The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki Part 27

The writer has a silver Nicholas the Fifth rouble. It is one of the very few silver coins seen in Russia. Here and there a soldier was able to get hold of silver and gold coins of the old days, but they were very scarce. The Russian peasant had to feel a high degree of affection for an American before he would part with one of his h.o.a.rded bits of real money.

Of paper money there was no end. When the Americans landed, they were met by small boys on the streets with sheets of Archangel state money under their arms. The perforations of some Kerenskies were not yet disturbed when great sheets and rolls of it were taken from the bodies of dead Bolos. Everybody had paper money. The Bolsheviki were counterfeiting the old Czar's paper money and the Kerensky money and issuing currency of their own. The Polar Bear and Walrus 25-rouble notes of Archangel and their sign-board size government gold bond notes were printed in England, as were later the other denominations of Archangel roubles, better known as British roubles. Needless to say there was a great speculation in money and exchange. Nickolai and Kerensky and Archangel and British guaranteed roubles tumbled over one another in the market. Of course trafficking in money was taboo but was brisk.

Early the Yankee got on to this game. His American money was even more prized than the English or French. The Russian gave him great rolls of roubles of various sorts for his greenbacks. Then he took the good money on the ships in the harbor and bought, usually through a sailor, boxes of candy and cartons of cigarettes and,--whisper this, bottles and cases of whiskey of which thousands of cases found their way to Archangel. The Russian then went out into the ill-controlled markets and side streets of Archangel and sold to his own countrymen these luxuries at prices that would make an American sugar profiteer or bootlegger seem a piker.

Meanwhile the Yank or Tommie or Poilu went to his own commissary or to the British Navy and Army Canteen Bureau, "N. A. C. B." to the doughboy's memory, or to our various "Y" canteens and at a fixed rate of exchange--a rate fixed by the bankers in London--to use his roubles in buying things. He could also use the roubles in buying furs and skins of the Russians who still had the same saved from the looting Bolsheviki.

At the rate first established, an English pound sterling was exchangeable for forty-eight roubles and vice versa. But on the illicit market, the pound would bring anywhere from eighty to one hundred and forty roubles. The American five dollar bill which was approximately worth fifty roubles in this "pegged" rouble money on the market when an American ship was in the harbor, would bring one hundred to one hundred and fifty roubles. No wonder the doughboy who was stationed around Archangel or Bakaritza found it possible to stretch his money a good way. Many a dollar of company fund was made to buy twice as much or more than it otherwise would have bought. And in pa.s.sing, let it be remarked that the Yank who had access to N. A. C. B. and other canteen stores was not slow in joining the thrifty Russki in this trafficking game, illicit though it was. And truth to tell, many a case of British whiskey was stolen by Yank and Tommie and Russki and Poilu and sent rejoicing on its way through these devious underground channels of traffic. One American officer in responsible position had to suffer for it when he returned to the States. The doughboys and medics and engineers who were up there are still filled with mixed emotions on the subject, a mixture of indignation and admiration.

"Let him now who is guiltless throw the first stone."

Returning to the discussion of currency, let it be recorded that after the market was flooded with all sorts of money and after the ships stopped coming because of the great ice barrier, the money market became wilder than ever. Finally the London bankers who had been the victims of this speculation, decided upon a new issue of pegged currency. At forty to the pound the old roubles were called in. That is, every soldier who had forty-eight roubles could exchange them for forty new crisp and pretty roubles. Their beauty was marred by the rubber stamp which was put over the sign of old Nicholas' rule, which the thoughtless or tactless London money maker printed on the issue. The Russian would have none of this new money with that suggestion of restoration of Czar rule.

Inconsistently enough they still prized the old Nickolai rouble notes as the very best paper currency in the land, and loud was the outcry at giving forty-eight Nickolais for forty English-printed and guaranteed roubles of their own new Archangel government.

To stimulate the retirement of all other forms of currency, which measure in a settled country would have been a sensible economic pressure, the Archangel government set a date when not forty-eight but fifty-six roubles might be exchanged for forty new roubles. Then a date for sixty-four, then for seventy-two and then eighty. Thus the skeptical peasant and the suspicious soldier saw his old roubles steadily decline in exchange value for the new roubles. Of course they had always grabbed all the counterfeit stuff and used it in exchange with no compunctions.

