In any case it is easy in a revolution to magnify the influence of military events on internal affairs.In the first place, no one who has not actually crossed the Russian front during the period of active operations can well realize how different are the revolutionary wars from that which ended in 1918.Advance on a broad front no longer means that a belt of men in touch with each other has moved definitely forward.It means that there have been a series of forward movements at widely separated, and with the very haziest of mutual, connections.There will be violent fighting for a village or a railway station or the passage of a river.Small hostile groups will engage in mortal combat to decide the possession of a desirable hut in which to sleep, but, except at these rare points of actual contact, the number of prisoners is far in excess of the number of casualties.Parties on each side will be perfectly ignorant of events to right or left of them, ignorant even of their gains and losses.Last year I ran into Whites in a village which the Reds had assured me wasstrongly held by themselves, and these same Whites refused to believe that the village where I had spent the preceding night was in the possession of the Reds.It is largely an affair of scouting parties, of patrols dodging each other through the forest tracks, of swift raids, of sudden conviction (often entirely erroneous) on the part of one side or the other, that it or the enemy has been "encircled." The actual number of combatants to a mile of front is infinitely less than during the German war.Further, since an immense proportion of these combatants on both sides have no wish to fight at all, being without patriotic or political convictions and very badly fed and clothed, and since it is more profitable to desert than to be taken prisoner, desertion in bulk is not uncommon, and the deserters, hurriedly enrolled to fight on the other side, indignantly re- desert when opportunity offers.In this way the armies of Denikin and Yudenitch swelled like mushrooms and decayed with similar rapidity.Military events of this kind, however spectacular they may seem abroad, do not have the political effect that might be expected.I was in Moscowat the worst moment of the crisis in 1919 when practically everybody outside the Government believed that Petrograd had already fallen, and I could not but realize that the Government was stronger then than it had been in February of the same year, when it had a series of victories and peace with the Allies seemed for a moment to be in sight.A sort of fate seems to impel the Whites to neutralize with extraordinary rapidity any good will for themelves which they may find among the population.This is true of both sides, but seems to affect the Whites especially.Although General Baron Wrangel does indeed seem to have striven more successfully than his predecessors not to set the population against him and to preserve the loyalty of his army, it may be said with absolute certainty that any large success on his part would bring crowding to his banner the same crowd of stupid reactionary officers who brought to nothing any mild desire for moderation that may have been felt by General Denikin.If the area he controls increases, his power of control over his subordinates will decrease, and the forces that led to Denikin's collapse will be set in motion in his case also.* [(*)On the day on which I send this book to the printers news comes of Wrangel's collapse and flight.I leave standing what I have written concerning him, since itwill apply to any successor he may have.Each general who has stepped into Kolchak's shoes has eventually had to run away in them, and always for the same reasons.It may be taken almost as an axiom that the history of great country is that of its centre, not of its periphery.The main course of English history throughout the troubled seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was never deflected from London.French history did not desert Paris, to make a new start at Toulon or at Quiberon Bay.And only a fanatic could suppose that Russian history would run away from Moscow, to begin again in a semi-Tartar peninsula in the Black Sea.Moscow changes continually, and may so change as to make easy the return of the "refugees." Some have already returned.But the refugees will not return as conquerors.Should a Russian Napoleon (an unlikely figure, even in spite of our efforts) appear, he will not throw away the invaluable asset of a revolutionary war-cry.He will have to fight some one, or he will not be a Napoleon.And whom will he fight but the verypeople who, by keeping up the friction, have rubbed Aladdin's ring so hard and so long that a Djinn, by no means kindly disposed towards them, bursts forth at last to avenge the breaking of his sleep?]
And, of course, should hostilities flare up again on the Polish frontier, should the lions and lambs and jackals and eagles of Kossack, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists temporarily join forces, no miracles of diplomacy will keep them from coming to blows.For all these reasons a military collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time, even a concerted military advance of its enemies, is unlikely.
