It was an incident characteristic of the pervading spirit, and one well calculated to stimulate it. But there were thousands of incidents and scenes that have perforce to be dismissed in a line, or even not referred to at all. Among the many gallant spirits marked out for special distinction of the Tsar was the Captain Pleshkoff whose superb horsemanship had been acclaimed year after year at the Olympia Horse Show in London, where as recently as 1914 he carried off the King Edward VII Cup. Captain Pleshkoff received a nasty wound in one of the cavalry combats around Warsaw. He is a Cossack by descent, a pupil of the famous General Brussiloff, and is noted among his admiring countrymen as the “inventor” of a new system of riding. The captain shared the fate of most reformers when he attempted to bring his riding method to the notice of his colonel, an old-fashioned martinet commanding the Tsar’s Life Guard Cuirassiers. In fact, it led to Pleshkoff’s temporary severance from his beloved regiment when he became adjutant to one of the Grand-duke’s; but on the outbreak of the present struggle he returned to the Life Guard Cuirassiers. But there are so many men of Pleshkoff’s stamp among the Tsar’s eight millions of fighters that his Imperial master might well be tempted to say, with a great leader of the past, “If I made all my brave soldiers generals, there wouldn’t be any privates left.” Such a one was the wounded warrior who averred, with crystalline sincerity and self-confidence, that if he had not been laid aside by a bullet the campaign for Russian Poland would have been a much more brief affair! A parallel story to one coming from the western theatre of war--of the young girl who, by assuming masculine attire, managed to be accepted for service with the Flying Corps--is that of a young Russian lady who managed to smuggle herself into a cavalry regiment leaving for the front. Not only so, but this young Amazon, in addition to bearing herself bravely in the field--she was a fine horsewoman--assisted a trooper in rescuing a wounded comrade. The secret of her sex was only discovered when, a few days later, she herself was wounded. Again, two lads about fifteen years of age escaped from their parents’ home in Moscow, and, following the fortunes of a regiment belonging to that ancient city, were present at half a dozen battles of Rennenkampf’s campaign in East Prussia, “crawling on their stomachs with reserves of ammunition to the firing line.” Apparently these adventurous boys escaped unscathed. A story with a delightful flavour of the hoax running through it was communicated during October by the Petrograd correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_. It betrays a sense of Slavonic humour which, it is to be hoped, was not entirely lost upon the victims of the ruse: