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Rev. A. B. Winchester 71
number. I would advise you to look at that. It gives a very sobering
influence to those of us who have been hearing in the past much of the
Russians. It has a sobering effect to just go back and acknowledge
the echo of the admiring word spoken by a very conservative critic
of the London Times, and he is putting his hands up and saying, "Now
don’t get excited. Of course we all are fille’d with admiration for the
magnificent people whose army has stood the pounding of months when
it didn’t have munitions enough and were not allowed to fire the muni-
tions they did have, and they took that pounding, and as Doctor Hill,
a physician from the United States, who was in the Russian Army,
tells in his story in another place, when he saw a hundred thousand
men go to a thing that no men except those of the sternest resolve and
fearless of death, so that they might do their duty, could do. He saw
a hundred thousand men go, and but ten thousand of them come back.
He had seen Russian soldiers go day after day, of different regiments;
and perhaps out of the twelve hundred men three hundred would come
back. And tomorrow others would face it again, and tomorrow again
and tomorrow again, until at last they said, "What is the use?" There
are today many people in this country who are talking about them as
though they were the chief ones upon whom the responsibility rests
ior the war that is now going on. They say, "If they only had kept on,
then it would have been all right; but at the wrong moment their
debacle turned back the clock and prolonged the war." They didn’t do
that. It is simply a base slander to speak in any such terms.
John R. Mott’s Testimony
Dr. John R. Mott tells, and he has a right to tell us, for he knows
his Russia very well, when he says, "I don’t understand Russia, but I
believe in it." Well, if John R. Mott says that, I don’t know what the
rest of us, or some of the rest of us, can do but say, "I too do believe
in it," as he does. But he tells us that Russia has been standing most
loyally by all that they believed to be their duty until certain fire
brands sprang up within themselves inflaming and so bemuddling the
people that they were as sheep led to the shambles. But when we think
that three million fathers, sons, brothers of the Russian army lie under
the sod, having given themselves, as they believed, that liberty might
be given or retained to the world—three millions of them suffered the
extreme penalty of loyalty and two millions more maimed for life,
more than all the allied forces put together; and two millions more
were interned in the central powers of Europe; when you think of
what they have suffered to the very limit of sacrifice; and then to
hear contemptuous criticisms of Russia from those who have not lifted
a finger to prevent rampant militarism from crushing the liberty of
mankind, it is difficult to keep indignation within bounds. It is John
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