I visited the Anglo-Russian Hospital at Petrograd one evening, and saw how our English sisters have become friends with the simple Russian lads, sit at their bedside with dictionary and notebook, and carry on delightful and pathetic conversations. The Russian authorities will not allow a wounded man to leave until he is well enough to return to his unit. The consequence is that the wounded man remains longer in a hospital in Russia than he would in a similar hospital in England. And the longer they stay the better are they known to those who tend them. The English in the hospital on the Nevsky at Petrograd obtain a fair notion of the character and temperament of the Russian soldier. My impression was that they admired and loved him greatly. He was all that had been written of him and said of him, and something more--religious, simple, brave, patient, cheerful, and sociable. Jolly boys these Russian wounded, not dour like Cromwell’s soldiers although they are as religious as his, not Puritans, not intolerant. No one asks suspiciously of the sister nursing him, “Are you not perhaps a Protestant?” And then feels suddenly, “I am saved and she is damned,” but a general feeling that God’s mercy is needed more for the poor suffering soldier than for the bright angel who is nursing him. When our women were on the point of going out to Russia to work in this Anglo-Russian Hospital I confess I felt a doubt as to whether they would not find fault when they got to Russia and dislike the Russian Tommy because he was unlike his British brother. But I was wrong. The Russian peasant is convincing when you see him day after day, and it is your lot to tend him whilst he is suffering. Singing their national songs and their national Church music in those good choruses which without selection any hospital affords, you hear the voice of Russia with your ears be they keen or dull, and dressing wounds and watching you see character. Undoubtedly if the same party of British nurses and doctors were thrown simply into the midst of ordinary educated men and women in Petrograd or Moscow instead of being given to the wounded they might easily come away with a less true impression. But here amongst the men suffering for you and me and all of us is Holy Russia, which was and which is. A considerable amount of spiteful nonsense is written against the notion of Russia conveyed by the term Holy Russia, and I among others am blamed for idealising Russia, or as Mr. Zangwill puts it, of Ruskinising her. And another Hebrew writing under an assumed name finds fault with me because I said at the National Liberal Club, “Love Russia, and do not distrust her as you have done in the past.” Another Russian Jew, who has been embittered by political treatment writing also under a pseudonym, pursues a violently misrepresentative campaign in Russia against the conception of Russia as a country that can be spiritually helpful to us.