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They were cheered on with the promise: 'Across the Yenisei, Japanese troops are waiting. They will receive the fugitives and supply them with what they need.' But when they reached that river, no Japanese were on hand, and the troops promptly scattered in every direction. More than 30,000, including many officers with their wives and children, were captured and given the choice of volunteering in the Red Army or starving. Incredible supplies of clothing, shoes, linen, and munitions fell into the hands of the Red Army at Omsk. There was enough to reëquip the whole Bolshevist military establishment. One of my first duties was to allot these supplies. Hundreds of wagons kept arriving from Omsk with them. We, personally, got a new and, let me add, first-class outfit. I am still using the shoes I received at that time for my mountain tours in Switzerland. My Red Guardist comrades would often tell me how grateful they were to the bourgeois governments for so kindly carrying on war against them, for this was the only way in which they could get such excellent supplies.

Is it possible to subdue Russia by force of arms? Great Napoleon tried it and failed; Hindenburg, Kolchak, and Wrangel had no better success. The only thing that supports Bolshevism is the Red Army. Take away from Russia an excuse for fighting and maintaining an army, and Bolshevism goes down. For ninety-nine per cent of the people outside that army are against the Bolsehviki. Every man in the army is personally interested in keeping the government going; for he has a glorious time and everything he wants long as the army stays. Since foodcontrol is absolutely centralized, and the army collects the provisions and distributes them, it is quite natural that the soldiers first take what they

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need. The leavings, which are mighty small, go to the rest of the people. Some rare articles of food, such as sugar, are found only in the army. Therefore, Bolshevist Russia lives under a militarism, compared with which the famous Prussian militarism was the purest democracy.

Every peasant is against the government, because he cannot carry his crops to market, since private trade is forbidden, and there is nothing but worthless paper money in circulation. Consequently the peasant cannot get the tools and implements and household supplies he needs. He is expected to give, give, give-and never get anything in return. More than that, however, the workingmen are all against the government because they go hungry and have less freedom than ever. The peasant out in the country, especially if he lives a little distance from the railway, does not go hungry. He has plenty of corn and wheat and pigs and cows. But conditions in the cities are frightful. However, I will leave that until later.

It is a very common but absolutely false idea that the Red Army is made up of worthless scoundrels. I was astonished to find what respectable men most of the Red Guardists were. The Bolsheviki themselves have the greatest interest in keeping doubtful elements out of their forces, for they depend on their troops to maintain order. Their system of discipline is quite different from that in our older armies. The latter depended upon iron obedience, and it did not make much difference what kind of men they used that system on. But the idea in the Red Army, is to enlist only good reliable people who will, of their own accord, maintain order and discipline because they themselves appreciate how necessary these are. The kind of drill which we had in a Prussian regiment in 1914

is never given in the Red Army. I used to think in my old army days that we did everything in our power to make army life disagreeable and unpleasant for recruits. The Bolsheviki do precisely the reverse. They do everything in their power to make military service pleasant and easy. The final result is the same. The discipline and training are excellent, and most of the soldiers are convinced Socialists. The old, foolish idea of soldiers' councils, and letting the soldiers elect their officers, was done away with long ago. Nevertheless, the authorities are shrewd enough to flatter the selfrespect of the soldiers, and to allow them to hold mass meetings and take votes as much as they want to, so long as these affect only non-essential things. While I was in the Red Service, we had several such meetings in our company to change cooks and commissary employees. The soldiers, who were mostly old veterans from almost every army in the world, were tremendously proud of all this, and assured me frequently that the principal superiority of the Red Army over the old armies was this right of selfgovernment.

onerous.

Our service was in general not A man soon accustomed himself to calling his fellow soldiers and officers tovarisch, or comrade. My friend and I were each given charge of two horses and a wagon the very day that we enlisted. Our first task was to name our horses. We could give them Russian, Hungarian, or German names at our discretion. As soon as we had christened the beasts, their names were enrolled in a register and became official. I received a horse and a mare that I named Hansel and Liesbeth, and they soon became very fond of me. They did not make much work for us. Currying and rubbing down and washing horses are practically unknown in

