At ten o’clock Friday night my telephone rang, and a weary voice came over the wire. It was my Lettish friend, Jacob Peters. “I am trying to translate something,” he said. “It is very important, and I do not know enough English. Could you find time to help me?” “When?” I asked him. “Now,” he said. Half an hour later he knocked at my door. His face was gray with fatigue. He had not been in bed for three days, and he looked utterly crushed and discouraged. “It is the decree of peace to the warring nations of the world,” he said. “We are going to send it out on the wireless in every language. They have given me the English translation. We have nobody to help us. It is terrible--there are so few of us who can do this sort of thing.” We sat down at my typewriter, and Peters struggled with the difficult Russian words. Though he could speak Russian, his knowledge of the fine points of the language was none too good. He had to translate it first in his own mind into Lettish, and then into English, and his poor, tired brain nearly went mad with the task. Slowly I took down the words. At the end of an hour the sum of our labors covered half a page of typewriting. We started glibly enough with the title: THE DECREE OF PEACE and continued: The All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workmen’s, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies unanimously passed the following decree of peace, October 26-November 8. The Workmen’s and Peasants’ Government, made by the Revolution of the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of October (old style), and sanctioned by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workmen’s, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, asks the warring peoples and governments to start negotiations immediately for rightful and democratic peace; for rightful and democratic peace for which the majority of the worn-out, suffering, and war-weary workers are longing in all warring countries; peace for which the peasants and workers of Russia have been persistently asking since they overthrew the monarchy of the Tsar, that is, peace without annexations and contributions and self-definition of nations. It was only the first paragraph. Peters looked despairingly at the long document in front of him, and rubbed his tired eyes. “I guess it’s no use,” he said. “We couldn’t finish it if we worked all night. My Russian is not good enough. If we only had some translators! If we only had some stenographers!” Here was this new government of the People’s Commissaries preparing a document that they confidently hoped would revolutionize the status of the struggling world, and there was no one to translate it but a Lett who had not been to bed for three days, and an American war correspondent. When Peters got up to leave, he held out his hand. “This may be the last time I will see you,” he said. “If we fail now, everything is lost. Up in my country the business is all in my name--my throat will be the first one cut.”