As they were drinking a figure slouched along the trench and blocked the doorway. It wore a black-visored cap, shiny with celluloid--a Russian cap. Searching the gloom the Russian found the three wounded soldiers. Then he poked his rifle in and fired three bullets--one at the brain of each. Two died instantly. The third--the soldier who had already survived as by a miracle--passed into what he thought was the rigor of death. All grew black before his eyes. Never from that moment to this--seventeen days later--has he seen even a glimmer, nor will he ever see again. The bullet passed across his eyes as he lay side down and shattered the optic nerve. The Russian thought his work complete. Leaving his rifle outside he passed into the dugout and emptied the pockets of the two dead men and the third, whom he believed to be dead. Then sneaking back up the passage, the Russian regained his own lines. For five days the soldier lay in the dugout, unable to move, unable to see, numb from long suffering. Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he at length severed the arteries of one of his fallen comrades, newly dead, and lived on. He found worms crawling in the wounds of his legs. He tore up the shirt of a corpse and bound them. Then began as memorable a journey as man ever made, as heroic a combat for life as pioneer or warrior ever underwent. He started to crawl to the Japanese lines. Blinded, paralyzed, his legs shattered, one arm useless, half dead with fatigue, his tongue swollen with thirst, and starving, he made his piteous way a few yards each night. Directions were useless. Seeing nothing he could not tell whether firing came from friend or foe. He only knew that his way was down. So down he crawled. Bullets and shells passing over him became so common he lost all sense of them. By a terrible mistake--an error that cost twelve days of agony, for otherwise he might have traveled the few essential yards in a night--he missed the captured fort which marked the apex of the wedge driven into the Russian lines. And so his fearful, sublime crawl was for a thousand yards along the front of his own lines, into which at any time, had he turned straight along the face of the hill, he might have come and found sound legs and new, clear eyes. But down was his direction and down he went--a thousand yards in twelve nights. He found a few new dead with biscuit in their pockets and blood in their veins--this saved him.