24G 



THE NATIONAL 



GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



A few Russian women could be seen 

 wearing Paris styles a little out of date or 

 with their heads swathed in the shawl of 

 the peasant matron, and from one of the 

 buildings there fluttered the Red Cross of 

 the "Union of Cities" hospital, but the 

 city was as Turkish as it had ever been. 



The signs on the street corners, strik- 

 ingly new in their blue and white, were 

 printed in Russian. Those Russian let- 

 ters in such a city were as exotic as in 

 the Russian Concession on the Yangtse 

 at Hankow. The veneer of Tsardom had 

 been laid on over the Turkish city with- 

 out changing its character a particle. Yet 

 a Russian could find his w r ay to the Rus- 

 sian post-office by reading signs in the 

 Russian language. 



RETREATING FROM THE TURKISH FRONT 



That very day Russian soldats, freed 

 from the yoke of autocracy by Tsar and 

 bureaucracy and blindly assuming the at- 

 tractive but heavier yoke of autocracy by 

 the mob, were retreating in droves from 

 the Turkish front, so eager to abandon 

 all dreams of conquest or defense of ter- 

 ritory in which they had no interest for 

 one more visit with the home folks that 

 many rode on the roof of the military 

 train through the bitter cold of winter, 

 6,000 feet above the sea. 



The veneer of Russian greatness, an 

 outside show which had caused even Ger- 

 many to fear, has peeled off. A boister- 

 ous wave of popular unrest and revolu- 

 tion, suddenly aware of Tsardom's weak- 

 ness, but still lacking Tsardom's strength, 

 has swept from the barren steppes south 

 of the Caucasus to the dreary wastes of 

 Lapland, and from the Crimea to Man- 

 churia. 



If once that great sluggish mass is 

 roused to united action by the honeyed 

 words of German propagandists, not only 

 will the patchwork republic of Lenine 

 and Trotzky be disrupted, but Anglo- 

 Saxon ascendancy in Asia may give way 

 to Teutonic hegemony — a Pan-Turanian* 

 empire dominated by the militarism of 

 Germany and led by the Timur and Attila 

 of modern war. 



* The Pan-Turanian movement aspired to an 

 aggressive union of Asiatic peoples, especially 

 the Ural-xAJtaic tribes. This menace to Indo- 

 European civilization received the active secret 

 support of German autocracy. 



