From that hour the battery was silent. Through the Russian trenches the word had gone that peace was coming. An armistice was to be arranged in a few days, and Germany and Austria and all of Russia’s Allies were to be asked to take part. It was still November. The armistice negotiations were on. The great parley at Brest-Litovsk had commenced. The Allies had not come, but a special train had pulled out of Petrograd with the strangest collection of envoys that ever went upon a foreign mission. There were twenty-eight members, headed by Adolph Joffe, a Russian Jew, and including a soldier, a sailor, a workman, a peasant, and one woman. There were others in the delegation not so glad to go as these. They were military experts, obeying orders from Smolney expressed in terms that permitted no other alternative. They were officers of the Russian army, thoroughly out of sympathy with the undertaking and the men who were making it--every tenet of their codes, every fiber of their poor, bewildered, uncomprehending beings outraged by this new topsy-turvy world in which they had been plunged. The train had arrived. The efficient Germans had built a special track across that strip of No Man’s Land which divided their territory from that of the Russians. Each member of the party was provided with his own servant, a German soldier who spoke Russian. Shoes and clothes were cleaned, and no detail of preparation had been neglected. In the rooms to which the visitors were taken there was letter paper and _eau de cologne_, for which the Russian has a special fondness. The Russians proposed their terms of armistice. They demanded that no troops be transferred from the eastern front to the fronts of the Allies during the period of the armistice, and that fraternization take place. General Hoffman declared that the armistice conditions were only such as could be proposed to a defeated nation. The delegates asked for instructions from the Commissaries, and were told to stand firm on these conditions. [Illustration: Meeting in the library of the Tauride Palace December 11 where in defiance of the People’s Commissaries the Constituent Assembly was declared open] [Illustration: The Constituent Assembly as it finally convened in the Tauride Palace January 18] [Illustration: The Russian delegation arrives at Brest-Litovsk] Back in Petrograd, Trotzky was talking. “In our negotiations with our present Allies and enemies, we will be constantly on our guard,” he said. “Under no circumstances will we allow them to distort the principles of general peace proclaimed by the Russian Revolution. We will propound to them most categorical questions, and every word pronounced by them or by us will be transmitted by wireless to all the nations of the world, who will be the judges of our negotiations.” Petrograd waited, one ear turned in the direction of Brest-Litovsk, and the other pressed against the world’s key-hole, listening for rumblings of revolutions in other lands.