I cannot speak as an expert about the railroad situation, nor would mere figures and statistics give the reader any adequate picture of the railroad demoralization. To say that on May 15, 1917, the then Minister of Ways and Communications reported to the Duma that more than 25 per cent. of the total number of locomotives in the empire were laid up for repairs wouldn’t begin to express the thing. The average reader does not know that 5 per cent. of “sick” locomotives is considered high by competent railroad managers. I might go further and say that the number of freight cars loaded from May 15 to May 31, 1917, was 87,000 poods less than the number loaded between those dates in 1916, but that would not mean much. Few outside of Russia know what a pood is. As a matter of fact it is thirty-six pounds. But figures cannot adequately describe the situation. What told the tale of railroad demoralization to me was the constant anxiety I heard voiced on all sides by people trying to buy their winter stock of wood and coal. There is an endless quantity of wood in Russia. Great forests of pine and cedar and birch--beautiful forests. I had often marveled at them from the windows of my railway carriage passing through Finland and the country between Petrograd and Moscow. Plenty of this wood has been cut. I saw thousands and thousands of cords of it piled up along the railroad tracks, and of course there must have been much more elsewhere. Petrograd is built on a marsh and the ground is drained by picturesque if rather badly smelling canals which run through the city and empty into the Neva. Down one of the widest of these--the Moika, which I crossed every day--a constant line of barges, loaded with wood, floated slowly, drawn by horses and sometimes by men walking along a towpath beside the canal. I used to watch those bargeloads of wood and wonder why, with such an almost unparalleled means of distributing wood after it got there, the people of Petrograd should be troubled about the winter fuel supply. Not nearly enough of it was getting there last summer; that was all. The quantity that floated down the Moika and the other canals and got stacked up in woodyards and in the courtyards of apartment houses, hotels, hospitals, factories and even palaces, was not half the normal quantity. There weren’t enough flat cars and locomotives running to get the wood as far as the city limits.