The commissary, Captain Blodshvoshki, was not in favour of my petitioning the Commander directly, as he appeared to have some misgivings concerning the irascibility and generally adverse disposition of that gentleman; which, considering what I had myself seen and heard, I thought were not altogether without grounds. So a Staff Officer, Colonel Vilkovski, who had shown me some kindness, was applied to. He said that he had never heard of a foreigner being permitted to join the Russian Army except by express permission of the Czar; and he was much surprised to learn of my experiences with the Muscovite forces. He promised to forward my wishes as far as it was in his power to do so. It was on the 13th April that this conversation took place. On the 15th a surgeon came to my quarters and desired to examine me. When he saw the state of my feet he shook his head; and I understood, through Captain Blodshvoshki, that he had pronounced me "no good." On the 18th a passport and a railway voucher were handed to me by a police orderly, and I was told to go home; that is the simplest way of putting it. Arrangements were made for me to leave the camp the same evening. I make no comment on the seemingly cool and off-hand manner in which I was dismissed; but I resolved if ever again I do any fighting it shall be in the ranks of the British Army. But the resolution is superfluous: it is pretty clear that I have ridden Nature to the last lap. Ostrolenka was the nearest station to the camp, and I was advised by Colonel Vilkovski to proceed to Riga via Vilna, and from thence to obtain a ship to England. The good gentleman shook hands with me, and took his departure. Captain Blodshvoshki wished to accompany me, but he was not permitted to do so. He also shook hands, with the hearty warmth of a true friend. A horse was lent me to carry me to Ostrolenka; and a police trooper accompanied me to take back the horse when I had done with it. Ostrolenka was distant about twenty-five versts (a verst is 1,166 yards), and there was a straight road to it, though it was in a truly dreadful state--cut to pieces by heavy traffic and more than knee-deep in tenacious mud. Moreover, we soon discovered that it was obliterated in some places by the fighting that had at one period of the war been very frequent over it. Whole versts of it had been torn up by shell fire and the passage of heavy guns, so that we had to make wide détours to avoid the large mudholes, which were the craters of shells, and some of which contained six or eight feet of water, drained from the melting snow. The sun set a couple of hours after we started, and it happened to be a very dark night, much clouded and overcast, with an occasional shower of rain; though this is scarcely worth mentioning, except that it added to the already excessively bad condition of the road, and was probably one of the causes that led to my becoming quite bewildered.