In many battles there comes a moment when little or nothing appears to have changed, and yet you suddenly realize that all is over but the running. Such a moment came on the morning of Christmas Day as I went up the Sadovaya towards the central revolutionist position where I had been the afternoon before. The barricades were still standing, the Sodovaya was still covered with such a network of wire about four feet from the ground that one had to walk under it bent double like a hoop, and no horse could have moved. The guns had not come perceptibly nearer, and in the centre of the town I had seen an officer stopped and deprived of his sword by half a dozen men with revolvers, who threatened to strip him naked, as another had been stripped the day before. There were rumours of all manner of wild enterprises on foot—attacks on stations, on prisons, on barracks. All these were favourable signs. Yet as I went along, I suddenly realized, “instinctively” as it is called, that the tide had turned, and that the highest moment of revolutionary success lay behind us.

I was so convinced of this that, wishing to photograph the barricades before they disappeared, I went all the way back to the hotel for my kodak. There was a brilliant sun, and as the firing had not yet become severe, I walked leisurely through the main position, selecting in my mind the best places; for I had only one roll of films left, the rest having gone down the line. As on the previous day, a good many people were moving about in groups, besides the usual number of women passing up and down unconcernedly, since children must be fed, revolution or not. But from a number of unconscious signs, I felt the place was to be abandoned, and it appeared likely that the fighting revolutionists had already gone. So I began taking the views, and had just secured a fine construction of doors, benches, barrels, railings, shop-signs, and trees, when I found myself surrounded by a group of young men, evidently displeased. I soon perceived I had fallen into the midst of my friends. They were very quiet about it, and only one of them spoke. He was a dark Pole of about twenty-five, dirty and red-eyed with sleepless fighting, and he appeared to be informing me that I was a spy and must at once give up my camera. To make his meaning plainer, he stealthily drew a revolver from his coat pocket, and held it close against my side, whilst he repeated his demands in the same low voice. In two or three unknown tongues I appealed to him and the others, who had now closed in all round me, ready with the same stealthy argument. I smiled my hardest, assuring them I was at least as good a revolutionist by nature as they, and would rather explode the universal spheres than betray a stick of their barricades. I think they understood the smile, for their manner became less anti-social. But there was a movement among the crowd, and as I tried to escape in it, they again grew painfully insistent. In the end I had to give up the roll of films, and with that they appeared content, for they graciously let me keep the camera. But by their action their finest barricades lost a chance of immortality.

The incident only proved how impossible it was to know where the revolutionists were stationed, or in what force. There was nothing to distinguish these men from the numbers of others with whom they were mixing quite freely. It is true that, after this experience, I recognized them almost by intuition. As though by a law of nature, they assumed the conspirators’ habit—the hat drawn down to the eyes, the long coat with the collar turned up, the hand constantly feeling in the pocket, the quick look of suspicion glancing every way. After a few days I think I could have picked out the leaders simply by their pale and intellectual faces, or their appearance of nervous and bloodshot excitement. But the possession of a revolver was the only admissible evidence, and that required search. By the soldiers it was taken as sufficient evidence for death without phrase, and any one caught with a revolver in his pocket had no further chance. Of course, the revolutionists were aware of this, and knew that death was as good as surrender. Whilst I was among them that morning, for instance, an English officer only a few streets away saw five men suddenly come upon a strong picket. They were summoned to halt, but, instead of halting, they walked quietly on, taking no notice. One after another they were shot down, till only one was left, and he also walked on, taking no notice. Then he was shot, and there was an end of the five. No doubt the more usual form of courage would have been to rush upon the picket and die fighting. But they may have been out of cartridges, and in any case it would be hard to surpass their example in passive bravery.

In expectation of sudden death like theirs, all the students, both men and girls, had stitched little labels inside the backs of their coats, so that, when they were killed, their parents might possibly hear the news and know the pride of having produced an adventurous child. I think most of the revolutionists had done the same, but the dead were piled up and carted into the country for burial with such indiscriminate carelessness, that I doubt if the precaution was of very much avail. And, indeed, it was not the revolutionist who suffered most during the days of combat, but the sightseers and the ordinary passers-by.

