Their uniform of peaked cap, trousers tucked into knee-boots, and khaki blouse is workmanlike, and the serious middle-aged officers trudging beside them are hardly distinguishable from the men. They have not yet learned the use of the short, broad-bladed bayonets; theirs are of the old three-cornered section type with which the Bulgarians drove the Turks to Chataldja; but there is something else that they have learned. Since the first days of the mobilization that brought them from their homes there is not a man among them that has tasted strong drink. In 1904 the men came drunk from their homes to the centres; one saw them about the streets and on the railways and in the gutters. But these men have been sober from the start, and will perforce be sober to the end. Of all that elaborate and copious machinery of war which Russia has built up since her failure in Manchuria there is nothing so impressive as this. Her thousand and odd aeroplanes, her murderously expert artillery, her neat and successful field wireless telegraph, even her strategy, count as secondary to it. The chief of her weaknesses in the past has been the slowness of her mobilization; Germany, with her plans laid and tested for a mobilization in four days, could count on time enough to strike before Russia could move. She used her advantage to effect when Austria planted the seed of this present war by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; she was able to present Russia in all her unpreparedness with the alternatives of war in twenty-four hours or accepting the situation. But this time it has been different. At Petrograd one sees how different. Hither from the northern and eastern Governments come the men who are to swell Rennenkampf's force. Their cadres, the skeletons of the battalions of which they are the flesh, are waiting for them--officers, organization, equipment, all is ready. The endless trains decant them; they swing in leisurely columns through the streets to their depots, motley as a circus--foresters, moujiks in fetid sheepskins, cattlemen, and rivermen, Siberians, tow-haired Finns, the wide gamut of the races of Russia, all big or biggish, with those impassive, blunt-featured faces that mask the Russian soul, and all sober. No need now to make men of them before making soldiers; no inferno at the way side-stations and troop trains turning up days late. It is as if, at the cost of those annual 780,000,000 rubles, Russia had bought the clue to victory.