“No,” he said; “they won’t arrest me. I was out with a rifle over my shoulder. I was one of them. I was a Red Guard!” CHAPTER XIII THE GRAVE OF HOPE Mystery shrouded the Petrograd front. In the days that followed the battles of Gatchina and Tsarskoe Selo only a few meager facts came out of the background of wildly conflicting rumors. We knew that Kerensky, with that dazzling gift of his for momentarily overpowering men, had driven in an automobile into the midst of a detachment of rebel soldiers, and disarmed them. We knew that the ragtag army of the Red Guard, fired by faith in their cause, had taught the Cossacks that it takes more than a military reputation to make a fighting man. We knew that the sailor Dydenko had gone alone across No Man’s Land to plead the cause of the proletarian revolt, and had come back with the surrender of the opposing forces. We knew that it was all over. At heart the Cossacks were no more eager for killing their brothers than the rest of the Russians. They were the policemen of the Tsar because they had known no other calling, seen no other vision. The Revolution had broken their traditions, given them a new faith. They were no longer a unit ready to do the bidding of a master. Many of the younger Cossacks had already embraced the Bolshevist faith, and in the months to follow more and more of them were to desert the ways of their fathers. There is something poignantly tragic in the picture of Kerensky out there alone beyond the edge of the city, where for an hour he was an uncrowned king. Like most of the Russian leaders of the revolutionary year, he came out of nowhere, flashed for a moment on the world’s screen, and disappeared into nowhere again. If some day he should emerge from that land of silence into which so many Russians are exiled by the changing fortunes of revolution, we may learn what really happened to him at Gatchina. The sailor Dybenko, in his report to the Soviet, declared that Kerensky, when he learned the soldiers had deserted him, said to General Krasnoff: “Your Cossacks have betrayed me. I shall drive a bullet into my brain.” According to Dybenko’s story, General Krasnoff suggested that the only courageous thing for the Minister-President of Russia to do was to go to Petrograd, and offered to give him an escort of eight men. To this Kerensky consented, but, while the escort was being formed, he asked to be allowed to clean himself up, and succeeded in changing to the uniform of a sailor and escaping in an _izvostchik_. Leon Trotzky, in a telegram from the village of Pulkovo to his followers in Petrograd, said: