Then they all lie down between lean-to and fire and cosily go off to sleep. I came upon a family of ten sleeping in this way, women and girls in the middle, men on the wings. The feet of the women were bare and stretched out towards the fire, and everybody seemed fast asleep, but I had not been there a fraction of a minute before the feet were withdrawn so quickly that you could not see how it was done. [SN: MOSCOW] At last the first winter snow drifted down and marching became impossible, so we were put in the train for Moscow. I had long wished to visit Moscow, but I saw nothing of it except Singer’s Sewing-machine factory. This was a really fine building, as up to date as anything in Germany. Every peasant’s hut we had visited had been adorned by Singer’s calendars. They always set my teeth on edge a little, because their startling modernity was so out of place in the medieval filth and backwardness of the Russian village. At Moscow we were sorted out into our various nationalities. Germans, Jews, and Hungarians were to be punished by being sent to Siberia. All the oppressed races from Schleswig-Holstein to Alsace-Lorraine, all Slavs, Rumanians, and Italians were to be kept in Russia. As a matter of fact, those who went to Siberia had the best of it in the end, because food was cheap and plentiful, while those who stayed in Russia were half starved. Other Germans were punished by being sent north to build the Murman line. One of the few men who survived told me that the men perished like flies. The country was a stretch of horrible marshland, and the moisture seemed to get into the men’s constitutions and rot their bodies. The food was insufficient and of the wrong kind, and as a consequence scurvy spread through their ranks like a forest fire. The Murman line got itself built at last, but, it was said, at the cost of thousands of lives. Other Germans were kept at the front to repair bridges and throw up trenches--often under the fire of their own artillery. At Moscow a neutral consul presented each of us with three roubles and a copy of St. John’s Gospel. It had been printed in German at Cambridge and was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society. The German soldiers were surprised that a British society should thus interest itself in the spiritual wants of the enemy. They were grateful, as the leaves of the booklet were just the right size and thinness for cigarette-paper. The Catholics were doubtful about the book, suspecting a Protestant trap or some contrivance to proselytize them. On others of us the reading of St. John made an impression that would have been impossible in ordinary times. The very poverty of our circumstances allowed us to concentrate our minds upon it as we could never have done before. The impression made was not altogether a religious one, nor one probably that the Bible Society aimed at. But its poetry and fire worked upon us in such a way that, although I may forget everything else that came to