"Do you think we shall ever really have a war with Germany, Big Yeogh Wough?" "Yes, dear, very surely. If it comes in my lifetime, I hope it will come before I am old, because there will be dreadful things happen which old people will not be able to face. It might mean almost a going back to savage life--even at home in England." He looked at me as if he thought I could not mean what I was saying. He knows better now. On the ship they called him the "Encyclopædia Britannica," and said he might be safely referred to when any information on any subject was required. "If I'm still in the position I'm in now when that boy gets old enough to think of making a start in the world, I hope you'll let me be of some use to him," said a high Government official who was among the passengers. "You and his father are not thinking of the Army for him, of course. His eyes not being right puts soldiering out of court." "His eyes will be all right in a few months," I replied. "But we should not think of the Army for him, in any case. By the way, there isn't a single soldier among the people on this ship." No, there was not a single soldier on board. And yet, since then, I have shed tears for five of the men who were before me as I talked that day, and who have given up their lives for their country. Many others whom I did not know so well have gone over the awful border, too, and the rest are in khaki; all the rest, that is, who had something of youth still in their blood. "Aren't the Russians splendid?" the boy cried to me a few days later. "They're just right, you see, because they've got the two sorts of men in them both at the same time--the football-playing, hard-hitting sort, and the other sort that loves poetry and likes beautiful things." "Yes, you are right. That is just what makes Russians so fascinating," I said. There was cholera in Petrograd--and we had told Little Yeogh Wough that he would only be allowed to go there once or twice and would have to spend most of his time waiting on the ship off Cronstadt, while we went to the capital, and thence on to Moscow. But we had reckoned without Little Yeogh Wough himself. Coming back from Moscow to Petrograd, we were thunderstruck to see, just outside the Empress Mother's palace, in the magnificent Nevski Prospect, a fine-built, boyish figure, that stepped out very gaily and held its head very high. "Surely that can't be Roland!" I exclaimed in amazement. "It certainly is Roland," declared his father grimly. Little Yeogh Wough--wandering through Petrograd alone! He was looking at a carriage drawn by four long-tailed, coal-black, fiery-eyed horses, and at the dazzling uniform of an officer who sat in the carriage. Then he hurried into a side-street and we got out of the droshky we were in and followed him on foot. How much at home he was! how gaily he walked here alone in this city where the very letters of the alphabet over the shop fronts were strange and mysterious!