I rode through Kitsa once when there was one platoon of American soldiers quartered there and the civilian population was about normally occupied with its own life. And then I came in with the refugees from Shenkursk on the night of January twenty-seventh. First it was Brackett Lewis and Ivan Taroslaftseff serving hot coffee and biscuits to the exhausted soldiers in the building that the people had built and used for a public school but the Allied military had commandeered, not to store whisky in, as at Bereznik, but to run a canteen in. Then it was caring for the ninety-seven wounded, then back to the men and civilian refugees, until the full daylight, and the column was all in. We took the three best houses in town for the hospital that night. Then the British officers took the next best. Then the American officers. And that following day we billeted troops in every house, and the Russian people made room for us, welcomed us, waited on us, made nothing of themselves, moved into their bath houses, then out again if we wanted them; gave us all the room there was, gladly, believed in us. I shall always remember a poor woman who came into an officer’s room and opened a table drawer to look for two hundred silver roubles she had left there. The lock had been forced. The roubles were gone. Silver roubles were very precious. The woman’s tearful face did not express so much grief as surprise. She had discovered something most unwelcome about our soldiers—perhaps officers. Other Russians were learning to hate the military for other reasons. In three days they were utterly bewildered. They do not take disillusionment in our offhand, familiar way. They are a serious people. Their illusions are genuine. No literature and no sophistication, but great sincerity. So completely did these Kitsaites give way to us that when the order for their evacuation went forth we gained no room for we already had it all.