I remembered the peace of Riga some twenty-four hours before this. I wanted to tell the driver to turn around and go back, and then I remembered that we did not speak the same language, and certainly, judging from his impassive back, we were not thinking the same thoughts. There was an instant when I stopped thinking altogether, and when I knew that I could not have opened my mouth had I tried to speak. A shell burst some forty feet away and a piece of shrapnel about the size of a grape-fruit landed on the floor of the hay-rick between my outspread legs, broke two slats on the floor of the wagon and dropped harmlessly to the ground. Then at last the driver turned around, his face white as chalk. His panic, instead of communicating itself to me, had the very opposite effect and I suddenly lost all sense of danger. With a boldness, which surprises me whenever I think of it, I shouted to him: “For Christ’s sake, go on!” The driver obeyed reluctantly but soon turned around again. “Go on!” I cried. A few minutes later we approached a clump of trees under which stood a Lettish gun, surrounded by four or five officers. My driver stopped to talk to them, evidently inquiring whether it was safe to go on. One of the officers nodded, the others laughed, and one said in good English, “Everything is all right.” At four o’clock we reached the headquarters at the front. I presented my pass to the commanding officer, a stocky young fellow with humorous wrinkles around his eyes. “You are an American,” he said, observing me keenly. “From New York,” I said. “I am going to Moscow on important business for my paper.” I told him more, giving most impressive details. I convinced him. “Well,” he said finally, “you will have to wait until morning. Both of us are using heavy artillery now.” I insisted. I wanted to go at once. “Well, go then,” he said with his first show of impatience. He called a lieutenant, gave him brief instructions and washed his hands of me. Right across the neutral zone you could see the Bolshevist trenches, running at right angles to the railroad with barbed wire on each side so that a motor train couldn’t rush through. “You can’t go into the front line trenches,” the commanding officer told me. “Nobody is allowed in there except military men, but you can go through the opening in the barbed wire and start across.” That was the best I could do, so the lieutenant took me around those barbed wires and down into a ditch at the edge of the railroad and pointed to me to climb the bank. Well, I climbed up somehow, it was about twenty-five feet; and started down that track with my big suitcase and a heavy overcoat on, holding up my umbrella with a white handkerchief tied to it.