For myself, I was very unfortunate all that day. The guns began firing heavily again about eleven, and I tried many devices to reach their main position on the Tverskaya by passing from lane to lane in their rear. I even reached the Pushkin statue, from which I could see the limbers of the guns waiting under cover. But the continual threats of bayonets and rifles on every side, and the violent searching by the sentries became strangely demoralizing. Certainly the process of search that day was pleasingly simple in my case, because what underclothing I still possessed had gone to the wash, and all the shops were shut. But my kodak excited the utmost suspicion; all the more, perhaps, because it was empty now.

Tired of all this, I turned down the main Boulevard westward for an interval of peace, but again I was singularly disappointed in my hope. The further I went, the more disturbed and dangerous the atmosphere of things became. Something was evidently happening down that way. Troops were marching hastily about, and two guns passed at full gallop. At one place I heard an officer’s voice shouting some order, and the few people on the pavement near me began to run for their lives. I saw no reason to run till two soldiers came dashing at me through the trees with fixed bayonets. Then running was too late, and, seated on a railing, I awaited them, feeling that the centre of indifference was reached at last, and life and death were equal shades. But something induced them to respect so obvious a foreigner, and having again searched me and taken half a crown each as their reward for international amenity, they conducted me past an angle of a church and waved adieu.

Then I discovered the reason of all this excitement. New barricades were rapidly appearing across many of the streets leading down into the Boulevard from the right-hand, or north-west side. I continued along the circle almost to the point where the Boulevard ends, close to the great cathedral of the Saviour near the river, and all the way I saw signs of fresh conflict and heard sudden outbursts of rifle or revolver-firing. It was only after two or three days that I understood the real significance of this movement, by which the revolutionists were preparing for their final stand in the extreme north-west of the city. But at the time I thought they were merely attempting a feint upon the Government’s left, just as they had tried on the right the day before. It seemed probable, also, that the movement was intended to cover their withdrawal from the main position where I had lately left them. And that, indeed, was their object, though they hoped rather to change their centre than to abandon the contest altogether.

Yet the crisis, as I had felt in the morning, was really over. When I passed through the middle of the city again, and out to my own quarter, the crowds were still running to and fro in panic round the Theatre Square, men and women were still falling unexpectedly in the streets, there was as much to do as ever in helping the wounded, and the ambulance yards were continually being filled. But the life seemed to have dropped out of the rising. People were talking with terror of a great peasant invasion, hundreds of thousands strong, that was already marching to deliver their Little Mother Moscow, and hew us all to pieces. With better reason they said that Mischenko, the hero of the Japanese war, was coming as military governor with 7,000 Cossacks. Hour by hour the citizens were agitated by new alarms, and the cautious began to think enough had been done for freedom, and to remember that something, after all, was due to the sacred stove of home. That night the revolutionists issued appeals calling for volunteers at six shillings a day and a revolver, the term of service to be limited to three days. For Russian fighting, or indeed for fighting in any land, the pay was magnificent. Even in nations like our own the risk of life is not valued above two shillings, and though the Russian soldier’s pay was raised for this occasion, it only amounted to threepence three farthings. It was certainly safer for the moment to be a revolutionist than any other kind of citizen, because revolutionists generally knew which was the enemy and where he lay, but I do not think many volunteered for the sake of the pay or the mere delight of firing a revolver. Even if any recruits were gained by such inducements, their fighting, not being inspired by revolutionary spirit, was not likely to be glorious.

During the next two days, there was very little outward change in the position, except that the feeling of disaster grew, and most people began to recognize the winning side and arrange their own behaviour accordingly. The guns still sprinkled bullets over the barricades and wrecked the houses on each side. The soldiers continued their slow and perilous advance from street to street. People fell at random; the hospital and ambulances were crowded beyond limit. On the Tuesday evening an official estimate put the killed and wounded at between 8,000 and 9,000. In ordinary wars all numbers are exaggerated, but in civil war the Government would probably not overstate the number of their victims, and when I went up on Tuesday, the troops had advanced very near to the Sadovaya, the firing was very heavy, and many were hit. But the sense of disaster and failure lay over all, and on that day, for the first time, I heard revolutionists beginning to describe the whole movement as a dress rehearsal and to congratulate themselves upon the excellent practice in street fighting which they had enjoyed.

On the Wednesday I was unable to go out, except only to cross the Theatre Square. And there I found a group of soldiers who had just taken part in an execution in the middle of the place. Some inmate of a hotel opposite the Métropole, possessed by a crazy spirit of slaughter or revolt, had fired a pistol at large from his window. The battery was placed in front of the hotel and the surrender of the man demanded. The proprietor gave him up without dangerous hesitation, and in a minute or two he was shot in front of the window from which he had fired. One would have liked to discover the kind of mania that seized him, but his death made that impossible.

