Life — March 14, 1918 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MARCH 16, 1918 “While there 6 VOL. 71 Life there's: Hope No. 1846 Publishea by LIFE PUBLIS Jo A. Mitcnent, Pres‘t, 17 West Thirty-first English Offices, Rolls House, T is a comfort sometimes to re- member that, after all, the world is small and the Ger- mans can’t get away. Russia is a large space as countries go, and there is Si- beria beyond it, but even there they do not escape the All-seeing Eye, nor even the reporters, and Berlin stays just where it was before the war, and can- not straggle. It was quite different with the Huns and earlier marauding tribes that had no vested interests, and when they had finished with one place, or it got too hot for them, moved on to the next in- viting field for plunder, and perhaps returned no more. Wherever the Ger- mans go and whatever expanses they overrun, they have got to come back to Germany and be at home to callers. They cannot lose themselves beyond discovery, and wherever their connec- tion with their home fires is effectually broken they lapse into the condition of a dismembered fragment of machinery and cease to be dangerous. These thoughts are consoling be- cause the Germans have wandered of late so far afield as to make it secm a desperate job to round them up in and secure them their dues. But that will all take care of itself whenever the gong can be made to sound loud enough on the Western front. Hit it hard enough, and all the straggling German soldiers in the world will turn their. faces back towards Berlin, to as- sist in their own country in the pro- ceedings due to befall there (ING COMPANY A. Minturn, Sec’y and Treas, New York . Breams Bldgs, London, F. C. Street, So the great job now, as everybody sees, is to hit the gong on the Western front and call the Germans home. HINGS feel better than they did. Readjustment is a weary job, and there has had to be a vast deal of it. To have Russia crumble and go grad- ually and miscellancously to pot, and to change her status from a nation to a disintegrating problem, was a sore trial, and disconcerting. To see a great country under the improvised direc- tion of a couple of Russian Jews is a bewildering sight, but it may not be without a value for instruction. In one way Trotzky and Lenine and the Ger- man masters are fairly matched. N. ther side is under any restraint from a sense of honor or regard for any precedent. In other respects the dis- parity of forces is pitiful. But the Russians needed strong medicine and are getting it. The mass of them had no conception of the office of authority and management in the affairs of a ation. They cast down both, and now are flat on their backs with Germans marching over them, and the Japanese attentive, anxious, and probably won- dering at their own self-restraint. Having had the awful spectacle of what organization and management can do when directed by ruthle: ithority, the world, mayhe, needed this comple- mentary spectacle of a nation utterly cast down by the dissolution of order. Now we have amazing pictures of the two main things that democracy needs to be saved from—conscienceless au- tocracy and anarchy. However, Russia many good people, and many friends in the world, and is too big a human interest to be neglected. She will come right again, nd may get back on the road to civil- ization sooner than one dares hope for. The battle for her, as for everybody else, is now on the Western front and on the seas. Beat the Germans there, and they are beaten everywhere. Never for a day or for an hour should we omit to be thankful that we are in on this great job; that, get- ting in, we helped maintain the cour- age and the means of its chief han- dlers; that from the first we have been useful in the doing of it, and have now at last begun to tell a little in the actual land fighting in France. Things are going better with us. Confidence in our machinery and its tenders is rising. We begin to get results of all manner of preparation. The real power of the country has begun to be felt where the wheels turn, Many real men are find- ing their places and beginning to see the fruit of long and weary struggles. Pretty soon now—any minute —the country will find itself really interested in this war and with the means and the opportunity to make its interest tell. The war is coming nearer to us all the time, and getting more and more un- der our skins. Daily we give lives to it, and are thankful that we still have so many more, ready to be given and sure to be costly to take. We are the great reserve of civilization, beginning at last to respond with men armed and trained to the call we began to answer a year ago with ships and dollars and food. LL things counted, it has been a ar of struggle imperfectly directed, of blun- ders, of confusion, of discouragements, pretty tough year for us, ay of constant yapping and a good deal of necessary criticism. Building up a big war-machine is no joke. That has been