During these anxious days the Empress took to confiding in me and sometimes called me to her side, generally during the night when she could not sleep and was haunted by all kinds of fears in regard to the future. She told me then that she felt persuaded a revolution would follow upon the war, and that this time it would be a serious one which would require considerable energy before it would be suppressed. The idea that it might eventually prove successful never entered her mind, and I have often wondered at her utter blindness in this matter. But she felt so convinced that the greater part of Russia was still attached to the principles embodied in an all-powerful autocracy that no one was taken more unawares than herself by the promptitude with which the Russian nation accepted the overthrow of the dynasty. And yet she had been told often enough that this dynasty was in danger if it did not decide to make concession to public opinion that clamoured for a change. She still nursed illusions, and she honestly believed that her personal efforts in favour of wounded and disabled soldiers had made her popular with the army, that it felt grateful to her and to the Czar, and that it would not allow them to be harmed. She liked to relate anecdotes tending to prove this, and whenever she returned to Czarskoi Selo from one of the frequent visits she made to the Front, after the Emperor had assumed the supreme command, she liked to call me to her side and relate to me all that she had seen whilst there, and how the wounded whom she had visited had thanked her for her kindness towards them, not knowing that their thanks had been uttered in obedience of a command and had never proceeded from the heart of those who had uttered them. There had come, however, one fatal day when, instead of the cheers to which she had been used, the Empress was received with a dead silence by the troops when she accompanied her husband to a review of regiments about to be sent to the fighting Front. This was the first time that such a thing had happened to her, and the poor Czarina was so upset by this proof that she had lost the affection of her soldiers that she declared she would no longer show herself among them. Of course her friends tried to cheer her up, and to explain to her that this had been a pure accident, but the impression had been produced, and its effects were to be lasting ones. The first two years of the war dragged on, and sometimes I wondered whether my beloved mistress would ever live to see the end of this awful conflict. She was getting weaker and weaker and her nerves were so entirely destroyed that all those who still cared for her were getting quite alarmed on her account. The Emperor alone seemed quite unconcerned and failed to notice the great change that had come over his wife. He imagined that she was anxious about the war, but did not dream that her health was getting worse every day and that she had lost the energy