It was not only as a submarine commander of the first quality, however, that Cromie was unobtrusively making his mark, but as an organizer and administrator in charge of his flotilla through a period of ever-increasing difficulty. Busy, as he was, arranging for repairs and supplies, and safeguarding the moral of his men in strange and remote surroundings, he found or made time to learn the Russian language, with results quite impossible to over-estimate. By the end of 1916, he had acquired--let us rather say there had come to him--a reputation extending far beyond the little technical world of the British submarine contingent. For patent efficiency, complete {165} honesty, and entire fearlessness, there are no international boundaries; and in Cromie there were added to these a very remarkable patience and deep human sympathies. It was these qualities, recognized by all parties, that, throughout the abrupt and dark changes of the Russian Revolution, invested Cromie with an unique influence, responsible for the saving of scores of lives. Stationed at Reval, it was largely due to Cromie that, when the naval mutiny broke out in the Russian Fleet, many officers were saved from the fate that befell their less fortunate colleagues at Helsingfors and Cronstadt. With his headquarters on the Russian cruiser _Dwina_, Cromie lived through the spectacle of beholding his own Russian servant appointed to the command of the vessel; yet, though he had vigorously deplored the formation of the committees that took over the charge of the Fleet and appealed to them in vain to uphold the discipline vital to the preservation of the Russian navy, their personal respect for him enabled him to hold his flotilla together and even to carry on offensive warfare. It was not for very long, however, that this continued possible. The débâcle that had set in could not be stayed; and, after the treaty between Germany and the Bolshevik Government had been signed at Brest-Litovsk, hope flickered out. There was then nothing left but to destroy the British submarines, and for their gallant crews to return home; but Captain Cromie, as he had then become, was appointed naval attaché at Petrograd. {166} Here he carried into a new and perilous sphere the same qualities that had already distinguished him, and his influence with all sections was of a kind possessed by no other British representative. Even when the British Embassy was withdrawn, he remained at his post in spite of the fast-accumulating threats of hunger, pestilence, fanaticism, and German intrigue. He was at last to die, at Bolshevik hands, in a Petrograd brawl in September, 1918; but yet without leaving, in spite of the madness that slew him, a real enemy in Russia.