I breakfast every morning with Litvinoff. By coming down at 11 the others have finished, so we can talk. If Rothstein is present the conversation becomes Russian. If Vanderlip is there he talks all the time about America (he usually leaves the room with boredom if conversation is on any other subject). It is the fashion in Europe to vilify Litvinoff and to regard him as a terribly dangerous man. I suppose that he is an astute diplomatist. Whatever he is, he is better than he pretends, and though he gets no credit for it, he has done a good deal for the British prisoners here. He has unfortunately an abrupt manner, and a way of refusing to do things by pretending that they are no concern of his, but straightway he will go off and do a kindness to the very people who are damning him for having refused. To me he is charming, frank, outspoken, and always ready to help. OCTOBER 24TH. We have all been very much saddened by the death from typhus of John Reed, the American Communist. Everyone liked him and his wife, Louise Bryant, the War Correspondent. She is quite young and had only recently joined him. He had been here two years, and Mrs. Reed, unable to obtain a passport, finally came in through Murmansk. Everything possible was done for him, but of course there are no medicaments here: the hospitals are cruelly short of necessities. He should not have died, but he was one of those young, strong men, impatient of illness, and in the early stages he would not take care of himself. I attended his funeral. It is the first funeral without a religious service that I have ever seen. It did not seem to strike anyone else as peculiar, but it was to me. His coffin stood for some days in the Trades’ Union Hall, the walls of which are covered with huge revolutionary cartoons in marvellously bright decorative colouring. We all assembled in that hall. The coffin stood on a daïs and was covered with flowers. As a bit of staging it was very effective, but I saw, when they were being carried out, that most of the wreaths were made of tin flowers painted. I suppose they do service for each Revolutionary burial.