hardly recognized the town again. Anger, discontent and curses wherever I went. The soldiers returned from the front had certain peculiarities, explicable from their service at the front, which were quite incompre¬ hensible to the elderly commanders of reserve units, but were obvious for an officer who had himself just come back. The respect paid by the men to such a one was quite different from that given to an officer at the rear. With these exceptions the general spirit was wretched. Scrimshanking almost counted as a sign of higher intelligence, devotion to duty as a mark of weakness and narrow-mindedness. The offices were full of Jews. Almost every clerk was a Jew, and almost every Jew a clerk. I was amazed at this mass of combatants of the chosen race, and could not help comparing it with the sparseness with which they were represented at the front.
In the business world it was still worse. Here the Jewish nation had become actually “indispensable”.
The munitions strike at the end of 1917 did not produce the hoped-for result in starving the front of arms ; it collapsed too quickly for the lack of munitions, by itself—as was intended—to condemn the army to defeat. But how great and how disgraceful was the moral harm which had been started !
First, what was the army going on fighting for, if even the people at home did not desire victory ? For whom these vast sacrifices and privations ? The soldier has to fight for victory, at home they are striking against it !
Secondly, what effect was it having on the enemy ?
In the winter of 1917-18 dark clouds covered the firmament of the Allied world.
All the hopes founded on Russia were at an end. The Ally, who had offered the biggest blood sacrifice at the altar of their joint interests, had