The boy stayed longer than the others. Peter offered him a cigarette, and soon he was relating a round, unvarnished tale. Smirnoff Brusiloff was his name, and his age eighteen. He was in school at Petrograd when the war broke out, and he made up his mind to enlist. His father, a Russian general, promptly ordered him to stick to his books. He as promptly rejected parental commands and ran away to join the army. From his pocket he drew a handful of medals. They were the four Orders of St. George. Each of them marked some daredevil adventure and hairbreadth escape. The last, the Gold Cross, highest award in the gift of the Tsar, was given for blowing up a railroad bridge used by the Germans for transport of provisions and war supplies. To him, war was a great game. The abstract ideas of revolution meant nothing. The theories that were keeping his peasant brothers in the trenches awake at night passed him by entirely. “There is no sport left in fighting with the Russian army,” he said. “I am going to cut down south and try to break into the English lines.” He left--and toward morning there sat in his place a simple fellow with a strange look in his vacant eyes. He unwrapped a big hunk of black bread, and with a pocket-knife pared off scraps and ate them. When he had finished his breakfast, he nodded to sleep. The soldier beside him drew the wabbling head down to his shoulder, as he might have done to a tired child. “The war,” he said, laying a gentle hand on the boy’s hair--“he is not right here.” When I opened the door of the compartment in the morning, the aisle was filled with soldiers asleep on the floor. I picked my way over one human bundle after another to the platform, to negotiate the purchase of wild strawberries, bottles of fresh milk, and prim little round bouquets of wild flowers which the barefoot peasant children were offering for sale. Late that afternoon we moved into the compartment of a kindly colonel, with whom Peter had made friends. We were all bound for the same section of the front, and the only other occupant of the compartment was Corporal Kuzma, of the proud age of fourteen. Already he had seen two and a half years of service, and had been twice wounded. He had a wonderful red pencil, which he fingered affectionately as he took us into his confidence. This pencil had been given him by a nurse in the hospital where he had been convalescing from his last injury. The corporal’s father, according to his story, was a captain of staff, and his mother a first-aid nurse. Both had been killed at the beginning of the war. An older brother, an officer in the army, had been killed in action; and a sister, seventeen years old, who was a nurse, was drowned while swimming the Niemen River to get away from the Germans. The corporal, lone survivor of his family, naturally joined the army. Two promotions were the reward for valor under fire. His uniform confirmed his story.