"Ah," said the Russian. "And my grandfather was killed on that river, fighting to free the Slavs. Defenceless little brothers, the Slavs! When the war began the enemy was right into your capital of Belgrade at once, but we Russians plunged into East Prussia. Yes, I was there, brothers, and was wounded and marched back to the Niemen with my wound open----" He recounted where he had been in the war, and was so circumstantial that one by one the Serbs said good-bye and wished him luck and went away. And he was left standing there alone, looking over the gloomy Austrian plain below where night was descending fast. "Would you like to have tea?" I asked. "My lodging is quite close." He readily agreed, and so we went across to the "Patriarchate" and up to Bishop Nikolai's white room. Budomir, Nikolai's servant, a shell-shocked soldier, struck a posture of pleasure and stoked up the fire to boil some water. Budomir had been a student and now could multiply numbers of four figures in his head though he could do little else. He was devoted to Nikolai, and insisted on serving me because I was Nikolai's friend. The Russian soldier marvelled to find himself in a room so strongly Orthodox in its appearance, and he did not fail to cross himself elaborately. Then he showed us the various crosses which he wore round his neck. One of these touched him very much: it had been given him by his mother in August, 1914, when he set out for the war. It had protected him ever since. He had gone through untold dangers and hardships, and had actually never seen his home and his wife and his child since that August morning when he marched away. He belonged to a Guards regiment, and so I was interested to know what part he had taken in the revolution, and what he thought of it all. It should be remembered he was not a newspaper-reading Russian. He called himself a _Gosudarstvenny_ or State peasant, apparently indicating that his family had not been serfs but had been free men. He was normally a peaceful tiller of the soil, stopped at the plough and put into battle-harness by the politicians of Europe. Though now one of Wrangel's army he attributed all Russia's misfortunes to the "burgui." What a bourgeois really was he had not the remotest idea, but the word served. It was the burgui who brought about the March '17 revolution in Russia. "If we had been at Petrograd then it could not have happened," said he. "How?" "Well, before the revolution took place, the burgui arranged that the stanchest regiments should be sent to France. Yes, our regiment of Guards was actually in the lines below Verdun when the Tsar was dethroned.