That was the winning part of the game. Now they were pinched. It afforded some merriment to hear the outcries of some who had been making rolls of money in the trafficking.

At the same time there was real suffering on the part of peasants in far distant areas who could not get their currency up for exchange or for stamping and punching which itself was finally necessary to even get the eighty-forty rate. They felt mistreated. To their simple hearts and ignorant minds, it was nothing short of robbery by the distant London bankers. Soldiers on the far distant fronts were caught also in the currency reform. Some of the fault was neglect by their own American officers and some was indifference to the subject by those American officers at Archangel who were in position to know what was going to be the result of the attempt to peg the currency at a fixed rate.

An officer who was in Archangel during the summer on Graves Commission service after the American units had been withdrawn, reports that speculators for a song bought up great bales of the old Kerensky and Nickolai currency supposed to be cancelled, dead, defunct stuff, and when there was a considerable evacuation of central Russians who had been for months refugees in Archangel, this currency came out of hiding, and its traffickers realized a handsome profiteerski by selling it to the returning people at sixty to the pound sterling, for in interior Russia the old stuff was still in circulation. At any rate that was Shylokov's advertis.e.m.e.nt. During the summer, the money market, says Lieut. Primm, became a violent wonder. On one day a person could not obtain two hundred and fifty roubles for one hundred North Russian roubles and a day or two later he might be importuned to take three hundred old for one hundred new.

Neither the soldiers nor the Russians saw any justice in this flip-flopping of the currency market, to which of course they themselves were contributors. The thing they saw clearly was that when they had need of English credit (that is, checks) to send money to London banks or when they wanted to buy goods from England or America, then they could buy only with the new, the guaranteed rouble, which might be dear, even at one hundred and twenty-five to the pound sterling and was dearer of course in terms of old roubles, the more the demand was for the new roubles which were in the hands of speculators who manipulated the market as sweetly for themselves as the American profiteers with their oral and written advertis.e.m.e.nts manipulate our foodstuffs and goods for us. On the other hand, if the soldier or peasant or small merchant had dues coming to him in English money he then found them valued at forty to the pound sterling. This difference between eighty and one hundred and twenty-five he thought (naturally enough to his unsophisticated mind) was due to the vacillation in policy of enforcement of the pegged rate and prosecution of the traffickers.

However opinion may differ as to the blame for the inability to peg the exchange, we know it was a bonanza to the speculators. Ponzi ought to have been there to compete with the whiskered money sharks. And we know there were Americans as well as British, French, Russians and other nationals who were numbered among those speculators.

After all is said we must admit that the money situation was one that was exceedingly difficult to handle. It was infinitely worse in Bolshevikdom. The doughboy who used to find pads of undetached counterfeit Kerenskie on the dead Bolsheviks, can well believe that thirty dollars of good American c.h.i.n.k one day in the Soviet part of Russia bought an American newspaper man one million paper roubles of the Lenine-Trotsky issue, and that before night, spending his money at the famine prices in the worthless paper, he was a dead-broke millionaire.

During the time American soldiers were in Russia they were paid in checks drawn on London. During the war, this was at the pegged rate ($4.76-1/4) which had been fixed by agreement between London and New York bankers to prevent violent fluctuations. But at the end of the war, after the Armistice, the peg was pulled and the natural course of the market sent the pound sterling steadily downward, as the American dollar rose in value as compared with other currencies of the world. To those who were dealing day by day this was all in the game of money exchange.

But to the soldier in far-off North Russia who had months of pay coming to him when he left the forests of the Vaga and Onega this was a real financial hardship. Many a doughboy whose wife or mother was in need at home because of the rapidly mounting prices put up by the slackers in the shops and the slackers in the marts of trade, now saw his little pay check shrink up in exchange value. He felt that his superior officers in the war department had hardly looked after his interests as well as they might have done. Major Nichols did succeed at Brest in getting the old pegged rate for the men and officers, but many had already parted with the checks at heavy discount for fear that the nearer they got to the land for which they had been fighting, the more discount there would be on the pay checks with which their Quartermaster had paid them their pittances. Soldiers of the second detachment came on home with Colonel Stewart to Camp Custer and were obliged (most of them) to take their little $3.82 per pound sterling of the British pound sterling paid them by Quartermaster Major Ely in North Russia, at $4.76-1/4. Later, through the efforts of the late Congressman Nichols, many of those soldiers were reimbursed. Of course complete rest.i.tution would have been made by the war department if all the soldiers had sent their claims in. Hundreds of American veterans of the North Russian campaign lost ten to twenty per cent of their pay check's hard earned value.

