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first document compromising to the German Government which he selected for publication was a letter from the Kaiser to the Czar, complaining of the asylum accorded to revolutionaries in Great Britain, and proposing joint representations on that subject. Trotski thus reminded his comrades of the time when Prussia had offered itself as an assistant to their hangmen, and when it was Prince Bülow, not the Morning Post, who sneered at "Silberfarb" and "Mandelstamm"! Not even our most God-forsaken official underlings with a flair for the psychological moment, when petty chicanery creates the maximum of irritation, can altogether wipe out the memory of those other days.

The pre-revolutionary opposition in the Duma was political; the revolution which broke out in the streets, social. The Cadets aimed at constitutional reform and at a more efficient prosecution of the war. They could not give the sign for active revolt lest it should interfere with the conduct of the war. The revolution was made by men to whom the war was not the first concern. The Cadets joined it after the day was won.

The peas

antry and army cried out for land and peace. The Cadets desired to go on with the war till victory was won and to check social revolution. These were two irreconcilable programmes. Kerenski tried to reconcile them. He wanted all classes to unite, to offer sacrifices and to have confidence in each other. The masses were to submit to the leadership and discipline of the educated bourgeoisie, suffer yet further in a war of which they hardly understood the meaning, and trust to the upper classes not to use in future their regained power for preventing the social revolution. The upper classes were to work cheerfully, viewing with equanimity the certain doom in store for them on the conclusion of peace. Kerenski's endeavours were met with opposi

tion, nay, with direct sabotage, from the Right and the Left, and with scant understanding among the Western Allies. His attempt broke down.

Then came Trotski's day and burden. With him and the Bolsheviki the strangest factor has entered the war-a belligerent power to whom war on national lines has neither sense nor meaning. The only war which they understand is between classes, and that war knows no frontier. It is not peace which they carry to the world but strife; they are militants, but in a different dimension. Could Trotski raise, arm, and officer a sufficiently big army he would menace, not the Central Powers alone but all the bourgeois gov ernments of the world; though he would probably try to avoid fighting their armies in battles which indiscriminately sacrifice bourgeois and proletarians. He naturally demands complete self-determination for all nationalities throughout the world— which implies, among other things, the end of German imperialism, the complete disruption of the Habsburg Monarchy and of the Turkish Empire (one has to come to England to find socialists or "democrats" who from sheer controversial perversity become champions of such dynastic creations!). But to Trotski self-determination is merely one aspect of a much wider problem. "Why should people object so strongly to the dominion of one nation over another," the Bolshevik would say, "and yet within the same nation admit that one man should be born in economic subjection to another man? Why talk about 'submerged nationalities' and be silent about submerged classes?" To the Bolsheviks the different ideas of possession and dominion are but parts of one organic whole of which the vital nerve may be destroyed by a violent blow, but which it is almost impossible to transform by degrees. Evolution comes after revolution to eliminate

the moribund forms by a gradual process. That is why systems survive revolutions and yet cannot be killed apart from revolution. As Grillparzer put it in 1848, referring to the constitutional problem raised by the French Revolution:

"Das ist der Zeiten bittere Not

Der Widerspruch der schwer zu heben,
Dass die Monarchie wohl tot,
Aber die Monarchen leben."

Most of Trotski's ideas are incomprehensible to the illiterate masses in the armies and peasantry of Russia which have raised him to power. They want peace because they are tired of fighting, not because they hold any particular views on international relations. They desire to expropriate the rich without any clear idea of the condition which is to supplant the order they destroy. The immense, almost inconceivable, suffering inflicted on the Russian peasant-soldier during the first three years of the war by the criminal callousness and corruption of the ancien régime has resulted in a psychological catastrophe-a disappearance of military and social discipline unequalled in history, and a collapse of routine and tradition, the framework of everyday life. The intellectual revolutionaries sail in the storm and their sails rise over the waves, in appearance a triumphant sign of the storm itself. Yet they have no real control over the blind elemental forces which cannot be disciplined, least of all by the revolutionaries themselves. For if Trotski tried to coerce them and succeeded in that attempt which in reality is impossible he would break the very spirit and force of the revolution. He is not the man for such work.