The evening of the same day—or perhaps it was the evening before—another execution was carried out, more terrible in its circumstances, but better deserved, if any execution is deserved. A band of revolutionists—the English papers, getting news chiefly through St. Petersburg, said three hundred of them, but that is absurd—made their way by some means unobserved to the house of the chief of the secret police, close to the gendarmes barracks. Knocking at the door, they demanded to see Voiloshnikoff, the chief himself. He came out to them, his wife and children looking on with terror in the background, and in spite of the entreaties and tears of woman and child, they placed him in front of the door and shot him on the spot. No doubt he had done many atrocious things, and had cared little enough for the entreaties of women and children himself. But most people regarded this act of wild justice as inhuman, and regretted, not the paid criminal’s removal from the world, but the manner of it.

An hour or two before daylight next day (Thursday, the 28th), I had to go to a house on the further side of the Sadovaya to help bring provisions and toys for an English family which had taken refuge in the hotel after spending some dull days in cellars. As we walked through the streets standing in silence audible under the transparent darkness of the morning, we saw the pickets squatting round orange fires of planks which they had kindled in the middle of the road. But beyond searching us once or twice, they did not interfere with our purpose, and the only real danger came from the police, who had that morning received brand new rifles—light-coloured things like toys, with fixed bayonets—which they hugged in both arms, or held horizontally over their shoulders, to the peril of all bystanders, while in their hearts they longed to put them to their natural use, with all the tremulous bravery of girls out rabbit-shooting.

But before we reached the Sadovaya, we had passed all the pickets, and hardly any one was visible on the streets. Some of the barricades were on fire or gently smouldering; the rest stood deserted. The pavements were strewn with glass and bricks. Houses on both sides were ruined with shell. Some were burning, and in two or three the beds and furniture were being thrown out of the shattered windows. We noticed how wild the shell-fire had been, for houses quite a hundred yards from the main streets were struck, evidently at random. But all was unguarded now. When daylight found us leaving the English flat with our load, there was still no one visible, and I think a battalion might have marched through the district in fours without receiving a shot. Even the red flags had been removed from the barricades, to be kept, one hopes, for another occasion, and almost the only sign of life was that here and there I observed a dvornik (the door-keeper who watches the Russian home) cutting down the network of telegraph wire with a hatchet and rolling it up. He reminded me of some trusty servant methodically putting away the stage properties on the morning after private theatricals.

For the rest of that day the guns and soldiers were engaged in clearing the quarter of barricades, entanglements, and all. It was an easy task now, though the firing was more violent than ever, as the progress was more rapid. For the revolutionists had received orders from their committee that morning to abandon the street fighting and scatter to their homes or out into the country, continuing the propaganda and holding themselves ready for the next opportunity. Some escaped, at least for the time. Some refused to obey, but continued the fighting, as we soon discovered. Many were seized, and for days afterwards small parties of soldiers or police in every street drove some unhappy creature in front of them with his hands tied. What became of these prisoners, we only suspected at the time; we found out later. On this part of the Moscow rising, there is no more to chronicle but massacre. And so the barricades and their defenders faded into history, and law and order were restored.

That Thursday at noon, a decree went forth from Admiral Dubasoff commanding all shutters to be taken down, all doors opened, and business to be resumed on pain of martial law. Then the heart of the shopkeeper was glad. For eight days all shops had been shut; banks were closed, merchants did no business, and, as the German song says, no mill wheel turned around. It is always hard not to smile at the money-making classes whenever the great passions of human existence appear upon the surface and shake their routine. Yet we need not make light of their sufferings. They had suffered at the heart. For months past they had been deprived of the profit which is their single aim. For more than a week they had taken absolutely nothing, and the whole credit of the country was so shaken that they could not hope for advance of capital. Their occupation was gone, and no return of it seemed likely. Besides the ordinary bankers, merchants, and shopkeepers, we must include among them the hotel and restaurant keepers, the theatrical managers, actresses, music-hall people, prostitutes, and all such as live by pleasing or amusing the wealthy. We ought further to include artists, musicians, authors, lawyers, journalists, and professors, but as a rule their profits are so small that their losses would hardly count in the universal ruin. To take a single instance of the immense injury to trade, the mere damage to house property from the shells and bullets was estimated at £10,000,000, and all of it was dead loss, except to the builders and glaziers. The Sytin printing works, wantonly destroyed by the Government for printing the Liberal newspapers, was valued at £300,000. There was no reason to be surprised, therefore, at the comfortable joy which welcomed the Government’s ruthless decree. Perhaps it might seem a little indecent, while the dead who had fought for freedom were still lying in frozen layers at the police stations, or were being thrown neck-and-crop upon sledges for their unknown burial. But we must make a large allowance for business habits, which tiresome revolutions interrupt. Think of the feelings of our own City men if suddenly the morning train which for years they had caught successfully, stopped running and shells rained from Holborn Viaduct to Aldgate Pump! With what common sense they would welcome the restoration of any tyranny, with what scorn decry the fallen sentimentalists who had cared for freedom! So in Moscow, returning law and order met a greasy smile, and many extolled the Governor-General and officers for the vigour of their action. Skin for skin; yea, all that a man hath will he give for his livelihood.

