Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/28

 once rejected as contrary precisely to those fundamental laws which would now again become valid, this bold step did not attract any particular attention. Yet, in the light of later events, this was the first sign that the Labour Party did not shrink from resorting to any foreign means of power, when it was a question of carrying through their own private claims.

The situation soon became very complicated.

The drama played in Finland by the Russian troops carried away by the intoxication of the revolution, showed what an army in process of disintegration means, and what an Asiatic barbarism the Russian army in dissolution was able to develop. The first days of the revolution in Helsingfors took the shape of a huge riot of the soldiers and the mob. Detachments of naval and land forces dashed about in the motor-cars of their commanders, all with rifle or revolver in hand, with the finger on the trigger, firing volleys of shot into the air for joy, or shooting straight before them in order to increase the din and noise caused by the furious speed. They were hunting for the officers who had concealed themselves. The latter were killed wherever they were found, in their houses, in the street, or on staircases. The fatal shot was fired almost without exception from behind, in an unguarded moment when the victim was ordered to come along to be submitted to examination, or simply arrested without ceremony. The city was entirely in the power of the Russian soldiers. They had turned out the police and maintained "order" themselves. Demonstration meetings and processions were arranged. Machine-guns were pulled through the streets, and fired off now in this place, now in that. Anything like this Russo-Barbarian frenzy had never yet been witnessed by the population; whichever way you cast your eye in the streets you saw only wild, armed