“War and revolution do not get on well together; yet we younger men realize that revolution had to come. Things could not go on as they were.” CHAPTER IV SPECKS ON THE HORIZON War as Russia has known it, war as they know it on the western front, is a different thing from war as I saw it made in the dark forests in July. Yet war as it came to me in flashes was real and terrible enough to fix itself everlastingly. One afternoon I sat in a bomb-proof observation station and looked through a tiny round hole across a narrow strip of sand-dunes to a tangle of barbed wire. No Man’s Land lay like a bone between two hungry dogs. Less than two hundred feet away, beyond that last strand of vicious metal, were the Germans. I sat there, trying to believe it--trying to realize that here, a few steps distant, so close that I could almost reach out my hands and touch them, were the fighting forces of the man who stands to most of the civilized world as the arch-enemy of liberty and peace. Suddenly my wandering mind stopped short. Two black specks appeared for a moment above that metal line. On the instant two rifles cracked--short, sharp, and final. The specks were gone. I caught my breath. It could not be true! I had imagined it. The officer beside me was speaking. I had not heard. I begged his pardon abstractedly, and he repeated: “A couple of Germans put their heads over the trench--bad thing to do.” When I returned to the Colonel’s headquarters a few minutes later, I found him surrounded by soldiers beaming with pleasure and being beamed upon in return. The Colonel, a stocky little man, brisk and alert, introduced me to his men, and pointed to a section of barbed-wire entanglement that they had just brought in. It was not the crude Russian entanglement fashioned from crossed logs sawed from the forest, but the made-in-Germany kind with slender portable metal standards, easy to fold and easy to carry. Under cover of the darkness of the night before, they had brazenly helped themselves to this sample of German efficiency, and before the enemy awoke to the situation the successful raiders were chuckling happily in safety in their trenches. When darkness came again, the scouting party once more ventured forth; and this time, after a short sharp fight, they came back bringing a German with a shattered hip--left by his comrades to die. The prisoner, a lad of eighteen, was from Dresden, and he told me it was his first night in the front-line trenches. I saw him on a cot in the Siberian Hospital the next day. At the foot of his bed sat a Russian officer, plying him with questions and filling long sheets of foolscap with the answers. Occasionally the boy turned his head to the pillow and sobbed with pain and exhaustion. The nurse looked at him compassionately. “Heaven knows, I don’t like the Germans,” she said, “but I can’t help feeling sorry for that boy. He is suffering terribly.” A woman doctor stepped up to the officer.