So “intercourse was resumed,” and the shop-keeping heart rejoiced. But on Friday morning an uneasy feeling stole abroad that all was not quite satisfactory yet. About two miles west of the Kremlin there is an isolated manufacturing district called Presna or Presnensky. A little stream with two or three ponds, running from the back of the Zoological gardens into the Moscow river, separates it from the main town, and to the north of it lies that ill-fated Khodinsky Polé, the plain where the crowds were crushed to death at the Tsar’s coronation. The district is about a mile square, and various factories stand there, for cotton, furniture, varnish, boiler-making, and sugar. Some of them are under English management, and in English commerce the place is known as Three Hill Gates, because the country beyond gently rises into slopes that would pass for hills in Russia.

It gradually became known that a large number of work-people—ten thousand of them it was said—were holding this district, and had set up there a little revolution of their own, under an organized system of sentries, pickets, and fighting force. A few students and educated girls had come over to them from the revolutionists of the barricades disguised as mill hands; indeed, a girl of eighteen was described as their most powerful leader, and in all probability those streets which I had seen barricaded on the extreme left of the Government advance on the Wednesday, were blocked to give time for the Presnensky preparations. But in the main it was a work-people’s affair, and on the Friday they held undisturbed possession of the district, their sentries marching up and down with revolvers and red flags, while they naïvely boasted themselves confident of terminating the exploitation of labour and establishing Social Democracy at a stroke.

But law and order were already at their work of disillusionment. That very day the fashionable regiment of the Semenoffsky Guards, under command of Colonel Min, already notorious as a slaughterer of the people, arrived from St. Petersburg, though the revolutionists made a gallant attempt to stop the railway by tearing up the lines. In the evening a cordon of troops was drawn round the district, and batteries were placed on five positions, at ranges of 1000 to 2000 yards. One stood on a high bank near a bridge over the little stream I mentioned; another was a point nearer the Zoo, where the gunners had to fight for the position, and burnt down several rows of small houses; a third was in the cemetery, where they met with no opposition; a fourth far away on the lowest slope of the Three Hills; and the fifth must have been stationed somewhere down by the Moscow river, but I did not discover it.

The district was thus surrounded by batteries, and at dawn on Saturday the guns opened upon the mills and neighbouring houses. There were no guns to reply, and the gunners consequently made “excellent practice,” plumping their shells down where they liked, crashing through the windows, or raising red clouds of brickdust from the battered walls. It was about as leisurely and safe a piece of slaughter as ever was seen. The large furniture factory was soon alight, and burnt quickly to the ground. So did the fine house of its owner and manager, a German-Russian named Schmidt, who was justly suspected of holding Liberal opinions, and was afterwards shot for the crime. The Marmentoff varnish works on the top of the hill also took fire, and its tanks continued to burn for many days and nights, rolling thick clouds of smoke into the air all day, and casting a brilliant crimson light upon the evening sky. The great Prokhoroffsky cotton mill was battered, and many shells burst in its rooms, but it was saved from fire by its automatic “sprinklers,” which, however, ruined the machinery by rust. Many shells burst against the owner’s house on the hill, for he too had committed the sin of Liberalism. During the bombardment, his wife gave birth to a child, an unpropitious time for herself and the nurses. But the guns were chiefly directed against the large workmen’s barracks attached to the mills, and these were soon shattered, though they did not burn. The small rows of cottages, where the married men lived with their families, being made of wood, blazed up at once, and it was in them that most of the people were killed. At the time it was reported that the gunners were ordered to fire on the lower stories, so that the people upstairs might not escape. I doubt whether gunners could make that distinction at the range, but, in any case, many people were cut to pieces by the segment shells and stifled by the flames. In one upper story alone, nine old men and women, who had been collected there for safety, were burnt to death.

