VILNA, Russia, Sept. 28.--For a fact as great as Russia one needs a symbol by which to apprehend it For me, till now, the symbol has been a memory of Moscow in the Winter of 1905, the Winter of revolution, when the barricades were up in the streets and the dragoons worked among the crowds like slaughtermen in a shambles. Toward that arched gateway leading from the Red Square into the Kremlin came soldiers on foot, bringing with them prisoners dredged out of the turmoil, two armed men to each battered and terrified captive, whose white and bloodstained face stared startling and ghastly between the gray uniform greatcoats. The first of them came to the deep arch, in whose recess is a lamplit shrine; I stood aside to see them go past. The soldiers were wrenching the man along by the arms, each holding him on one side; I recall yet the prisoner's lean, miserable face, with the suggestion it had of dissolute and desperate youth; and as they came abreast of the faintly gleaming ikon in the gate they let him go for a moment. His dazed eyes wandered up to the shrine; he was already bareheaded, and with a shaking, uncertain hand he crossed himself in the intricate Russian fashion. The soldiers who guarded him, too--they shuffled their rifles to a convenient hold to have a right hand free; they crossed themselves and their lips moved. Then they were through the arch and out upon the snow within the walls, and once again they had hold of their man and were thrusting him along to the prison which for him was the antechamber of death. That was Russia then. Prisoner and captors, soldiers and revolutionaries, blinded and bewildered by the rush and dazzle of affairs, straining asunder yet linked, knitted into a unity of the spirit which they neither understood nor questioned. But a week ago, on those still, dreary lands which border the Prussian frontier, there was evidence of a Russia that has been born or made since those hectic days in Moscow. The Germans who had forced Gen. Rennenkampf to withdraw to the border were making an attempt to envelop his left wing. Their columns, issuing from the maze of lakes and hills in Masurenland, came across the border on both banks of the little River Amulew, and fell upon him. There is a road in those parts that drifts south along the frontier, an unmade, unholy Russian road, ribbed with outcrops of stone, a purgatory to travel upon till the snow clothes it and one can go by sledge. Away to the southwest, beyond the patches of firwood and the gray, steeply [Transcriber: original 'steply'] rolling land, there toned the far diapason of artillery; strings of army transport, Red Cross vehicles, and miscellaneous men straggled upon the road.