Meanwhile at the school certain “precautions” were being taken. A pretended “escape” was staged. The school building and its approaches were “faked” to show evidence of combat between the Red Guards and pretended White Guards, and to give verisimilitude to the performance they took a peasant who happened to be locked up in the local gaol, murdered him and placed his dead body in the school to represent the White “bandits.” Mr. Preston, the Consul, telegraphed from Ekaterinburg, October 28, 1918, that on the retaking of Alapaevsk by the White troops on September 28, the corpses of the Romanov Princes, the Grand Duchess and their attendants were found sufficiently preserved to be recognised, and that they were buried in the presence of a great concourse of people. The discovery had been made, thanks to the resource of a local police agent, whose name I do not give for special reasons. _Post mortem_ examination showed that the victims had been bludgeoned to death but must have undergone a prolonged agony before they died. The Grand Duke Sergius was shot through the head, perhaps to put him out of his misery; for the murderers were just butchers who did not seek to torture their victims. There was no refinement of cruelty about them. They were only Russians. It is not true that they threw their victims down the shaft before life was extinct. The autopsy has dispelled that legend. The murderers even exploded hand grenades down the shaft, probably to make assurance doubly sure. The investigation has clearly established the authorship of these murders. The orders came from Moscow through the same channels that had been used in the murder of the Tsar--namely, from the Jew Sverdlov to the Jew Goloshchekin, and, as usual, the Russian workman Belodorodov acted as the dummy president of the Ekaterinburg Soviet board--the channel through which Moscow acted in the Urals. These orders were carried out by the leading komisars of Perm, among them being the Komisar of Justice Soloviev. As in the case of the murder at Ekaterinburg, the Bolshevists at Perm followed up their traitorous crime by announcing that there had been a conspiracy. The world was told that the Princes had been kidnapped by bands of White Guards. (When the Whites had to evacuate Perm, General Diterichs arranged to have the bodies of the martyred Princes removed eastward. They rest in a place of safety--at the Russian Cathedral in Peking).