Another night we listened to a handsome young Serb who was trying to help the Russian radicals make Socialists of the Austrian prisoners and organize them to resist German attacks on Russia. There had been a meeting of the Austrian prisoners that day in the Cirque Modern, and two thousand of them had pledged themselves to defend the Russian Revolution against a German attack, and to work to get revolutionary propaganda to the German and Austrian trenches. Sometimes it was Raymond Robins who held our attention, and no one saw better than Raymond Robins the significance of Russia’s place in the future settlement of the international problem. He knew that, from a practical as well as an ethical viewpoint, the Allies must not abandon Russia to the Germans. Most often the talk turned to the necessity for making the people at home understand the complex and difficult situation as it really is. Sometimes it was Arthur Ransom, the English writer, who said things that any of us would like to have said--fine, true, penetrating things, like a flashlight in dark places. He had lived a long time in Russia, and had wandered over the country in a cart, learning the stories of the land from Cossacks with whom he camped on the roadside, and from peasants who lit their samovars for him. Frequently there came a knock that brought us promptly back to the moment. Late one night John Reed came in to announce that they were shooting in the Winter Palace Square. The wine-cellars of the Tsar had been broken open, and a new danger was facing the Soviet government. Another menace had come to Petrograd, for the moment more threatening even than the gray wolf. Unknown to all of us, a sleeping serpent had been lying beneath the city’s surface, waiting for the hour to stir and strike. The city was mined with wine-cellars, and the forces working to prevent any government of the people from succeeding in the restoration of order took advantage of them. The Revolutionary Committee discovered eight hundred such places. In one wine vault alone there were twelve hundred thousand bottles. In the Tsar’s cellar the champagne had lain undisturbed for three hundred years. The wine in the cellars at the Winter Palace was valued at thirty million rubles. The government of People’s Commissaries, desperately in need of foreign credits, thought first of trying to sell it to England and America. Some of the members opposed this. Just after the trouble began, I went to the office of Jacob Peters, and found him and the Military Revolutionary Committee frantically trying to devise some way to meet the crisis. They realized that all that was needed to bring a real reign of terror to the city was to madden the soldiers with drink. While I talked to Peters, the telephone bell on his desk kept interrupting. Each time he took down the receiver, it was to discover that trouble had broken out in some new and unexpected part of the city. He was pale and worried.