A gentleman from Moscow, and his wife, on the contrary, inveigh bitterly against the Government and the war. (I saw these same people again at Moscow after the December rising. Their house was situated in a street where the firing had been heavy and abundant. They had had enough of revolution and blamed the revolutionaries as severely then as they now blamed the Government.) We constantly pass trains full of troops going to the war. The men all ask the same question: “When is peace going to be?” They ask for newspapers and cigarettes. I gave some of them some bottles of whisky, which they drank off then and there out of the bottle. An amusing incident happened last evening. We had stopped at a siding. Everybody had got out of the train. I was walking up and down the platform with one of the passengers. We saw a soldier throwing big stones at the window of the washing compartment. “What are you doing that for?” we asked. “I want to speak to his Honour,” the soldier said; “he is washing his face in the washing-room.” And through the window of the compartment, lit by electric light, we could see the silhouette of an officer washing his face. “Why don’t you go and knock at the door?” we asked. “They are” (to speak of a person in the third person plural is respectful in Russian, and is always done by inferiors of their superiors)—“they are ‘having taken drink’ (_Oni Vipimshi_),” he replied, and then he added, lest we should receive a false impression, “His Honour is very good.” As we passed train after train of troops I reflected on the rashness of prophecy. How often I had heard it said in London, when the war broke out, that the line would break down immediately. Even when I reached Mukden I heard people say that the line could not possibly last through the summer, and here it is supporting gaily train after train in the second year of the war. ON THE WAY TO CHITA, _August 20th_. We arrived at Irkutsk on the morning of the 17th and took the train for Baikal. At Irkutsk station there was a train of sick soldiers returning from the war. They begged for newspapers. The tedium of their long journey is, they say, intolerable. They say there has been a good deal of typhus in Manchuria.