XXIX

PROPAGANDA AND PROPAGANDA AND--

Propaganda Two-Edged Tool--From Crusaders To Carping Cynics--Be Warned-- Afraid To Tell The Truth--Startling Stories Of Bolo Atrocities Published--Distortion Disgusts Brave Men--Wrong To Play On Race Prejudices--Our Own Government Missed Main Chance--Doughboy Beset By Active Enemy In Front And Plagued By Active Propaganda Of Hybrid Varieties--Sample Of Bolshevik Propaganda Used On Americans--Yanks Punched Holes In Red Propaganda--Propaganda To Doughboy Connotes Lies And Distortion And Concealment Of Truth.

"Over there, over there, the Yanks are coming," sang the soldiers in training camp as they changed from recruits into fighting units of the 85th Division at Battle Creek. And the morale of the 339th was evidenced, some thought, by the fervor with which the officers and men roared out their hate chorus, "Keep your head down, you dirty Hun. If you want to see your father in your Fatherland, Keep your head down, you dirty Hun." Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe morale is made of finer stuff than hate and bombast. Maybe idealism does enter into it. Of course there are reactionary periods in the history of a people when selfishness and narrowness and bigotry combine to cry down the expression of its idealism. Not in 1918.

No secret was made of the fact that the Americans went into the war with a fervor born of an aroused feeling of world-responsibility. We must do our part to save Christian civilization from the mad nationalism of the German people led by their diabolic Hohenzollern reigning family and war bureaucracy. Too much kultur would ruin the world. Germany must be whipped. We tingled with antic.i.p.ation of our entrance to the trenches beside the bled-white France. We were going "Over There" in the spirit of crusaders.

What transformed a hesitating, reluctant, long-suffering people into crusaders? Propaganda. Press work. Five-minute men. Open and secret work. It was necessary to uncover and oppose the open and secret propaganda of paid agents of Germany, and woefully deluded German-Americans who toiled freely to help Kaiser Bill, as though to disprove the wisdom of the statement that no man can serve two masters.

We beat their propaganda, uncovered the tracks of the Prussian beast in our midst, found out, we thought, the meaning of explosions and fires and other terrible accidents in our munition plants, and turned every community into vigilant searchers for evidences of German propaganda or deviltry of a destructive kind and we persecuted many an innocent man.

And now we sadly suspect that in fighting fire with fire, that is in fighting propaganda with propaganda, we descended by degrees to use the same despicable methods of distorting truth for the sake of influencing people to a certain desired end. England and France and all other countries had the same sad experience. Doubtless we could not very well avoid it. It is part of the h.e.l.l of war to think about it now.

Propaganda, fair one, you often turn out to be a dissipated hag, a camp follower.

Many years from now some calm historian going over the various Blue Books and White Books and Red Books, with their stories of the atrocities of the enemy, ad nauseam, will come upon the criminating Official Doc.u.ments of various nations that sought to propagandize the world into trembling, cowering belief in a new dragon. Bolshevism with wide-spread sable wings, thrashing his spiny tail and snorting fire from his nostrils was volplaning upon the people of earth with open red mouth and cruel fangs and horrid maw down which he would gulp all the political, economic and religious liberties won from the centuries past.

The dragon was about to devour civilization.

And the historian will shake his head sadly and say, "Too bad they fell for all that propaganda. Poor Germans. Poor Britishers. Poor Frenchmen.

Poor Russians. Poor Americans. Too bad. What a mess that propaganda was.

Propaganda and propaganda and--well, there are three kinds of propaganda just as there are three kinds of lies; lies and lies and d--- lies."

