SCENES IN THE GREAT WAR
Pushkin, Gogol, Tourgeneiff, Tolstoy, Repin, Dostoyevsky, and Glinka, or yet in Kuprine, Gorki, Anoutchin, Merejkowsky, and Baranovsky, but in those simpler and perhaps cruder writings which speak directly to uneducated minds, the same striving after the spiritual is everywhere to be seen. Books like Treitschke's, Nietzsche's, and Bernhardi's would be impossible in Russia, not, heaven knows, because of their "intellectual superiority," which is another name for braggadocio, but because of their moral insensibility, their glorification of the physical forces of the body of man, which the Russian mind sets lower than the unseen powers of his soul.
THE RUSSIAN MOUJIK MOBILIZING
So the flashes as of lightning that have shown
us the part Russia has played in the drama of the
past 365 days have revealed a people acting
under something very like a religious impulse.
We have seen the moujiks being mobilized in
remote parts of the vast country, and have found
it a moving picture. It is probable that the war
had been going on for weeks before they heard
anything about it. Almost certainly they had
no clear idea of where the fighting was, or what
it was about, the theatre of the struggle being
so far away and their ignorance of the world