Though none of them saluted the officers, there seemed little to indicate disorganization here; but the commanding Colonel told me that some of his men had deserted, and more were sick. Scurvy was making frightful inroads in the Russian ranks on every front, and to the north, in the vicinity of Riga, the men were in a pathetic condition as a result of poor food. The dirt, the flies, the vermin, the monotonous round, the endless soup and _kasha_, the waiting--these are the things that take the last ounce of a man’s courage and faith. The Russian, like the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the Belgian, had had three years of it. The others knew for what they fought. Each had a cause; each had a country standing behind him and trying to send some fragment of comfort into his meager life. The Russian went to the front and stayed there simply because he was told to. It was tragic that he should be leaving his trenches, but it was understandable. The danger of warfare made little impression on me that afternoon, but I came out knowing that men who have stood three years of trench life, whether they be English, French, Italian, Russian, or any other, can not be dismissed as “cowards” by those who stay at home. An hour later eight of us were gathered at dinner in the officers’ mess. The Colonel had just asked for a second helping. Suddenly, as one man, we dropped our forks and listened. _Boom! Boom! Boom!_ The big guns crashed in our ears. Baba-yaga, the flutes, the trunks, the suit-cases--all of them at once. The sounds of the afternoon were like silence in comparison. Two men rose and hurried away. The Colonel left his plate untouched. One of the officers hurried back and said something in Russian to his commanding officer. He turned to me. “You got out just in time,” he said. “They are bombarding the trenches--down where you were.” And this was war! I had seen the trenches--walked safely through them with men whose chief concern was that I, a woman, should not get my feet wet. Hardly an hour later, the guns of the enemy were crashing them to pieces. Always the German was there, waiting, playing the diabolical game of war just as effectively in the silence as when the guns were pounding death into the trenches. Sometimes it was a newspaper printed in Russian that found its way down from Berlin and into the Russian trenches; sometimes it was a proclamation signed by German soldiers. The newspaper contained accounts of British and French defeats and German victories, with profuse proffers of aid sprinkled through its news item. “You are finished, Russia, but we will try to help you,” one of them read. “It will be good for you and good for us to make a separate peace. We are not your enemies. We do not want to spoil your Revolution. We want to help you save it.”