The bourgeois feared and hated the sailor most of all the revolutionists; but he was the cleanest, staunchest, finest-looking man I found in revolutionary Russia. There was real stamina here. He knew what he wanted, and was determined to get it. War-weariness played little part in his psychology. He was willing to fight Germans, if he believed Germans to be the enemies of revolution. Six hundred of him formed a volunteer battalion of death and went to the Riga front to fight with the soldiers in the trenches, and the battalion was practically annihilated. If the majority of the Russian sailors could have been convinced that to save Free Russia they must fight Germany, they would have fought. When the actual existence of their vessels was threatened, as it was in the Gulf of Riga in September, they did fight. Patriotism for their Revolution and pride in ownership of their fleet were uppermost. The first question the sailors on the _Respublica_ asked Mr. Williams was: “Are the American ships as clean as this?” CHAPTER X THE RISE OF THE PROLETARIAT Winter and the Bolsheviki came to Russia on the same chill breeze, and each brought a strange new world. Late one afternoon in early November, I walked through the gray streets of Petrograd, and shivered. It was not cold as the thermometer speaks, but cold as a room where death awaits a tardy undertaker--desolate, ugly, forbidding. Autumn was already dead, and the burial long overdue. The last copper-colored leaf had been stripped from the trees and trampled in the dust some days since. The gray trunks of the birches were nude, and conscious of it. The city was wrapped in a futile cloak of fog, too thin to hide its nakedness, and every barren shrub and battered cornice pleaded with delayed winter to cover its shame. I turned my face away from the Summer Garden, and walked quickly past. A million years had passed since that spring day, six months before, when the sparrows occupied themselves with house-building in the green leaves, and Vera and Ivan on the benches below devoted themselves to castle-building. Death was in the air. At that moment I hated the city, which I had come to love as one loves a naughty child for all its faults and virtues, its hopes, passions, potentialities, and failures--for the sum of its stormy, troubled self. I hurried back to my blue-and-white room, drew the curtains, turned on all the lights, and curled up on the couch to bury myself in a book of verse and shut it out. The next afternoon at three o’clock I reached for the desk telephone to call the American consul. There was no answer. I pushed the hook up and down, tempting fate in the shape of an irate operator; but it produced no response.