On May first, the international labor holiday, he opened up on every front, making the supreme effort of the year. His heaviest blow fell on Malobereznik. The ice had begun to run out of the Vaga and the upper Dvina enabling him to mount guns on barges while our gunboats were still frozen in at Archangel. When he had put five thousand shells into Malobereznik and burned down every house, his infantry came on only to be fearfully cut up and sent back, again and again. He was deeply disappointed. The thing was inexplicable. So on May fifth he came again. This time with eight thousand shells as a prelude. And when the last futile wave of his infantry had gone to pieces under our fire and we had taken prisoner hundreds of his men who had been sent to surround us, we knew that he had done his worst, and the winter campaign was practically at an end. *VI* *KITSA* Kitsa is a church village of about fifty long, low Russian timber houses situated in a great bend of the Vaga River with only the outer curve of the river bank for a landscape and with a dense wall of pine woods in the rear. This level country is so painfully level that you always have a desire to look over the edge of the nearby horizon to see something—but you never can. When you first pass through Kitsa, which you never would have done in a million years had it not been for this war, you think it is the sorriest of all the sorry places on the river. It might at least have been located on the high bank and so gained the only thirty feet of vantage that nature had provided. Yet Kitsa has one striking distinction. The road makes a right angle in the midst of the houses, and the churches are in the angle and in the west. The West! Russia does not need landscapes because she has skies. Kitsa to me is that wonderful western sky cloven in the midst by the Byzantine spires in pea green and gold, and based flat on the black ridge of pine, and fixed forever in permanent and infinite pastels in my memory. Kitsa was not a Bolshevist town nor Royalist. It was Constitutionalist Socialist Democratic. It was founded by refugees from Novgorod who had rebelled against certain imperial church decrees. There was still a little mound where these glorious ancestors had erected a hill of freedom. And the freedom itself had been retained intact, so the oldest inhabitant told me, it having been a matter of the text and type of the holy book read in the church.