“I never wanted anything so much in my life as I want to help Russia,” he said. “If I were thirty years old and had no family, nothing on earth would take me away from here.” I did not know until I had returned to America just how deeply the Russian Revolution had gone with him. He went to his firm and told them he was no longer of any use to them. “I’m not interested in the same things,” he said. Soon afterward he went to France to do a piece of humanitarian work for the government. Everywhere, day and night, we fought the endless battle of revolution. “You do not know the Russians,” said the old residents, shaking their heads at those of us who professed to find something more vital than German money at work among the masses. “If you had lived here as long as we have--” “That’s just it,” we replied; “you have lived here too long. Your roots are buried too deep in Russia’s past. You see the Russians as slaves. You can not see them as human beings.” It raged across tea-tables in the charming apartment of the naval attaché, where we gathered occasionally to eat the tiny hot white rolls which, wolf or no wolf, found their way to Mrs. Crosley’s tea-tray every Thursday afternoon. It stormed around General Judson’s dinner-table. We carried it into the Turkish Room, where we curled up on the great wide Russian divan for coffee, and upstairs to the shiny ball-room, where we one-stepped and waltzed to an American phonograph. As prophets the old residents were hopeless failures. They were always backing a “man on horseback,” or setting a date for the restoration of the monarchy, then moving it up a week or two as time found their predictions unfulfilled. If Petrograd offered no sensation for a day, there was always Captain Harry Brown’s communiqué to give us a real thrill. Captain Brown was an oldtime New York newspaper man attached to the Red Cross Mission, and he wrote for an exclusive circulation a daily summary of all the rumors that came in from all parts of Russia. Neither truth nor fiction could ever rival those documents for interest. They were an amazing combination of both. There was much good talk in my little blue room. All kinds of people found their way there. Every shade of political opinion was expressed. Most often it was of Russia we talked, but sometimes we wandered far, far away. The fight we fought so good-naturedly was the same that is being fought on the battlefield of the world--the struggle of the old and the new. One night the Baltic states was the topic, and there was a Czech whose burning spirit would have withered the Kaiser if we could only have produced him at that moment. “No matter who makes peace, the Czecho-Slavs will go on fighting until they give us back our country,” he said. “We are attacking from four directions, and we are going straight to Berlin. We’re going to get the Kaiser; and when we get him, we’ll feed him on pigs’ liver--raw--half a pound a day.”