He gave us his fresh impressions in brutally frank terms and they added up to a picture of ghastly horror. His estimate of the dead from famine was the most startling I had as yet heard from anyone. ‘But Walter, you don’t mean that literally?’ Mrs McCormick exclaimed. ‘Hell I don’t . . . I’m being conservative,’ he replied, and as if by way of consolation he added his famous truism: ‘But they’re only Russians . . .’
