her than the spirit of their
agreement, have given Balahovitch the opportunity of establishing
himself in Minsk, where, it is said, that the pogroms of unlucky Jews
show that he has learnt nothing since his ejection from Pskov.

Balahovitch's force is not important in itself, but its existence will
make it easy to start the war afresh along the whole new frontier of
Poland, and that frontier shuts into Poland so large an anti-Polish
population, that a moment may still come when desperate Polish statesmen
may again choose war as the least of many threatening evils. Still,
for the moment, Russia's western frontier is comparatively quiet. Her
northern frontier is again the Arctic Sea. Her eastern frontier is in
the neighborhood of the Pacific. The Ukraine is disorderly, but occupied
by no enemy; the only front on which serious fighting is proceeding is
the small semi-circle north of the Crimea. There Denikin's successor,
supported by the French but exultantly described by a German
conservative newspaper as a "German baron in Cherkass uniform," is
holding the Crimea and a territory slightly larger than the peninsula
on the main land. Only to the immense efficiency of anti-Bolshevik
propaganda can be ascribed the opinion, common in England but comic to
any one who takes the trouble to look at a map, that Soviet Russia is on
the eve of military collapse.

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 was strong