july 20, 1917
Conditions under the revolution
Odessa, July 13: I have returned from a tour in the districts of Poltava, Ekateringrad and Nicolaieff. The harvest has begun and haymaking is in progress. The cutting of other crops will begin in the next few days. Most of the cultivated land presents an excellent appearance but, owing to the abnormal duration of cold weather in the spring, followed by a long period of drought, the growth of the crops has been retarded, and the supply of straw will be deficient. A considerable portion of the landlords’ estates has been appropriated by the peasants, who will doubtless cut the crops on their own account. In some instances trifling compensation was offered. This was not paid to the landlords, but handed over to a fund for the widows and families of soldiers.Whether the landlords who have retained possession of their properties will be allowed to cut their crops seems doubtful. The peasants in the Poltava district have forbidden labourers from other districts to work there, insisting upon the employment of local labour, but this will be scarce, as most of the local workers will be employed on their own lands. The Workmen’s Deputies at Nicolaieff propose to solve the labour difficulty by sending the whole male and female population of the town between the ages of 15 and 50 to work as harvesters. The proposal excites dismay among many parents of the upper classes, who object to allowing their daughters to work in the fields in company with roughs and hooligans from the town.
In general the position of the landlords is being rendered untenable. The Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Committees have usurped authority, and the Government officials are powerless to protect them. In the Kieff and Poltava governments pogroms have taken place on the estates of unpopular landlords. The social disruption in Bessarabia appears to be far greater.
The Cossacks are the only considerable population imbued with conservative sentiments, and they may yet prove an important factor, should the increasing disorder lead to a reactionary movement. They declare that they will resist any attempt to compel them to yield a portion of their lands to others, and any effort in this direction might be productive of serious consequences.
July 19, 1917
The Queen’s visit to France
While the King in France was visiting battlefields and passing most of his time with his soldiers, the Queen devoted herself to inspecting hospitals and similar beneficent institutions. At each hospital her Majesty went through the wards saying a few words to patient after patient. The first hospital was an Irish one. “Well,” said one Irishman, “you never know your luck. I’d never have been talked to by the Queen if I hadn’t got this wound.” On one journey the Queen by chance came upon three battalions drawn up at a railway station waiting to be entrained. She spent some time speaking with the men. It was all spontaneous, and 3,000 men seldom make more noise than those men did cheering when the Queen entered her motor-car to drive away. There was a pretty scene when the Queen went down the ranks of the drivers of the Women’s Ambulance Convoy of the VAD. In their blue uniforms they were drawn up almost as smartly as any veteran troops, and the officers saluted with a curtsey as the Queen approached.During her tour the Queen saw a display of flame-projectors, burning oil throwers, gas shells, and smoke barrage, which gave her Majesty some idea of what the horrors of this conflict really are to the men who do the fighting. It was characteristic that what impressed her most was not the ingenuity of the devices, nor even the terror of the spectacle, but the suffering which they must cause to their victims. With the Prince of Wales she drove to the battlefield of Crecy. Here the Prince stood on the exact spot, as tradition gives it, where the Black Prince stood nearly 600 years ago when he assumed the now familiar Prince of Wales’s feathered crest and motto, which had belonged to the slain King John of Bohemia. Her Majesty also visited the Somme battlefield, motoring through Albert, where the great gilded figure of the Virgin Mother still hangs head downwards from the church steeple, out along the Bapaume road, by the great craters of La Boisselle, to the top of the Pozieres Ridge. It is a peaceful scene now that summer has covered the scars of last year’s fighting with grass and flowers, but the ridge is still not far behind the battle front so that the guns were loudly audible, and the Queen saw shrapnel fired at an aeroplane bursting in the sky.
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