Russia. We fed them and gave them water twice a day. We were mainly occupied with going after supplies for the brigade, hauling wood, carrying out of prison camps the corpses of those who died from typhus, and that sort of thing. We did not trouble ourselves in the least over the fact that we hauled typhus corpses, garbage, and the regiment's bread in the same wagon. I took part in only one military enterprise. This was just before I left, and after I had been appointed a noncommissioned officer. One night there was an alarm. A band of counterrevolutionists had attacked the railway, plundered a train, and was holding possession of a section of the line. Things went like clock-work. In less than an hour, the cavalry, with its wagon train was ready and on the way. We crossed the Yenisei on the ice and marched some twelve miles beyond it to the east. I was ordered to halt with my supply train, while the cavalry advanced and intercepted the retreating enemy. We soon heard lively firing and our forces came back toward evening. They brought five of their own dead with them, twelve wounded, and twenty-three prisoners. We of the wagon train were ordered to strip every particle of clothing from the prisoners and pack it in our wagon. Then they were all shot and the peasants of the nearest village were ordered to bury the corpses. This was done in a business like and matter-of-fact way, as if no other method of dealing with prisoners had ever been thought of. This done, the cavalry started on its return to Headquarters, and our wagon train followed. I looked back, and shall never forget the sight of those twenty-eight naked bodies lying by the side of the road, all of them young, vigorous fellows, whose only crime was that their political opinions were different from ours!

BY W. J. LAWRENCE

From The New Statesman, May 21
(LIBERAL LABOR WEEKLY)

POPULAR impressions are never scien- ed ashore, he could and did send

tifically accurate, and the prevailing idea that an Elizabethan theatrical performance demanded excessive powers of make-believe is about as far from the mark as a popular impression well could be. It denies to Shakespeare's stage the extraordinary complexity which proved its glory. Not by one principle but by a jumble of principles was it ruled. Paradox makes for equipoise, sanity; and by the abrupt antithesis of its conventions it was thrillingly paradoxical. Ever striving after the real, it had perforce, through its limitations, to make constant resort to the ideal. In idealism it has not since been approached, nor in realism (challenging statement!) has it been transcended. Viewed from the standpoint of an age of pictorial backgrounds, it could present nothing and yet presented everything. It materialized the immaterial and made the visible invisible.

With all his resourcefulness there were problems that baffled the Elizabethan producer, and these he left by tacit understanding to be solved by the poet's pen. Backgrounds which conveyed a hundred different impressions to a hundred different minds, were imperishably built up in a mosaic of scinin a mosaic of scintillating phrase and glowing imagery. But if the prime conveyance of atmosphere was the poet's prerogative, none the less was it the producer's duty to prolong its vibrations. He could not show the helpless vessel on angry waters, but once the mariner was wash

him before the audience dripping wet. The mysteries of night eluded his simulative genius, but he was skilled enough in pyrotechnics to be able to startle you with a blazing star.

The truth is that on Shakespeare's boards realism and idealism were so intermingled that it is difficult to determine precisely what was left to the imagination and what was not. One thing is reasonably certain: realism when resorted to had to be of the fullest and most satisfying order. Less of the deceptio visus was possible in the days when the stage was a platform jutting out into the auditorium, and when sundry spectators were seated upon it, than in these days of a strict demarcation. Whether memorized or not by the players, letters read out in the course of the action had to be written out in full, and occasionally the producer had to be careful what kind of ink he used. In the Spanish Tragedy, of Kyd, there is a scene in which a letter flutters down from above to Hieronimo's feet. It is a warning from the imprisoned Bell' Imperia, written in her own blood, and begins: 'For want of ink, receive this bloody writ.' A prompter's note in the margin of the quarto, 'red ink,' shows the care taken in these matters. Here there is no mistaking the meaning, but one is puzzled to know whether these marginal warnings are always to be taken literally. In Chapman's May Day, where Quintiliano takes out the 'two brace of angels' and gives them to In

nocentio, the concurrent instruction reads 'a purse of twenty pound in gold.' If current coin of the realm were really used, then the force of realism could no farther go.

It is only once in an æon the impossible happens. Not since Shakespeare's day has the stage been able to reconcile elements fundamentally incompatible. The Elizabethan producer was a pastmaster of the science of the illusion of sounds, that subtler kind of realism which, when deftly procured, proves such a quickener of the imagination. As practised by him it reënforced the pen-picture sketched in by the poet and gave it color. Thunder, the muttering of the storm and the whistling of the wind, the singing of birds, the lowing of cattle, the baying of hounds, the pealing and tolling of bells, the galloping of horses, the boom of cannon and the rattle of musketry all were well and truly imitated. In Hamlet as Shakespeare wrote it, and as it was played until the middle of the eighteenth century, a cock crew to herald the dawn whose coming hastens the ghost's departure. To-day at this juncture it is the eye, not the ear, that is appealed to; but the Elizabethan producer, though he could conjure up mist and bring down rain, stood aghast before the problems of sunrise and sunset.

