The Drama of Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days/The Shadow of the Great Death
THE SHADOW OF THE GREAT DEATH
The truth, as everybody knows who knows
Russia, is that " barbarous," the classic taunt
of the German against Russia, is, of all words,
the least proper as a description of the Russian
mind and character. I have myself been only
once in Russia, but it was on a long visit and
under conditions which were calculated, beyond
anything that has happened since down to
to-day, to reveal to me the whole secret of the
Russian soul. In 1892, when the cholera had
come sweeping up from the south, I travelled for
weeks that seemed like an eternity in the little
towns of Galicia and the cities beyond the
Russian frontier. The Great Death darkened
my sky over many hundreds of miles of travel.
I visited the plague spots where men's lives
were being mown down at the devastating stride
of 5000 deaths a week, and where men's hearts,
the nerve, courage, sanity, and humanity of men,
were being sapped and quenched and consumed
by terror and panic and despair. I saw the
Russian people under the black shadow and in
the malign presence of the Great Death, living
in the dark clouds of inquietude and dread and
awe. And when my visit came to an end I left
Russia with the feeling that, relatively short as
my life among the Russian people had been, I
knew them because I had been with them when
their very souls lay bare.
What, then, did I see? A barbaric people? No, a thousand times, no! I saw an uneducated people; a neglected people; a people badly fed, badly housed, and badly protected from the cruelties of a rigorous climate; but not a people who had naturally one barbaric impulse, if by that we mean the "will to life" which animates the savage man. And I now say, with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that the last reproach that can rightly be flung at the Russian people, even the least enlightened of them, the Russian peasants, in the darkest reaches of their vast country, is that they are barbarians. Deeds of cruelty and of barbarity there may be among the Russians, as there are among all peoples, and the dehumanizing conditions inevitable to warfare may perhaps increase the number of them, but the outrages of Louvain, Termonde, Rheims, and Liège are morally and physically impossible to the Russian race.