“He can stand no more,” she said. I stooped to brush the flies from his feet and tuck the sheets around them. He looked up at me and managed a feeble and a grateful English “Thank you.” The next night a deserter was brought in. He was from Alsace. He told us that the Alsatians in the trenches were alternated with Germans ordered to watch them. In addition, a German officer continually patrolled the rear of the line. It was raining, and the officer was apparently less vigilant. The man watched his chance, and slipped away under cover of the storm. Johanna Ivanovna, Peter, and I went frequently in the evenings to a near-by village where a young Cossack captain, Vasaili Pestrakoff, and a command of a hundred men operated an anti-aircraft battery. The Captain was a living denial of all my preconceived ideas of Cossacks. He was quiet and serious and almost puritanical in his denunciation of the moral code preached and practised by some of his brother officers. One evening we found the regimental band drawn up outside the entrance to the village. It was St. John’s Day, and the occupants of the straw-thatched huts were out in the brightest and best calico clothes their meager wardrobes permitted. All of the soldiers within walking distance of the battery were there. When they saw us coming, the band proudly played an American march--“in honor of the Amerikanka,” explained Johanna Ivanovna. A Russian waltz followed, then a lively peasant tune. Russia has danced little since the war, but the music was a real temptation. A soldier grabbed a barefoot woman and whirled her into the circle. Another followed his example, then another, and another. The women danced with flying feet and tragic faces. Three years of living in constant apprehension, fleeing from home in terror and straggling back again to take up life within sound of enemy guns, had painted fear and resignation into their great, soft eyes. The children huddled together in a group on the edge of the ring, peeping shyly up at me from under their kerchiefs when curiosity got the better of timidity. The telephone had tinkled out the information that three enemy aëroplanes were headed that way, and while the crowd danced the Cossack Captain’s observers searched the heavens with powerful glasses.