Symmetrical as it sounds, it was unfortunate that the Elizabethan audience should have been as paradoxical as its stage. If it could take the eagle's flight with the poet into the empyrean, it could also drag him down into the mire. Nothing was too spiritual and nothing too gross for its appreciation. It responded to pathos and yet was pitiless. The stage preceded the playhouse, and by dint of its inheritance the English theatre-stage was steeped in mediævalism. Anxious as it was to become Liberty Hall, to keep open house for the new humanism, its guardians, the pub

lic, saw to it that it did not wholly dissipate its patrimony. Hence it was that Elizabethan tragedy was remarkable for its barbarism. There is a type of neurotic Shakespearolatry which strives to put the ugly thing aside; but to those not afraid to look, the fact is as patent as it was to Voltaire. Much as we may deplore the expenditure, it was the price paid by the poet, and paid inevitably, for the suffrages of his public. Hearing could be gained for the higher thought only by catering to the lower instincts. Brutal and bloodthirsty at base, the Elizabethan crowd could only be appeased by scenes of battle and atrocity. The influence of its clamor is to be detected in the blinding of Gloster, and in that horrifying episode in the early German version of Titus Andronicus (surely a reflex of Elizabethan taste and Elizabethan methods), where Titus cuts the brothers' throats and holds them to bleed to death, drip, drip, over a basin. What we need to grasp is that in staging these effects very little was left to the imagination. The audience demanded blood, and real blood, and got it. It was generally calves' or sheep's blood, blood that did not readily congeal, and the container was a small sponge concealed in the hand.

There was scarcely any limit to the horrors with which the insatiate mob was fed, and few were the tragedians who escaped paying tribute. It is a sorry spectacle this, of Chapman making Cato pluck out his entrails or Webster bringing Virginius on the stage after the sacrifice of his daughter, with his knife and arms all bloody. All such episodes were accompanied by a forbidding realism. The Greek sense of decency was lacking. If a nice distinction was made between hangings and beheadings, it was because the stage trick-and-shuffle-board of the time permitted of an illusive representation of

the one and not of the other. It was risky to tamper with the executioner's axe. But even in such cases the gloating stinkards were not baulked of their prey. Lady Jane Grey disappears to trace her faltering steps to the block, and immediately her severed head is brought in. A meed of long-delayed admiration must at last be awarded to the Elizabethan property-man for his artistic powers in modeling in papier mâché with faithfulness to the life (and death), so many heads of such diversity. For, be it remembered, the head had to resemble the player, just as the player had to be careful in making up to resemble the head. And their number!

Few pause to think how many were used by Shakespeare alone. In Macbeth and King John the latter-day producer, in deference to our susceptibilities, dodges the issue. Let him but give us the second part of King Henry VI without cut or evasion, and the truth of Voltaire's dictum will be established.

But, when all is said, we have little cause to lament that Shakespeare was cast to play the ungrateful rôle of the diamond on the dunghill. Of the humiliations of his environment we get a revealing glimpse in the Sonnets, but despite those humiliations how serenely he shone!

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS ATTACKED

BY GEORGE MATHESON CULLEN, M.D., B.Sc.

[Dr. Cullen, a graduate of the Universities of Edinburgh and Paris, was formerly in charge of the Royal Infirmary and Royal Maternity Hospital, Edinburgh. He has since joined the Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul.]

From the Dublin Review, April, May, June
(IRISH CATHOLIC QUARTERLY)

De tous les animaux qui s'élèvent dans l'air,
Qui marchent sur la terre ou nagent dans la mer,
De Paris au Pérou, du Japon jusqu'à Rome
Le plus sot animal, à mon avis, c'est l'homme.

(Of all the animals there be

That walk the earth or swim the sea,
In Paris, Rome, Peru, Japan,
The stupidest, I think, is man.)

IN all ages the folly of mankind has been the wonder of the philosopher and the butt of the satirist. And yet probably never before has man played such fantastic tricks before high Heaven as in this our day. A sad commentary indeed on the results of half a century of

free education! The fact is that this blind worship of knowledge, without any compensating cultivation of wisdom and virtue, has led to a cataclysm of war such as has never previously been experienced, and has set up a mad brewage in the mind of man which threatens the annihilation of our civilization. Even in the sphere of knowledge itself, anarchy has appeared, and it would seem that there is no kind of lunacy which will not be welcomed if it but masquerade in the garb of science. For proof of this no more telling example can be chosen than the extravagance,

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