Night after night, in the white hall at Smolney, at the Peasants’ headquarters, in the Narodny Dom and the Cirque Modern, the men in the mud-colored uniforms talked about it. “We soldiers, we trench inhabitants, we must have something to say,” I heard one of them declare; and another: “We can not conduct peace negotiations by going up to the German generals with a copy of Karl Marx in our hands.” And a third: “We must be able to speak loudly in revolutionary language, and back our language up by cannon if necessary, but for revolutionary purposes--not for the commercial interests of the Allies.” “Slava, Slava, Slava” (Words, words, words), said another. The discussion centered largely on the question of the removal of troops. “Prohibition of removal of troops to the front should cover reserves in the rear as well, and also cannon,” said a delegate named Lapinsky. “It is necessary for us to guard against all these things in order that the Allied troops and masses should know that the Russian Revolution has no intention of permitting them to be crushed by the Germans. We are not concerned with ourselves only. We must remember that the Germans have not accepted our peace terms. We must deal with the facts as they are. They have accepted our formulæ applying the principles to the Russian camp,--not to the German camp,--to the Poles and others whom they have subjugated. We must see that imperialism in Austria and Germany does not triumph.” The guns on the Russian front were still. The last shot to echo across to us in Petrograd was that with which the Russian General Skaloon at Brest-Litovsk dramatically ended his life in a room adjoining that in which the armistice conference was being held. General Hoffman had accepted the terms “such as could be proposed only to a defeated nation.” The fact that he was humoring the Russians, that he might trick them the more thoroughly in the end, was not evident. The Bolsheviki, disappointed that the Allies had refused to consider coming into their conference, found crumbs of comfort in the concessions of Germany. “It must mean,” they argued, “that the Kaiser fears the German masses. They will make him accept our honest, democratic peace.” December 15 saw the armistice signed, and by noon of the 17th it had gone into effect. The night before, at a rump convention of the Peasants’ Deputies, I heard Leon Trotzky make his report of the proceedings at Brest. He talked for three hours, answering the questions of his soldier peasant audience. The meeting began in a fashion typical of those days in Russia, where night after night in every available hall in Petrograd men were shaking their fists in one another’s faces.