The Russians, he told me, fought well, their cavalry, one hundred thousand strong, breaking the German line and taking many prisoners. But the supporting artillery failed them; never came up at all. Mutiny broke out, many of the men charging that their higher officers had sold them out to the Germans. If this was so, then the Germans behaved toward their friends with their customary treachery. At one halt these Russian officers took possession of a German country house, obligingly left open and well furnished. Very soon after they were installed, the house blew up and killed every man in it. The place had been mined by the Germans. In the Russian retreat, Jeff was taken prisoner, and with many others was sent first to Germany, where he was forced to slave at menial labor. Later he was sent to Belgium. “I never let them know that I was a skilled mechanic,” said he. “I didn’t want to be set at munitions work, or to help them in any other way to win the war.” In Antwerp, Jeff, because he has a strong personality, was placed over a gang of Russians who were repairing streets. This was at a time when the British flyers were bombing Antwerp, and on one of their visits some of the bombs fell in a quarter of the town where this labor group was at work. The German guards, to quote Jeff’s exact words, “beat it to hell” for the nearest cellar, yelling to the prisoners to do the same. But Jeff and fifteen other Russians seized their chance and beat it to the water front. In the terror and excitement of the raid they were not stopped anywhere, and they managed to get hold of a fishing boat and beat it some more for the English Channel. They had no food or water, but they thought they might be picked up, and after twelve anxious hours they were picked up by a Norwegian steamer. They were taken to London, and for a week or ten days were lionized and made much of. But of course they were Russian soldiers and had to be returned to their army. Jeff showed me the “paper” given him by the Russian consul in London, a safe conduct to the port where he was to embark for Norway and go from thence by rail to Russia. Jeff kept the paper as a souvenir, but he had no intention of going home. Instead, with the aid of a Russian whom he had met in London, he went to quite another port and got a job as a stoker on a British merchant vessel bound for Marseilles, and from there to New York. By the time he reached New York he had eighty-five dollars in wages in his pocket. He knew some English, and with true Russian facility, soon picked up more. He went to Coney Island one day, and there he scraped up an acquaintance with two soldiers of our regular army. “Why not enlist?” they suggested, and Jeff, who was tired enough by this time to be tempted by an easy life and plenty to eat, consented. This was before we entered the war.