“You will never return alive. They will slaughter you. They will rob you of everything. They will take your clothes from your very back.”

With stubborn conviction the dapper young Lettish gentleman spoke to me as he attempted to change my mind about going into Soviet Russia. He was attached to the Foreign Information Bureau of Latvia. He had been in Riga all through the Bolshevist rÉgime, from November, 1918, to May, 1919, when the German army of occupation in the Baltic provinces drove them out. There was nothing he could not tell me about that rÉgime. He was especially eager to impart his experiences to foreign journalists.

“Was it really so terrible, then?” I asked him.

“Nothing could have been worse,” he repeated. "Many persons were killed by the Bolshevists—I saw them myself—but not so many as when the Germans began their slaughter. There was the Bolshevist program of nationalization. They nationalized the land. They nationalized the factories. They nationalized the banks and the large office buildings, and even the residences.

“Aristocratic women were taken from their comfortable homes and forced to wait on Bolshevist Commissars in the Soviet dining-rooms. One of our leading citizens, a man who through hard work had accumulated a great fortune, was put to work cleaning streets. His fine house with thirty or forty beautiful rooms, where he lived quite alone with his wife and servants, was taken away from him, and he was moved into a house in another part of the city on a mean street where he had never been before. His home was taken over by the ‘state’ and seven families of the so-called proletariat were lodged in it. One of our generals was compelled to sell newspapers on the streets. Our leading artists were forced to paint lamp posts—and the color was red. They made the university students cut ice.”

“And the women—did they nationalize them?” I interrupted.

“Well, no, they didn’t do that here in Riga,” he said, “but that was because they were not here long enough to put it into effect. They were so busy confiscating property in the six months they held sway that they had little time for anything else. No, they didn’t nationalize the women in Riga, but you will find they have done so in Moscow.

“But you must not go to Moscow,” he added. “You will surely never return alive—but if you do, please come and tell me what you have seen.” And mournfully he wished me a safe journey.

I returned to the Foreign Office the next day determined to get permission at once to pass through the Lettish front into Soviet Russia. It was a hot August day. Officers and attachÉs sat around panting, obviously bored that any one should come at this time to annoy them. Yet despite the heat, they were willing enough to argue with me when they learned that I wished to go into Soviet Russia. Like the young man I talked to before, they tried hard to dissuade me. They were full of forebodings.

“You will be robbed of the clothes on your back the minute you fall into the hands of the Bolshevists,” they insisted.

“You must be crazy,” said one particularly friendly officer, whose blonde hair stood straight up from his head so that he looked perpetually frightened.

“But I am an American correspondent,” I repeated over and over again, not knowing what else to say.

“So that is it,” said the officer, seeming to understand all at once. And shortly after that the Foreign Office at Riga decided to recommend the General Staff that I be permitted to pass the lines. But still they urged me not to go.

“You will come back naked if you come back alive,” they shouted to me in parting.

I left Riga on a troop train at six o’clock in the evening of September 1, 1919, bound for Red Russia. By noon the following day we had reached a small town, where I disembarked with the soldiers. The front was fifteen versts away. There the Reds had established themselves, I was told, in old German trenches near the town of Levenhoff, 107 versts from Riga.

I carried a heavy suitcase, an overcoat and an umbrella, and the thought of trudging in the wake of the less heavily caparisoned soldiers was discouraging. I accosted a smart young officer with blonde mustaches. He listened to me with interest.

“I am an American correspondent,” I said, “accredited to your headquarters.”

He glanced at my papers and shrugged his shoulders with such an air of indifference that I thought he was not going to help me at all. But he told me to follow him, and a short distance up the road we came upon a peasant driving a crude hay-rick drawn by a single gaunt horse.

After a brief parley, none of which I understood, the peasant got down from his high seat, hoisted my suitcase into the vehicle, and I followed it. I sat flat on the floor with my feet braced against the sides of the springless cart, and we started jolting and bumping down the rough road which ran parallel with the tracks. The peasant sat on a board laid across the front of the rick.

