By Friday night the Committee of Salvation had succeeded in spreading the strikes in the various ministries until the Bolsheviki were almost completely isolated from the rest of the Russian _intelligentzia_. They made the city ring with stories of outrages--stories that later proved to be a fine fabric of falsification, worthy of Russian imagination. The leaders of the Council of the Republic, the Peasants’ Council, and even the Centroflot, Executive Committee of the Russian fleet, called upon the people to refuse to recognize the Soviet government, and announced that before long they would be able to establish a stable government themselves. It was a call the people did not heed. The masses had swung away from their leaders. They had their own very definite ideas as to what they wanted. The sailors were protesting violently that the Centrabalt did not represent the rank and file of the navy, and it was finally dissolved by order of the Military Revolutionary Committee. Soldiers from the ranks were charging their committees with counter-revolution, and shouting with fire in their eyes that their executives were putting off the army elections week after week because they knew they no longer had the faith of the men in the trenches and could not be reëlected. The same split had come between the peasants and their executives, and every rumor from the remote corners of Russia indicated that little villages, towns, and cities were following the lead of Petrograd, and rising in massed revolt. The Bolsheviki had achieved a degree of success greater than they suspected. The leaders, exhausted by lack of sleep, depressed by the rejection of the _Intelligentzia_, and conscious of their inadequacy for the mere physical task of bringing bread to keep Petrograd alive, failed utterly to realize their strength. A heavy pall of discouragement settled on Smolney. Word had come that the Cossacks were marching on the city, and that the citadel of the workers would be attacked the following morning. Petrograd poured out to fight. The factory gates opened wide, and that amazing army of the Red Guard, ununiformed, untrained, and certainly unequipped for battle with the traditional backbone of the Russian military, marched away to defend the “revolutionary capital” and the victory of the proletariat. Women walked by the side of men, and small boys tagged along on the fringes of the procession. Some of the factory girls wore red crosses upon the sleeves of their thin jackets, and packed a meager kit-bag of bandages and first-aid accessories. More of them carried shovels with which to dig trenches. The fire of the Crusaders was in their eyes, and the faith of the Christian martyrs in their souls, as they marched down the Nevsky, singing as they went, oblivious to the bitter cold that blew in from the Baltic waters, and unafraid for the first time of that foe whose very name had been a terror to countless generations of beaten, broken human beings.