the men, it was almost impossible to get the equipment. Military stores were in a hopeless tangle. Rifles in one place, bullets in another; telephones, barbedwire and sappers' tools in one vast jumble; and officers trying their best to make it more jumbled. When the sabotagers were removed, raw incompetent men took their places. We entrained two miles below Petrograd and, after a horrible ordeal in a box-car, we got up to find ourselves four miles on the other side of the city. We had lost six miles during the night and were stalled in a yard full of cursing troops, trains, broken-down engines. Exasperated commissars were shoving papers and fists into the faces of railway officers, who were frantically protesting they could do nothing.
This was a reflex of the chaos that prevailed all over Russia. To bring order out of it seemed a sheer impossibility. Yet the impossibility was being accomplished. In the welter of confusion was rising the great Red Army destined to amaze the world by its organization, discipline and effectiveness. And not only in the realm of war but in the cultural and economic fields were appearing the results of the powerful directing spirit begotten of the Revolution.
Always there were tremendous latent energies in the Russian masses. But they had never found expression. They had been locked up by the grim jailer—Autocracy. The Revolution came as their releaser, and with the pent-up fury of centuries they