We had gone only a short way when the booming of guns came from both sides of us. My driver, however, seemed unconscious of it. We went on for another five versts. The guns grew louder and I saw shrapnel shells burst uncomfortably near. They came thicker and faster.

I remembered the peace of Riga some twenty-four hours before this. I wanted to tell the driver to turn around and go back, and then I remembered that we did not speak the same language, and certainly, judging from his impassive back, we were not thinking the same thoughts. There was an instant when I stopped thinking altogether, and when I knew that I could not have opened my mouth had I tried to speak. A shell burst some forty feet away and a piece of shrapnel about the size of a grape-fruit landed on the floor of the hay-rick between my outspread legs, broke two slats on the floor of the wagon and dropped harmlessly to the ground. Then at last the driver turned around, his face white as chalk. His panic, instead of communicating itself to me, had the very opposite effect and I suddenly lost all sense of danger. With a boldness, which surprises me whenever I think of it, I shouted to him:

“For Christ’s sake, go on!”

The driver obeyed reluctantly but soon turned around again.

“Go on!” I cried.

A few minutes later we approached a clump of trees under which stood a Lettish gun, surrounded by four or five officers. My driver stopped to talk to them, evidently inquiring whether it was safe to go on. One of the officers nodded, the others laughed, and one said in good English, “Everything is all right.”

At four o’clock we reached the headquarters at the front. I presented my pass to the commanding officer, a stocky young fellow with humorous wrinkles around his eyes.

“You are an American,” he said, observing me keenly.

“From New York,” I said. “I am going to Moscow on important business for my paper.” I told him more, giving most impressive details. I convinced him.

“Well,” he said finally, “you will have to wait until morning. Both of us are using heavy artillery now.”

I insisted. I wanted to go at once.

“Well, go then,” he said with his first show of impatience. He called a lieutenant, gave him brief instructions and washed his hands of me.

Right across the neutral zone you could see the Bolshevist trenches, running at right angles to the railroad with barbed wire on each side so that a motor train couldn’t rush through. “You can’t go into the front line trenches,” the commanding officer told me. “Nobody is allowed in there except military men, but you can go through the opening in the barbed wire and start across.” That was the best I could do, so the lieutenant took me around those barbed wires and down into a ditch at the edge of the railroad and pointed to me to climb the bank. Well, I climbed up somehow, it was about twenty-five feet; and started down that track with my big suitcase and a heavy overcoat on, holding up my umbrella with a white handkerchief tied to it.

It was a very hot day and I had to walk two miles across the neutral zone—two miles right straight down the tracks. You could see the Bolshevist trenches in the distance. Pretty soon the firing started. I couldn’t feel anything dropping near me, so I decided those Lettish soldiers were popping their heads out of the trenches to see this fool go across and the Bolshevists were taking pot shots at them.

The Lettish officer had told me: “If they start to fire on you, roll off down the bank and crawl back to our positions.” But I would have had to roll twenty-five feet and probably crawl a mile. So I kept on. A scattering rifle fire spat out from the Red trenches and the shells screamed steadily overhead. My suitcase dragged heavily and I was uncomfortably warm, but I made good progress. I had covered about half the distance when a rifle bullet whipped by my ear. I plunged along the track with redoubled speed.

As I came within fifty yards of the barbed wire which the Russians had strung across the tracks, Red soldiers shouted up at me from their trenches and motioned for me to come down into the adjoining field where there was a gap in the wire. A few moments later I was in the first-line trench of the Red army.

I was hot and exhausted and still resentful of that shot. I spoke first: “Why did you shoot at me?” They did not understand, but one of them evidently knew I was speaking English. He called down the trench to another soldier who ran up. He was a tall young Slav, and showed white teeth in a broad smile as he greeted me in good English.

“Hello, America,” he said.

“Why did you shoot at me?” I repeated indignantly.

“Oh,” he made a deprecatory gesture.

“One of the comrades made a mistake,” he said. “He shot at you without orders. But you also made a mistake.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“You carried a white flag,” he said, grinning. “It should have been red.”