It is very wonderful, this self-denying patience of the Russian soldier, and it is too big a thing that one should get tired of speaking of it. A doctor at work here tells me how constantly it is impressed upon him. A man whose chin he has had to remove simply says: "Thank Heaven, now you've tied me up, and I am all right." Another, after his leg has been taken off, as soon as he is able to speak, says: "Ah, but it was a fine fight at Krasny; they gave it us, but we gave it to them too." Another, when he is brought in for operation, is only taken up with the thought that he meets in the operating room an Austrian officer to whom he has attached himself as guide and friend. Anything else that is human comes before any thought of self. I am quite certain that one of the greatest things that this war is doing is its revelation to Europe of the simple goodness of the Russian peasant in the person of the Russian soldier. He is more than the unconscious hero of the moment. The qualities of the real Russian people are going to take their proper place among the best factors in the future of European civilisation. _January 8._ In our _halupa_ (hut) we had those intimate and speculative conversations which seem so natural to Christmas Eve. Monk and Intelligents were on common ground. Only once Father Tikhon put down his foot when one of the party expressed indifference as to the other life. "No," he said, "joking apart, that's not good, least of all in time of war"; and the rebuke was accepted as gently as it was given. Our Russian Christmas began with the burial of a wounded soldier who had died in the night. In a little waste patch in the snow, near the lazaret, the priest stood in his gorgeous vestments and bowed deep over the new grave, while two soldier choristers sang the beautiful prayers for the dead. In the evening there was a Christmas Eve service in a room of the lazaret, which Father Tikhon and the soldiers had spent no end of trouble in turning into a chapel. The room was crowded with soldiers, and there was an improvised choir. The simple directions of the priest and the strangeness of the surroundings only added to the deep atmosphere of reverence.