The shelling was particularly heavy from eight to nine in the morning, and again from one to two. As the wooden houses caught fire, and the work-people were driven out in helpless crowds from their barracks by the crash of shells, the soldiers came crowding in with rifle and sword, and met with little organized resistance. The troops employed were Cossacks, a Warsaw regiment, and the fashionable Semenoffsky Guards, who had arrived, as I noticed, only the day before, and to the end of the insurrection displayed a surpassing blood-thirstiness and brutality. No Moscow men were present, though I was told by an officer that the Rostoff regiment, which had been regarded as dubious for some weeks past, entreated to be set in the front throughout the fighting, and at every chance engaged in the slaughter with a ferocity well calculated to recover the Government’s esteem. The whole of that Saturday appears to have been one long massacre of men, women, and children, who were blown up, shot, and hewn in pieces with delightful ease, and almost uninterrupted security. But that day I was myself unable to penetrate the thick line of sentries which surrounded the district and were engaged in shooting down escaping refugees and preventing witnesses of the massacre from entering.

In the afternoon an event happened which illustrates the spirit in which the Government’s agents carried out their work. Living in the Presnensky district, which has some streets of wealthy villas at the upper end, was a doctor named Vorobieff, well known in Russia as a man of science and a writer on medical discoveries. At the beginning of the bombardment he hung an ambulance flag from his window, to give notice to the wounded where they might obtain assistance. His landlord came and asked him to take it down, because the red cross would naturally draw the fire of Government troops. He took it down, but continued attending to any wounded who came. Presently a party of police, under an officer named Ermoleff, who had formerly been an officer in the Guards cavalry, came to the house and accused him of assisting revolutionists. He replied that he was not a revolutionist himself, but it was his duty as a surgeon to give every possible help to the wounded, no matter what their opinions might be. “Have you a revolver?” Ermoleff suddenly asked him. Yes, he said, he had a revolver, but he held the Government licence for it. “Go and fetch your licence,” cried Ermoleff. And as the doctor turned to go upstairs, he fired his pistol into the back of his head and blew his brains out. “Oh, what have you done?” cried his wife, who had been standing at the doctor’s side. “Hold your tongue, and wipe up that mess,” answered the ex-officer of the Guards cavalry, and withdrew his party.[2]

All that night Moscow saw the flames raging to the sky. Many of the revolutionists, and many of the ordinary work-people too, tried to escape from the district, especially across the frozen river, and it was along the river banks that most of them were shot down. Early next morning, on the excuse of visiting the English overseers who were shut up in the district, I succeeded in penetrating the cordon of troops, though I was searched nine or ten times from head to foot, and the sledge was searched as well. Two Russian journalists from St. Petersburg, who tried to follow me, were less fortunate, for by the command of the officers, they were so shamefully beaten and stamped upon that they hardly escaped alive, and one of them, still exhausted with terror and pain, came to my room some hours later to have his wounds dressed. All round the edge of the district, the wretched work-people were now trying to escape to their villages upon any kind of sledge that would move. Into these sledges they had heaped all their household possessions—feather beds, furniture, cooking things, and heavy old trunks with clothes. Sometimes the toys already bought for Christmas were laid carefully on the top—the doll or scarlet parrot—and one woman carried a baby on one arm and a wooden horse under the other. But when it came to the line of pickets, every sledge was emptied, all the boxes unpacked, and their contents strewn upon the snow. The people also were searched with customary brutality—the old people beaten, the young insulted. The soldiers thrust their hands into the girls’ breasts and under their skirts. One girl was passed on from soldier to soldier and searched six times within about twenty yards. “God spit at them!” muttered the women as they crawled away.

