The result of these three days was a strange new intimacy between the four of us. I have never in all my life seen anything more charming than the behaviour of Nikitin and Andrey Vassilievitch to Trenchard. There is something about Russian kindness that is both simpler and more tactful than any other kindness in the world. Tact is too often another name for insincerity, but Russian kindheartedness is the most honest impulse in the Russian soul, the quality that comes first, before anger, before injustice, before prejudice, before slander, before disloyalty, and overrides them all. They were, of course, conscious that Trenchard's case was worse than their own. Marie Ivanovna's death had shocked them, but she had been outside their lives and already she was fading from them. Trenchard was another matter. Nikitin seemed to me for the first time in my knowledge of him to come down from his idealistic dreaming. He cared for Trenchard like a child, but never obtrusively. Trenchard seemed to appreciate it, but there was something about him that I did not like. His nerves were tensely strained, he did his work with his eyes fixed upon some impossible distance, he often did not hear us when we spoke to him. And so the three of us formed a kind of hedge about him to protect him, a hedge of which he was perfectly unconscious. He was very silent and I would have given a great deal to hear again one of those Glebeshire stories that I had once found so tiresome. That some plan or purpose was in his head one could not doubt. We had, all of us, much in common in our characters. We liked the sentimental easy coloured view of life. We suddenly felt a strange freedom here in this place. For myself, on the third day, I found that Marie Ivanovna was most strangely present with me, and on the afternoon of that day, our wounded quiet on their beds, our wagons sent into the tent with no prospect of their return for several hours, we sat together, Nikitin, Andrey Vassilievitch and I, looking out through a break in the garden towards the Forest, and talked about her. The weather was now very heavy--certainly a thunderstorm was coming. I was also weighted down by an intense desire for sleep, at the same time knowing that if I were to fling myself on my bed sleep would not come to me. This is an experience that is not unusual at the Front, and officers have told me that in the middle of a battle when there comes a sudden lull, their longing for sleep has been so overpowering that no imminent danger could lift it from their eyes.