Without an army at his command, with a country plunged in anarchy and demanding peace, with masses only very dimly comprehending the meaning of the events which now

unfold, Trotski has to face the Teutonic power. It would seem that he is at their mercy. And yet a dark fear haunts his opponents. There is the suffering and despair of their own peoples, their craving for peace, their rage, which, hitherto silent, may any moment burst out in a desperate cry. They, too, have heard the watchword about "the rule of the downtrodden" and "the turn of the wheel." It is to them that Trotski speaks over the heads of their rulers. What do the starving German masses care for dominion over other races? Has not enough blood been shed; are the maimed and crippled too few in number? Trotski speaks sincerely about peace. Russia sets all her nations free. She threatens nobody. If peace negotiations break down, will anyone believe that it was through Russia's fault? German and Austrian statesmen wriggle, they manœuvre for positions; they make the most amazing professions of principle and contradict them in the same breath, they try to set themselves right in the eyes of their peoples. Trotski unmasks their game and analyses aloud each move they make. The scene is almost grotesque. As Dr. Harold Williams put it in one of his Petrograd despatches, the Germans "are in the position of the mediæval knight, playing a weird game of chess with supernatural powers."

If the war continues, what can the German Government do? Can it risk ordering its armies across the undefended Russian front? Will they obey? Will they attack the country which was the first to offer peace? Perhaps. But if the Germans get to Russia-again, what can

they do? They cannot coerce Russia. Revolutionary Russia is already a nightmare to them, and even from their own country Germany's rulers cannot eliminate any more the forces and ideas which the war has set in motion.

EARTH

BY JOHN GOULD FLETCHER

THIS is the Earth.

Brown clogged and dull,

Turned in wet, sticky furrows,
It sleeps in the still evening
Of some late autumn day.

Ages ago tides rose against it,
And heaped it thus in shelving folds,
And monstrous scaly creatures
Swam through those tides;

Ages ago men hunted on it,
Seeking amid the frozen spaces,
For furs and food;

Ages ago men settled on it,
Emerging from the forests

Driving the cattle before them;

Ages ago men fought for it,

Struggled and died

For foothold in these scanty fields.

And now at last

The earth cries out for food,

This slave of man has too long given its harvests,

It asks the life it gave be yielded back to it.

In the autumn evening,

You can hear it plainly,

The cry of the ancient earth.

Moaning and tossing,

Under the heavy steel rain that falls on it from heaven; Crying for blood, blood to make fertile

Its growing barrenness.

POETS MILITANT

BY JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE

I ARE poets dreamers and impractical folk, shirking the real business of life? No better answer could be made to this query than the roll call of those who have exchanged the singer's robes for the khaki. As far as America is concerned, and considering the brief time we have been in the war, our roll of poet-soldiers is one to be reckoned with.

First in point of time, or surely among the first, to spring to the ranks was Joyce Kilmer. Just beyond the draft age and with a little family, Uncle Sam not only had no legal claim upon him but would probably have hesitated to take him from more immediate obligations; but this did not deter one whose blood beat to a martial as well as lyric strain, and not waiting to go through an officer's training, he cast in his lot with the million others whose distinction is in service alone.

Joining first the Seventh Regiment of New York, he remained in it for part of the period of his training, but coming to suspect that the Seventh might, according to its tradi tion, be content to achieve its glory elsewhere than on the field, he succeeded in getting transferred to the "Rainbow Division," with the Irish Regiment, formerly famous as the "Fighting Sixty-ninth." This proved a shrewd guess, as the Seventh is still at Spartanburg while the "Rainbow Division," with its Irish contingent, has been for some months in France.

To follow Mr. Kilmer through the exigencies of war will be possible only when we have the record, which is eventually to come, of his experiences "From Mineola to Flanders." This will make excellent reading, as a decade of training in journalism

has given him not only the essential but the picturesque approach to a subject. Indeed Mr. Kilmer's career in the decade in question has covered not only journalism but so varied a list of other pursuits that it is not strange that adventure is in his blood and that he is ready to break a lance in still another field. Bookseller, lexicographer, college teacher, editor of a religious journal, critic, interviewer, lecturer and poet,―he has crowded so much into a brief span that when to it he adds experience of the trenches, he will be able to say with Byron,

For I had the share of Life which might have filled a century

Before its fourth in time had passed me by.

