The Cossack has no head for politics. He agrees on the government he is going to support and he serves that government with an undivided mind. When he served the Czar he did the Czar’s bidding. When he decided to serve the new democracy he could be depended on to do it. He has done no fraternizing with wily Germans in the trenches. He has listened to no German propaganda in Petrograd. He wants to fight the war to a successful end, and then he wants to go back to his home on the peaceful Don river, or in the wild Urals and cultivate his fields and vineyards. Of all Cossack leaders the most picturesque and the most celebrated as a military genius was Gen. Korniloff. His life and adventures would fill volumes. He fought his way up from a penniless boyhood to a successful manhood. He knows Russia from one end to the other, and speaks almost every dialect known to the empire, and several foreign languages in addition, especially those of the Orient. He is a small, wiry man with a beard, and the only time I ever saw him he was surrounded by a bodyguard of tall Turkestan Cossacks wearing long gray tunics, huge caps of Persian lamb and a perfectly beautiful collection of silver-mounted swords, daggers and pistols. In a pictorial sense Gen. Korniloff was quite obscured by them. Following a series of disasters and wholesale desertions at the front, the late provisional government announced that the chief command of the army had been given to Gen. Korniloff. The command was accepted with certain conditions attached to the acceptance. Gen. Korniloff would not be a commander in any limited or modified sense of the word. He demanded absolute power and control over all troops, both at the front and in the rear. He wanted to abolish the committees of soldiers who administered all regimental affairs, and who even decided what commands the men might or might not obey. Gen. Korniloff could never tolerate these bodies. Whenever he visited an army division he asked: “Have your regiments any committees?” And if the answer was yes, he immediately gave the order: “Dissolve them.” One of the principal demands made by Gen. Korniloff on the provisional government was the right to inflict the death penalty on deserters, both in the field and in the rear. I have written of the thousands of idle soldiers in Petrograd, and of the expressed refusal of many of them to go to the front when ordered. There was no secret about this, nor any concealment of the fact that of many thousands of soldiers sent to the front at various times since the early spring, about two-thirds deserted on the way. They captured trains--hospital trains in some instances--turned the passengers out, left the wounded lying along the tracks, and forced the trainmen to take them back to Petrograd, or wherever they wanted to go.