The guns were still in position around the district, and firing was to begin again in an hour. But on such mills as were still standing, the white flag now waved. Arms were being surrendered, and the dead were collected in rows upon the frozen surface of a pond. In one place was a mutilated child of nine; in another a baby’s arm, cut off at the shoulder and across the fingers, lay on the snow. For law and order were being restored. Near the mills I found many hundreds of work-people standing idly round their ruined barracks and smouldering homes. A barrack for mill-hands, as I have already shown, is not much of a place. The beds are jammed close together in rows; everything is hideous, the smell intolerable. Nor are the doghutch homes for married people much better. But at all events they had been warm. Now the workmen and their families had nowhere to go, and for the last three mornings the thermometer had stood at eighteen degrees below zero (Réaumur). Probably many homeless people were given shelter at night in other crowded rooms, but all day long they remained shivering helplessly among the ruins.

I waited for some time in an English manager’s house, expecting the guns to re-open fire. But no firing came, though the guns remained all day in position. As far as open fighting went, the Moscow rising was over. When I returned next morning (Monday, January 1st) I found the guns had been withdrawn, and the streets and ruins and mills were held by strong detachments of Cossacks and Guards. The surrender was complete. Three of the leaders had just been bayoneted to death, and their bodies were lying outside a shed. The remains of the last revolutionary band were cooped up as prisoners in the sugar-mill yard, and soldiers stood round the thick crowd of them, while the leaders were being sorted out for execution. Many women were found among them, and a large proportion of the dead were women too. Indeed, considering that this was mainly a work-people’s movement, it was remarkable how large a part the women played.

Of the killed it was impossible to form an accurate estimate. In the Presna district itself they said that eighty work-people were killed during the bombardment of Saturday morning. Perhaps 200 were killed in all, including those who tried to escape across the river. As to the larger question of the casualties during the whole ten days of the rising, every kind of estimate was heard between 5000 and 20,000. I have even heard of enterprising newspapers which put the total of killed alone at 25,000. But it takes a lot of killing to make a thousand dead, and after going carefully into such figures as I could get with two experienced officials who knew the city well, it seemed to me probable that the killed numbered about 1,200, and the wounded perhaps ten times that amount. But the truth can never be accurately known. The frozen bodies were piled up in police stations and other places till they could be carried out into the country by train and laid in hasty trenches. When I was in St. Petersburg many weeks later, a truck full of them arrived by mistake at the Moscow station there. The authorities denied it, but no one doubted the truth.

After our New Year’s Eve the process of vengeance and execution went on without further interruption. In the Presnensky district the prisoners were usually shot in batches—sixteen, twenty, or even thirty-five together, as I was told by an overseer who lived close by and saw it done. The work-people were set in a row before the firing party, and were driven forward three at a time. Three by three they were shot down before the eyes of the others. The heap of dead increased. Three more were driven forward to increase it, till at last only a heap of dead was left. In the case of two workmen, suspected of being leaders, there was a variety in the proceedings, perhaps by way of a practical joke. They were ordered by the officer just to walk round a corner of the sugar mill. They went carelessly, with their hands in their pockets, and when they turned the corner they were faced by eight soldiers standing at the present. In an instant they fell dead, and their bodies remained for a long time lying on the ground for all passers-by to see. Such executions continued among these factories for more than a week, and the numbers of those poor and uneducated men and women who died for their protest against despotism will never be known.

Nor will the numbers of the victims within the city itself be known. As I have said, on every street you met parties of soldiers and armed police bringing them to the police-stations. Even at the beginning of the rising, we have seen that prisoners were shot because the prisons were too full to hold them. It is quite certain that they had no mercy now, but what exactly became of them inside the walls, one could only judge from terrible hints and rumours that people whispered to each other. On the last day of the year, in a friend’s house, I met a skilled craftsman, an educated and middle-aged man, who from his own workroom could reach a window overlooking a police-yard. There, he said, one could watch the prisoners brought in and briefly examined by an officer. They were then strapped to a board and beaten almost to death, and if they were people of no account they were handed over to the executioners to be “broken up”—that is the English sportsman’s phrase for hares and foxes overtaken by the hounds. They were broken up. Their bones were smashed, their legs and arms lopped off with swords, and it did not take them very long to die.

The story may have been one of the exaggerations of war, but the man was a quiet and ordinary citizen, with no reason for lying, and he invited us quite freely to come and view the place, always soaked with blood. People of both parties who had lived many years in Moscow, did not hesitate to believe it, and they often told me of things still worse—of nameless things committed in the empty and windowless chambers of police-stations, where no light enters and no cry escapes.

