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 proletariat asked for peace, not because of its weakness, but fully conscious of its strength, and that it would never sell the Russian people „to the bandit ot German Imperialism“.

„If you wish to be really impartial, even from your Imperialist point of view“, he added, „you must recognise that we, by our example, and ail our actions have already done more to weaken the German military forces and, consequently, more for the military triumph of your arms,—which of course we are not working for,—than all your Rousskys, Broussiloffs, and other Generals, killers of men, whose brilliant services are so highly lauded in your press. You complain that we have given Germany the chance to throw ail its units over to your front, but you overlook the fact that the units which she will take from our front will be already strongly shaken by our propaganda,—that their „morale“ is far from that which it was only two or three months ago. You forget that these units represent for you no longer the impenetrable wall that they have been up to now“. These assertions appeared to me at the time in the light of declamatory extravagance, and I remember how Charles Dumas, to whom I reported my conversation with Solz summed it up by saying that it was „all outrageously mad“.

My investigations from the bolshevik side were pressed no further, so strong was my conviction that, with the exception of a few „fanatics“ and a few „inspired“, the bolsheviks (or at least the most prominent of them) were German agents, „traitors“, „the instigators of the Russian betrayal“ as they were daily stigmatized by the French press.