"They did not tell us what had happened. We learned it first from the Germans. They began calling out to us, 'The Tsar has abdicated.' We did not pay any attention, as they were always shouting lies. Then they erected long banners outside their trenches with the words 'There is revolution in Russia. The Tsar has abdicated. Why do you go on fighting?' "We were so infuriated by this that we planned a night attack on our own, and without the knowledge of our officers we entered the German trenches that night, just to show them what it meant to insult the Tsar. There was a great noise. The German artillery awoke. Ours replied. Our neighbours on the right and left wondered what was happening, and in the morning our N.C.O.'s were called to explain what it was all about. They told the story and were strongly reprimanded. Then officers addressed us and told us the bitter truth that there was actually revolution in Russia. And we wept, and the officers wept with us. . . ." He was a sentimental warrior, and the tears glistened in his eyes now. He professed to be unendingly devoted to the Tsar. His regiment would have made a mountain of its dead rather than let them take the Tsar. If the Tsar had even been in the Crimea when Wrangel was there they would never have given him up. "Whom have you hope in now?" I asked. "General Wrangel cannot do any more." "There's only one man." "Who is that?" "That man is Burtsef." What an extraordinary conjunction of sentiments!--devotion to the Tsar and belief in Burtsef! But here it was. The bourgeois were to blame for all Russia's troubles, and yet he was a soldier in the army that wanted to restore the bourgeois. Such paradoxical attitudes are no doubt responsible for the current official opinion in Serbia that all Russians tend to become Bolshevik, and that they may be a dangerous element in the State. The soldier had three glasses of tea and then inverted his glass and got up and was most profuse in thanks, and for the present of a few dinars actually got down on his knees in thankfulness. "You are going back to your hospital camp--how will you go?" I asked. "On foot?" "No, by train. They give us a free pass on the railway. Some say they'll soon give us a free pass back to Russia!" He looked very woebegone. He showed me his Georgian cross given for bravery in the field, and then once more the ikon his mother had given him. "Seven years, and I haven't once been home," said he. "Seven years," he repeated mechanically, and began stumbling out of the room. He was a strange and touching witness of the power of the human eruption in Russia. As it were, a clod of earth had been lifted from the province of Tambof and flung as far as the Balkans. Another witness of another kind was the old Archbishop of Minsk whom I found in the monastery of Ravanitsa.