Reluctantly we retraced our way. In front of the Kazan Cathedral the guards again ordered us to halt. In the darkness across the wide street, we saw a crowd of black figures lined up in marching order against the curb. We had come suddenly upon that little band of men and women who left Smolney to make a demonstration of passive resistance and die with their comrades at the Winter Palace. They had been joined by the Mayor of Petrograd, members of the City Duma, and the Jewish Bund. There were four or five hundred of them in all, and here, within a few blocks of their destination, they had been stopped. In that crowd were many of the men and women who had been the firebrands of Russia, the Socialist revolutionists, the terrorists, who were quietly walking forth to oppose themselves unarmed to the force of these new revolutionists who, to their way of thinking, were murdering the cause of Russian freedom for which most of them had suffered years of imprisonment and the unspeakable hardships of exile in Siberia. Here and there in the crowd was a young officer or a cluster of students; but more of them were veterans who had grown gray in the service of revolution, and their faces were grim and set. Standing a few feet away was a squad of soldiers. The commissaire in command of them raised his hand. “We have orders from the Military Revolutionary Committee to let you go no farther,” he said. A murmur ran through the crowd. The gray-haired veterans of the old days began to argue, and students and officers joined their entreaties. The soldiers remained obdurate. “What will you do if we go anyway?” asked Mayor Schreider of Petrograd. “Will you shoot us?” “No,” replied the commissaire. “We have orders not to shoot you. But we have orders not to let you pass.” He gave a quick command to his men, who fell back a distance of fifty feet and lined up across the Nevsky. They formed a solid human wall, stretching across the wide street from curb to curb. A block below there was another and yet more formidable wall composed of Red Guardsmen. The demonstrators looked at those husky young soldiers, and turned away in dismay. “If we go forward,” said a gray-haired terrorist, once expert in the use of dynamite, “some one will be killed, and they will blame it on the switchman. They will say it was a case of mistaken orders, and no good will come to any one. We will go back, and try to persuade them to stop the slaughter.” [Illustration: The proclamation of the Military Revolutionary Committee announcing the fall of the Kerensky government, distributed in Petrograd while the guns of the cruiser Aurora were hammering the Winter Palace] [Illustration: Women soldiers in their last stand before the Winter Palace] [Illustration: The pass which permitted the author safe conduct through the Bolshevist lines]