They did their work in the same way all over the city. But new wine-cellars came to light faster than they could destroy them, and before the dragon was finally slain several poor deluded fellows lost their lives. The night the Winter Palace cellars were broken into, we thought the whole populace was going to be killed; but it later developed that the sounds we had taken for shots were nothing more fatal than popping corks, and the soldiers who lay on the white snow were not dead, but merely dead drunk. This method of provocation was not new in Russia. It had been used in the old days by the Black Hundred, and in the retreat from the southwestern front the Germans resorted to it. They captured a town, stocked the houses with liquor, and retreated again. When they had gone, the Russian soldiers drank the wine, and the horror of outrages committed in the debauch that followed was one of the most tragic things in those unhappy July days. When havoc was complete, the Germans came with cameras and made photographs, which were sent back to Berlin for propaganda purposes. CHAPTER XVIII TSARS AND PEASANTS When the peasants in a remote South Russian village received word from the great city that the “Little Father” had been put off his throne, and that they, the Russian people, were now the rulers of the land, they shook their heads skeptically. The message that brought the news invited them to send delegates to a congress of workmen, soldiers, and peasants in the far-away capital. Some were for doing it; others counseled differently. Finally they hit upon a plan that satisfied every one. They elected the most disreputable of the village characters to go to Petrograd. “But why--” asked the bewildered squire of the big estate--“why did you choose these? Semon is a thief, and--” “Once before they fooled us,” explained the peasant spokesman. “It may be true that the Tsar is no longer the ruler of Russia, but it may be just another trick. In 1905 they told us to send delegates to Petrograd, and what did they do? They put our people in prison. If this is a trick, they will put the thieves in jail and we will be well rid of them. If it is the truth, we can send others to take their places.” Out on the banks of the ice-bound Yenesei, up on the northern edge of Archangel, down on the Bessarabian plain--all over the great white land--little handfuls of peasants, bundled up in their fur-lined _shubas_, were putting their canny caution to work on this thing that was said to have happened in the City of Peter. It was a caution born of years filled with slaughtered hopes and broken promises. All over Russia men and women eager to believe in the dawn of freedom were fortifying themselves, in one way or another, against a recurrence of the disappointments of the past.