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General Poole, the aforementioned British officer in command, seems to have been very sure that the Bolsheviks who had so blandly agreed to the passage of the Czechs through the country would not object to the passage of the expedition southward from Archangel, via Vologda, Petrograd and Riga to fight the Germans with whom they, the Bolsheviki, had compacted the infamous Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Its terms were severe, the immediate evacuation of all the conquered territory and withdrawal behind the Rhine, leaving the whole left bank and all the important bridgeheads open to Allied occupation, and a neutral zone on the right bank; the repatriation of all the transported inhabitants and Allied prisoners of war; the quashing of the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bukarest, and the withdrawal of all German troops from territories formerly belonging to Russia, Rumania, and Turkey; the surrender of thousands of guns, locomotives, aeroplanes, of all submarines fit for sea, and of the better part of the German Navy.
At this the Czech delegate, Doctor Kramarcz, flared up and exclaimed: "Russia? Cut up Russia? But what about her integrity? Is that to be sacrificed?" But his words died away without evoking a response. "Was there no one," a Russian afterward asked, "to remind those representatives of the Great Powers of their righteous wrath with Germany when the Brest-Litovsk treaty was promulgated?"
Warsaw had fallen, and Ivangorod, and the centre of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, sweeping across eastern Europe like beaters across a prairie, was now before Brest-Litovsk. This was the apex of this central triangle of Russian forts, a city and a rail-road centre as well as a fortress, and the last strongly fortified place on the direct road to Moscow.
Formal announcement of the armistice with the Petrograd government was made at Berlin December 16, with the statement that peace negotiations would begin immediately at Brest-Litovsk on the Eastern front. Russia thus violated her pledge to the Allies not to make a separate peace. The peace delegates of Russia and Germany began their sessions December 23.
In your speech of September 27th, you said: "We are all agreed that there can be no peace obtained by any kind of bargain or compromise with the governments of the Central Empires, because we have dealt with them already and have seen them deal with other governments that were parties to this struggle, at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest.
I stated to him that the basis of our attitude toward Germany should be an insistence, in line with his speech of September 27, 1918, wherein he said: We are all agreed that there can be no peace obtained by any kind of bargain or compromise with the governments of the Central Empires, because we have dealt with them already and have seen them deal with other governments that were parties to this struggle, at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest.
"A few days later Brest-Litovsk was taken. Behind the troops that stormed the fortifications during the night and thus forced the fall of the city, pressed from early morning great masses of the Austro-Hungarian and German armies.
The fall of Lemberg had given the German right a position far to the east of their left, and Mackensen advancing from Lublin and Cholm had driven the Russians across the Bug at Wlodawa before Brest-Litovsk was taken. The marshes of Pripet were at their driest in August, and Mackensen encountered few obstacles as he pressed on from Brest to Kobrin and thence to Pinsk along the rail to Moscow.
But all this did not in the least prevent General Hoffmann from declaring on the fifth day after the Brest-Litovsk negotiations had been broken off that the armistice was over, antedating the seven-day period from the time of the last Brest-Litovsk session. It were really out of place to dilate here on the moral indignation caused by this piece of dishonesty.
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