In this volume we are historically interested in the propaganda as it was presented and as it affected us in the campaign fighting the Bolsheviki in North Russia in 1918-19. We write this chapter with great hesitation and with consciousness that it is subject to error in investigation and sifting of evidences and subject to error of bias on the part of the writer. However, no attempt has been made to compel the parts of this volume to be consistent with one another. Facts have been stated and comments have been written as they occurred to the writers.

If they were forced to be consistent with one another it would be using the method of the propagandizer. We prefer to appear inconsistent and possibly illogical rather than to hold back or frame anything to suit the general prejudices of the readers. Take this chapter then with fair warning.

Keenly disappointed we were to be told in England that we were not to join our American comrades who were starting "Fritz" backward in Northern France. We were to go to Archangel for guard duty. The expert propagandists in England were busy at once working upon the American soldiers going to North Russia. The bare truth of the matter would not be sufficient. Oh no! All the truth must not be told at once either.

It's not done, you know. Certainly not. Soldiers and the soldiers'

government might ask questions. British War Office experts must hand out the news to feed the troops. And they did.

Guard duty in Archangel, as we have seen, speedily became a fall offensive campaign under British military command. And right from the jump off at the Bolshevik rearguard forces, British propaganda began coming out. Does anyone recall a general order that came out from our American Commanding officer of the Expedition? Is there a veteran of the American Expeditionary force in North Russia who does not recall having read or hearing published the general orders of the British G. H. Q.

referring to the objects of the expedition and to the character of the enemy, the Bolsheviki?

"The enemy. Bolsheviks. These are soldiers and sailors who, in the majority of cases are criminals," says General Poole's published order, "Their natural, vicious brutality enabled them to a.s.sume leadership. The Bolshevik is now fighting desperately, firstly, because the restoration of law and order means an end to his reign, and secondly, because he sees a rope round his neck for his past misdeeds if he is caught.

Germans. The Bolsheviks have no capacity for organization but this is supplied by Germany and her lesser Allies. The Germans usually appear in Russian uniform and are impossible to distinguish." Why was that last sentence added? Sure enough we did not distinguish them, not enough to justify the propaganda.

Immediately upon arrival of the Americans in the Archangel area they had found the French soldiers wildly aflame with the idea that a man captured by the Bolsheviks was bound to suffer torture and mutilation.

And one wicked day when the Reds were left in possession of the field the French soldiers came back reporting that they had mercifully put their mortally wounded men, those whom they could not carry away, out of danger of torture by the Red Guards by themselves ending their ebbing lives. Charge that sad episode up to propaganda. To be sure, we know that there were evidences in a few cases, of mutilation of our own American dead. But it was not one-tenth as prevalent a practice by the Bolos as charged, and as they became more disciplined, their warfare took on a character which will bear safe comparison with our own.

The writer remembers the sense of shame that seized him as he reluctantly read a general order to his troops, a British piece of propaganda, that recited gruesome atrocities by the Bolsheviks, a recital that was supposed to make the American soldiers both fear and hate the enemy. Brave men do not need to be fed such stuff. Distortion of facts only disgusts the man when he finally becomes undeceived.

"There seems to be among the troops a very indistinct idea of what we are fighting for here in North Russia." This is the opening statement of another one of General Poole's pieces of propaganda. "This can be explained in a very few words. We are up against Bolshevism, which means anarchy pure and simple." Yet in another statement he said: "The Bolshevik government is entirely in the hands of Germans who have backed this party against all others in Russia owing to the simplicity of maintaining anarchy in a totally disorganized country. Therefore we are opposed to the Bolshevik-c.u.m-German party. In regard to other parties we express no criticism and will accept them as we find them provided they are for Russia and therefore for 'out with the Boche.' Briefly we do not meddle in internal affairs. It must be realized that we are not invaders but guests and that we have not any intention of attempting to occupy any Russian territory."

That was not enough. Distortion must be added. "The power is in the hands of a few men, mostly Jews" (an appeal to race hatred), "who have succeeded in bringing the country to such a state that order is non-existent. The posts and railways do not run properly, every man who wants something that some one else has got, just kills his opponent only to be killed himself when the next man comes along. Human life is not safe, you can buy justice at so much for each object. Prices of necessities have so risen that nothing is procurable. In fact the man with a gun is c.o.c.k of the walk provided he does not meet another man who is a better shot."

