When the third globe went dark, I found that it too, had been unscrewed enough to break the circuit. The German came, climbed his ladder, and with pliers, when he thought I was not looking, pried off the glass tip, rendering the globe useless. Then he told me the globe was no good. And--there were no more globes. Now all I had left was the globe in the drop-light. Every morning I hid it, and thereby worried the German. There was evidence that he hunted for it when I was out of my room. Why were the janitor and the waiter destroying globes that were a necessity even to themselves? I clinched my suspicions by asking a former merchant of electrical supplies this question: “Where did you buy your electric globes and fixtures before the war?” Well, they came from Moscow--mostly made in Germany. Here was another corner of that joker! When Russian Bolshevists were afraid they would get caught breaking things, the German prisoners helped the game along by doing a little sly smashing on their own account! Because I had the room of a former American consul, the Russian owner of a gold mine near Chita called upon me, thinking I was the present American consul. He said he wanted advice as to where he might, some time in the future, buy mining-machinery. The Bolshevists had wrecked his entire plant. Their leaders had told the peasants that the mines of Siberia belong to all, and that in time a Bolshevist government would work the mines, and divide the gold among the people. In that way no one would become richer than someone else. “The German prisoners,” he said, “now tell my workmen that if I have machinery I will need only a few men, and so hundreds of workmen will be thrown out of jobs. Of course, if I could put machinery in I would employ ten times as many men as I do now. I can’t make my mine pay without machinery, and for the present I am employing only common labor to clean things up so as to be ready for better times. If we Russian mine owners can’t make our mines pay, we’ll have to sell out. During the revolution, German capitalists have bought up a lot of companies in European Russia at bankrupt prices. “But assuming that Germany takes the mines, how can the Germans hope to operate them if the workmen refuse to allow machinery to be used in them?” “You do not know our _moujiks_,” he replied. “They will not believe what I tell them for their own good. But they will believe the lies of an outsider--any childish story told to swindle them. By the time Germany is ready to sell us machinery, maybe the _moujiks_ will be told not to smash it--if the machinery is German.”