Ruth sat there with her hands clasped together and her face white. She could see those bullets going through Paul’s clothing right now! And be sure that she was not unlearning any of her dislike for war!
“A lot of our fellows came to hate the Japs,” said Paul; “but I didn’t. I got a philosophy out of this—the only thing I did get. The ruling classes in Japan were grabbing half a continent; but all the poor soldiers were grabbing was pay even poorer than mine. They didn’t know what they were there for—they, also, had been kidnapped. There were some that had been to America, and I got to talk with them, and we never had any trouble in agreeing. That was true of Czecho-Slovaks, and Germans—every nation I met. I tell you, Bunny, if the private soldiers could have talked it over, there wouldn’t have been any war. But that is what is known as treason, and if you try it you’re shot.”
IV
Paul and Bunny talked, that Friday night, and a lot of Saturday and Sunday, and Paul explained the Russian revolution. There was an easy way for Bunny to understand it, Paul said; if there was anything that puzzled him, all he had to do was to remember their oil strike. “Ask yourself how it would have been at Paradise, and then you know everything about Russia and Siberia—yes, and Washington and New York and Angel City. The Petroleum Operator’s Federation, that fought our strike, they’re exactly the sort of men that sent our army into Siberia—often they’re the same individuals. I read in the paper yesterday how a syndicate of oil men in Angel City has got some concessions in Saghalien. I remember one name, Vernon Roscoe. He’s one of the big fellows, isn’t he?”
Paul said this seriously, and Bunny and Ruth exchanged a smile. Paul had been away so long, he had lost track of the oil-game entirely!
Said Paul, “The operators are the same, and so are the strikers. Do you remember that little Russian Jew, Mandel, a roughneck that was in our strike? Used to play the balalaika, and sing us songs about Russia—we wouldn’t let him make speeches, because he was a ‘red.’ Well, by jingo, I ran into him in Manila, on the way out. He’d been travelling steerage on a steamer, on the way to Russia, and they found he was a Bolshevik, and threw him ashore and took away everything he had, even his balalaika. I loaned him five dollars, and six months later he turned up at Irkutsk, in a ‘Y’ hut. Lying on a shelf there was a balalaika, and he said, ‘Why, that’s mine! How did it get here?’ They told him a soldier had brought it, but didn’t know how to use it. ‘You can have it if you can play it,’ they said, so he played it all right, sang us the Volga Boatman, and then the Internationale—only of course nobody knew what it was. A few days later there were orders to arrest him, but I helped him get away. Months after that we came on him out in the country, not far from Omsk; he had been a Soviet commissar, and the Kolchak people had captured him, and buried him alive, up to his nose, just so that he could breathe. When we found him the ants had eaten most of his eyes, but there was still some life in him, his forehead would wrinkle.”
It was while Paul was alone with Bunny that he told this; and the younger man sat, speechless with horror. “Oh, yes,” said Paul; “that’s the kind of thing we had to see—and know we were to blame for it. I could tell you things much worse—I’ve helped to bury a hundred bodies of people that had been killed, not in battle, just shot down in cold blood, men and women, children, even babies. I’ve seen a ‘white’ officer shoot women in the head, one after another; and with our bullets, brought there by our railway men—I mean our bankers’ railway men. A lot of our boys went plumb crazy with it. Out of the two thousand that came off our transport, I doubt if there were ten percent quite normal. I said that to our surgeon, and he agreed.”
V
All this was so different from what Bunny had been taught that it was hard for him to adjust his thoughts to it. He would go off and think it over, and then come back with another string of questions. “Then Paul, you mean the Bolsheviks aren’t bad people at all!”
Paul answered, “Just apply the rule—remember Paradise! They were workingmen, like any other workingmen on strike. A lot of them have come from America—got their training here. I used to meet them and have long talks—all kinds of fellows, that had been all over this country. They are people with modern ideas, trying to dig the Russians out of their ignorance and superstition. They believe in education—I never saw such people for teaching; everywhere, whatever they were doing, they were always preaching, having lectures, printing things—why, son, I’ve seen newspapers printed on old scraps of brown butcher paper, or wrappings our army had thrown away. I learned Russian pretty well—and it was just the sort of thing our strikers printed at Paradise, only of course these people have got farther in their struggle against the bosses, they see things more clearly than we do.”
Bunny was staring, a little frightened. “Paul! Then you agree with the Bolsheviks?”
Paul laughed, a grim laugh. “You go up to Frisco and talk with the men on that transport! That army was Bolshevik to a man—and not only the privates, but the officers. I guess that’s why they brought us home. There was mutiny in Archangel, you know—or maybe you don’t.”
“I heard something—”
“Let me