Was not that fine stuff? Of course there were elements of truth in it.

It would not have been propaganda unless it had some. But its falsities of statement became known later and the soldiers bitterly resented the attempt to propagandize them.

The effect of this line of propaganda was at last made the subject of an informal protest by Major J. Brooks Nichols, one of our most influential and level-headed American officers, in a letter to General Ironside, whose sympathetic letter of reply did credit to his respect for other brave men and credit to his judgment. He ordered that the propaganda should not be further circulated among the American soldiers. It must be admitted that the French soldiers also suffered revulsion of feeling when the facts became better known. The British War Office methods of stimulating enthusiasm in the campaign against the Bolsheviki was a miserable failure. Distortion and deception will fail in the end. You can't fool all the soldiers all the while. Truth will always win in the end. The soldier has right to it. He fights for truth; he should have its help.

Our own military and government authorities missed the main chance to help the soldiers in North Russia and gain their most loyal service in the expedition. Truth, not silence with its suspected acquiescence with British propaganda and methods of dealing with Russians; truth not rumors, truth, was needed; not vague promises, but truth.

In transmitting to us the Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, our American diplomatic representative in North Russia, Mr. Dewitt Poole, published to the troops the following: "But so great a struggle cannot end so abruptly. In the West the work of occupying German territory continues.

In the East German intrigue has delivered large portions of Russia into unfriendly and undemocratic hands. The President has given our pledge of friendship to Russia and will point the way to its fulfillment.

Confident in his leadership the American troops and officials in Northern Russia will hold to their task to the end." This was a statement made by our American Charge d' Affairs after the Armistice, it will be noted.

The New Year's editorial in The Sentinel, our weekly paper, says, in part: "We who are here in North Russia const.i.tute concrete evidence that there is something real and vital behind the words of President Wilson and other allied statesmen who have pledged that 'we shall stand by Russia.' Few of us, particularly few Americans, realize the debt which the whole world owes to Russia for her part in this four years struggle against German junkerism. Few of us now realize the significance that will accrue as the years go by to the presence of allied soldiers in Russia during this period of her greatest suffering. The battle for world peace, for democracy, for free representative government, has not yet been fought to a finish in Russia."

With the sentiment of those two expressions, the American soldier might well be in accord. But he was dubious about the fighting; he was learning things about the Bolsheviks; he was hoping for statement of purposes by his government. But as the weeks dragged by he did not get the truth from his own government. Neither from Colonel Stewart, military head of the expedition, nor from the diplomatic and other United States' agencies who were in Archangel, did he get satisfying facts. They allowed him to be propagandized, instead, both by the British press and news despatches and by the American press and political partisanships of various shades of color that came freely into North Russia to plague the already over-propagandized soldier.

Of the Bolshevik propaganda mention has been made in one or two other connections. We may add that the Bolos must have known something of our unwarlike and dissatisfied state of mind, for they left bundles of propaganda along the patrol paths, some of it in undecipherable characters of the Russian alphabet; but there was a publication in English, The Call, composed in Moscow by a Bolshevik from Milwaukee or Seattle or some other well known Soviet center on the home sh.o.r.e of the Atlantic.

These are some of the extracts. The reader may judge for himself:

"Do you British working-men know what your capitalists expect you to do about the war? They expect you to go home and pay in taxes figured into the price of your food and clothing, eight thousand millions of English pounds or forty thousand millions of American dollars. If you have any manhood, don't you think it would be fair to call all these debts off? If you think this is fair, then join the Russian Bolsheviks in repudiating all war debts.

"Do you realize that the principle reason the British-American financiers have sent you to fight us for, is because we were sensible enough to repudiate the war debts of the b.l.o.o.d.y, corrupt old Czar?

"You soldiers are fighting on the side of the employers against us, the working people of Russia. All this talk about intervention to 'save' Russia amounts to this, that the capitalists of your countries, are trying to take back from us what we won from their fellow capitalists in Russia. Can't you realize that this is the same war that you have been carrying on in England and America against the master cla.s.s? You hold the rifles, you work the guns to shoot us with, and you are playing the contemptible part of the scab. Comrade, don't do it!