III
But something went suddenly wrong with the newly built revolutionary
steam-roller. The German military chiefs seized their strike-leaders
at home and threw them into jail, or shipped them off to the front
trenches to be slaughtered. By terrorism, shrewdly mixed with
cajolery, they broke the strike, and sent the grumbling slaves back
to their treadmill. And then the German armies began to march into
Russia!
It was the crisis to which Jimmie Higgins had been looking forward
ever since the war began. Tolstoi had taught that if one nation
refused to fight, it would be impossible for another nation to
invade it; and while Jimmie Higgins was no mystic or religious
non-resistant, he agreed in this with the great Russian. No workers
in an enemy army could possibly be brought to fire upon their
peace-proclaiming brothers!
And here at last was the test of the theory; here were German
Socialists ordered to march against Russian Socialists--ordered to
fire upon the red flag! Would they do what their masters, the
war-lords, commanded? Or would they listen to the clamorous appeals
of the international proletariat, and turn their guns against their
own officers?
All the world saw what happened; it saw the glorious revolutionary
machine, in which Jimmie Higgins had put all his trust, run into a
ditch and land its passengers in the mud. The German armies marched,
and the Socialists in the German armies did exactly what the
non-Socialists did--they fired upon the red flag, as they would have
fired upon the flag of the Tsar. They obeyed the orders of their
officers, like true and loyal Germans; they drove back the
Bolsheviki in confusion, taking their guns and supplies, and
destroying their cities; they led off the Russian women and children
into slavery, precisely as if they were Belgian or French women and
children, destined by the German Gott as the legitimate prey of
Kultur. They sacked Riga and Reval, they overran all the Eastern
portions of Russia--Courland, Livonia, Esthonia; they moved into the
rich grain country of Southern Russia, the Ukraine; they landed from
their ships and took Finland, wiping out the liberties of that
splendid people. They were at the gates of Petrograd, and the
Bolshevik government was forced to flee to Moscow. Of all which
military feats the German Socialist papers spoke with stern pride!
