The strangeness and horror of it all dawned upon me--the sense of the whole world against us, even America from whom we had drawn the spirit of our courage--a kind of holding of our army for slaughter. Listen, I have seen tens of thousands of troops go down to the pits of white and red, seen their opened veins colour the snows, seen the spots of red on the brown earth turn black. I have seen the boys lean over the trenches and the pools from each throat widen and deepen from one man to another. I have seen a man grab his mate as he fell and say some absurd whimsical thing that the soldier next didn't understand until _his_ moment of death--a little sentence that folded them, not in extinction, but in a new life. All the horrors of death--quantity and quality--yellow and red and white--pure white passings that made a man think of the lilies--all manner of death I had seen, and still it had all been impersonal compared to now. This was my own heart business. I shared leadership with Varsieff. These lives were in my hands. I wanted to go down among the boys--one by one and say that I was pure, that I loved them--that if they died they were at least loved and not wasted. I always wondered what those young peasant souls thought about death. Once in a lot of pain when I was just a boy, I wanted badly to die and was deterred from taking my life, because of a counter-desire to get home and see my mother. I think it must be like that with the peasants. Varsieff saw them in a strange mystic light. No man loved them as he did. They looked like sons of God to him. That's what he saw when they went down to death. "There are no dreams too fine for them to answer," he whispered. "They are pure--they come from the North like all invaders--glacially pure! We'll warm their hearts--lead them home to God--teach them how to live!" He was silent suddenly. I asked him to go on and then saw the queerest look instead. Varsieff was torn by the thought, that now as a leader of revolutionists he must teach his peasants how to _die_ as well.... A civilian, I repeat, does not realise this quite the same. In the Capitol, we had worked for a Cause that meant the death of men, but now we were the officers called upon to charge live troops to the fork and the grill. I knew Varsieff to be more imaginative and tender than I, yet I would not have mentioned my qualms, had I known how terribly he was suffering. He caught my hands, whispering: "You have it, too?" It was the single hour of weakness that Varsieff had ever revealed to me. I studied his face without speaking. "I brought them to this," he muttered. "I have always thought of the spirit of things. I was always pure enough, following that dream.... But, Lange, we're a little mad--we who dream.... I had to come here. I had to see this fighting end. Perhaps Christonal knew what he was doing." I put my arm around his shoulder. We Russians are allowed that.