One murder was especially talked about, because the victim happened to be the son of a leading barrister, who was a friend of the Governor himself. The boy was seized near the Riding School Barracks, close to the university, either on suspicion or for open hostility. The Sumsky Dragoons flogged him as usual, and their officer, finding him still alive, asked why they had not finished him off. An infantry officer who was standing by, took the news to the father, and he appealed to the Governor in person, asking only that the guard to take his son to prison should be composed of Moscow infantry and not of dragoons. The Governor replied that of course his request should be granted, and every consideration shown. Nevertheless, it was dragoons who formed the guard, and the boy never reached the prison alive.

Rumours reached us also about the fate of the revolutionists who had walked away into the country or afterwards escaped by train. I found some of them as prisoners a few weeks afterwards, at a long distance from Moscow; but many were overtaken on the road or shot by soldiers at the stations. The Semenoffsky Guards especially distinguished themselves by their zeal in hunting them down, and their exultation in the slaughter; but considerable allowance must be made for them, because they had not been given a chance of slaughtering the Japanese, and like all brave soldiers they naturally pined for active service.

So much for the men and women who had dared to strike for liberty. But having extinguished their efforts, Admiral Dubasoff devised a further method for discouraging the growth of Liberal opinions in the future—a method much applauded by the supporters of law and order, who hailed it as an admirable means of bringing ridicule upon the whole revolutionary cause. He ordered the police to arrest all suspected boys and girls in the Moscow schools and bring them to the police-stations. There they were handed over to soldiers, who stripped them, and, if they were under fifteen, beat them with their hands. Between fifteen and eighteen, the girls and boys alike were stripped and beaten with rods, though the girls received only five strokes and the boys twelve. I was told of this new device by reactionaries who had heard it from police-officers, knew of cases in which it had been carried out, and admired its admixture of sensuality with cruelty as likely to keep young people in their places for the future. But I could not help wondering how long a government in England would last if it handed grown girls over to soldiers to be stripped and flogged because they were suspected of Liberal opinions. I wondered also whether our own people who were then beginning to ridicule the revolutionists, and to welcome the restoration of order, ever in the least realized what is meant by order under Russian rule. And I wondered most of all how Frenchmen could still be found to advance money for the support of such a Government. But investors have neither pity nor shame.

In the midst of these scenes came the Russian Christmas Day (January 7th). It was celebrated as usual with superb ceremony in the enormous church of Christ the Saviour, which stands in the west of the city, above the river. Soon after dawn the people began to assemble, and by ten o’clock the vast space under the domes was packed with crowds, all standing up, except when, here and there, a man or woman forced the neighbours to make room for prostration on the floor. Bodies of troops stood at every corner round the building. The Governor-General arrived, the military staff arrived, the scene was radiant with uniforms. In any case, the ceremony is half military, for the great church of Christ the Saviour was built to commemorate Napoleon’s retreat. But it was not of Napoleon that the heroes of massacre were thinking that day.

The service began. In the centre, under the dome, stood a bishop—perhaps an archbishop—with gleaming mitre, his robes stiff with gold, his appealing arms supported by gorgeous priests. Between him and the altar veiled books were carried to and fro, books were brought with an escort of priests to be kissed, or were read in the unintelligible mutter of solemnity. Long-haired figures bore candles up and down; the bishop raised two candles high in air, crossing them so that they guttered down his robes, while he turned to the compass points of the church, to bestow his blessing upon all. Old priests and young, glittering in the uniforms of holiness, came to kiss his hands. In splendid humility he was supported to the altar. A veiled basin was brought for him to wash in. A golden priest knelt with the sacred towel hanging round his neck. The bishop washed, and upon the golden priest’s neck he replaced the sacred towel. The Re-incarnation of Christ began. On each side of the altar a choir of boys and men, apparelled in scarlet and black and gold, raised the glory of Russian music in alternate chant. From arch to arch ran the gleam of the kindling tapers till the marble walls and gilded capitals shone with points of fire.

Muttering and sobbing with devotion, the masses of mankind swayed up and down, as they bowed and crossed themselves in the gloom below. Struggling to touch the polished pavement with their foreheads, they fell upon the ground. The boom of distant bells was heard; a small bell tinkled close at hand. In front of the altar stood a black-maned priest, and with uplifted arm and upturned face, he called upon Christ. He called and called again, his immense voice bellowing round the cathedral, as though an organ had been wrought up to full power and one great note held firmly down. So he called upon Christ to come—Christ the Saviour, Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.