"Christonal is ambitious," he added. "What has he done now?" I asked. "He has ordered me to take the field----" That turned on a red light in my brain. Varsieff was not a soldier. I knew instantly that Christonal was not pure--that he wanted personal power more than the good of the Cause. No one knew Varsieff's place better than he did. My friend could only have been ordered to the field for the same reason that David sent the husband of Bathsheba. After the revolutionary signal went through, Varsieff and I found ourselves in the Galbraudin Foothills with thirty thousand men, and every man of them wanted to go home. Somehow the peasants thought that if they changed leaders, they would march home at once. They were willing to fight their way home; they had felt their own power. Varsieff loved them with a white passion. "They won't miss, if _we_ are true! They're clean. God love them--they're clean!" He saw in the peasants the soil for the new earth and the soul of the new heaven. Germans and Austrians were to the south of our nest in the Galbraudin Foothills, while to the east and north were the big lines of Russian troops as yet unawakened to the principles that moved our ranks. Our weakness was that the peasants thought the war was over.... The cold mountains were in the distance--winter still upon them--a late spring in the Foothills.... In this dramatic lull, our men talked of their ploughing, of their women. Some one said, "They're enlisting the women and girls----" It went through the lines like a taint of gas. The men were difficult then even for Varsieff to hold. You must get the picture. We revolutionists were cut off from the world. The Germans and Austrians sent us messages--some friendly, some derisive. They thought us fools or gods, but waited to see what we would do. The old line of Russian troops all about--just as clean peasantry as our forces--but officered by the straight military class, impervious so far as a body to any shaft of the propagandist. Varsieff whispered to me that those regular forces were honeycombed with our comrades, but that they were being put to death under the slightest suspicion--that two or three hundred were martyred each day.