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Gibbs, Philip, 1877-1962

"Now It Can Be Told"

They were often fiercer, narrower, and more desirous of
vengeance than the soldiers who fought, because it is now a known
truth that the soldiers, German and Austrian, French and Italian and
British, were sick of the unending slaughter long before the ending of
the war, and would have made a peace more fair than that which now
prevails if it had been put to the common vote in the trenches;
whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Cologne, and
the clergy who spoke from many pulpits in many nations, under the
Cross of Christ, still stoked up the fires of hate and urged the
armies to go on fighting "in the cause of justice," "for the defense
of the Fatherland," "for Christian righteousness," to the bitter end.
Those words are painful to write, but as I am writing this book for
truth's sake, at all cost, I let them stand . . . .


VI

The entire aspect of the war was changed by the Russian Revolution,
followed by the collapse of the Russian armies and the Peace of Brest-
Litovsk, when for the first time the world heard the strange word
"Bolshevism," and knew not what it meant.


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