But we get the same as the Red Guards; tho they scowl at us they share their bread with us."
The young Yunkers we found recounting their telephone-station adventures, opening packages from friends or stretched out on mattresses playing cards.
A few days later these Yunkers were released. A second time they were paroled and a second time they broke faith with their liberators—they went South and joined the White Guard armies mobilizing against the Bolsheviks.
With like acts of treachery thousands of Whites repaid the Bolsheviks for their clemency. Over his own signature General Krasnov solemnly promised not to raise his hand against the Bolsheviks, and was released. Promptly he appeared in the Urals at the head of a Cossack army destroying the Soviets. Burtsev was liberated from Peter-Paul prison by order of the Bolsheviks. Straightway he joined the Counter-Revolutionists in Paris and became editor of a scurrilous anti-Bolshevik sheet. Thousands, who thus went forth to freedom by mercy of the Bolsheviks, were to come back later with invading armies to kill their liberators without ruth or mercy.
Surveying battalions of comrades slaughtered by the very men whom the Bolsheviks had freed, Trotzky said: "The chief crime of which we were guilty in those first days of the Revolution was excessive kindliness."
Sardonic words! But the verdict of history will be that the Russian Revolution—vastly more funda-