The last thing before leaving for France, Mr. Kilmer read the proofs of his new book of verse, Main Street, and Other Poems, issued as an autumn publication. The collection is perhaps unduly weighed down with religious poems, which are not his best, although the sonnets are excellent, but who can resist the whimsical charm of A Blue Valentine or the human note of Roofs, or of The Snow-Man in the Yard? If childhood, domestic love, and relig ion have inspired most of the poems in Mr. Kilmer's volume, that is not to say that they are less authentic, for where shall one find more legitimate themes than childhood, domestic love and religion? We should like to pause by the way to quote from the book, but it will lead us too far from our theme of "Poets Militant."

Robert Haven Schauffler, of Scumo'-the-Earth fame, was also among the earliest to volunteer. After getting his commission as Second Lieu

tenant, he was assigned to Camp Meade, where he is now teaching in the Officers' Training School, but hoping soon to see more active service. Arthur Davison Ficke, who is an officer in the Ordnance Depart ment, has been more fortunate and has already been several months in France. He was recently sent back to America on an important mission, but has returned to the front. William Rose Bénet has entered the Aviation Corps, most fitting for a poet, and is now at San Antonio, learning to mount upon other wings than song. Charles Buxton Going, forsaking the editorial desk, is giving his valuable knowledge of engineering to the Government and is now a major in that department. J. E. Spingarn, whose volume, Creative Criticism, is the most valuable contribution to this subject made in America in recent years, has been in the war almost from the outset of our own participation in it, and has now the rank of a Major of Infantry. Curtis Hidden Page, another poet-critic, left his professorship at Dartmouth College to enter the service and is a Captain of Ordnance. Lastly, Franklin P. Adams, "F. P. A.," the genial, the inimitable, has gone to dispense a little of his cheer in the great army, where he is a captain. When F. P. A. enters the trenches, the gloom will give way, and mud and cold and rain -which Service declares are more formidable than bullets-will be forgotten. Weights and Measures, F. P. A.'s latest book, is a veritable lifesaver in these days of whelming horror. It has more wholesome and spontaneous fun, more clever wit than any book in its field that has appeared in many a moon. That the army is not going to quench this wit, is shown by A Change of Heart, written in camp and published last month in McClure's:

In other and more peaceful times

(Eheu! the years seem thrice a million

Since I committed daily rhymes
As a civilian!)

In those, the typing times of peace,
As master of a Dome Diurnal,
I told the hated Hun to cease
The strife infernal.

My wealth of verbiage was great;

Of bitter phrase I was no miser;
I screamed a daily hymn of hate
Against the Kaiser.

My pen was sharp, my lyre was loud,
I hated Bernstorff and Boy-Ed so!
I hated all the German crowd,
And often said so.

But now I am in closer touch;

I sense the spirit and the letter; And now I know the Germans much,Oh, so much,-better.

I understand their purpose now

I, who was given to flay and flout themHow green I was! I don't see how I wrote about them.

Withdraw my rhyme of earlier date!

Erase each previous high endeavour! Now that I know those birds, I hate 'Em worse than ever.

II

So much for the roll call of our own poets in camp or trench. In England that call takes on daily a tragic significance from the increas ing number who no longer respond. Undoubtedly Francis Ledwidge was the greatest loss to poetry since the death of Rupert Brooke, and aside from Brooke's incomparably beautiful sonnet, it is a question if Ledwidge had not the finer possibilities of the two. Ledwidge had been in the war from the outset, serving at Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and finally in Flanders, where he fell. Still in the middletwenties, his annals as poet and soldier were as picturesque as they were brief. The fairies must have directed him to send to Lord Dunsany, though not, we may imagine, without trepidation, those first poems of the fields and hedges which made him beloved far beyond his native Ireland. Through Dunsany he was introduced

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