On the afternoon of the second day Prince Oblensky arranged for us to meet the Grand Duke Michael who is commanding a division of Caucasian cavalry, one of whose detachments we visited in the trenches a few nights ago. I should say he is not much over forty years of age, and he is as unaffected and democratic a person as one can well imagine. I talked with him for nearly an hour on the situation, not only on his immediate front but in the theatre of the war as a whole. Like everyone in Russian uniform whom I have met, he was neither depressed nor discouraged, but evinced the same stubborn optimism that one finds everywhere in the Russian army. As one saw him in his simple uniform with nothing to indicate his rank but shoulder straps of the same material as his uniform, and barring the Cross of St. George (won by his personal valour on the field of battle) without a decoration, it was strange to think that this man living so simply in a dirty village in this far fringe of the Russian Front, might have been the Czar of all the Russias, living in the Winter Palace in Petrograd, but for a few years in time of birth. The Western World likes to think of Russia as an autocracy, with its nobility living a life apart surrounded by form and convention, but now, at any rate, I think there is no country in the world where the aristocracy are more democratic than in Russia. It is true that the Czar himself is inaccessible, but he is about the only man in Russia who is; and even he, when one does meet him, is as simple, unaffected and natural as any ordinary gentleman in England or in America. From the Grand Duke’s head-quarters I motored out to the Staff of a Cavalry Brigade, and had tea with the General who, after entertaining us with a dance performed by a group of his tamed “wild men,” went himself with us to his front line trench. His head-quarters were near the front, so near in fact that while we were waiting for the dancers to appear, a big shell fell in a field just across the way, with a report that sent the echoes rolling away over hill and valley. It is considered bad form to notice these interruptions however, and no one winked an eye or took any notice of the incident. The General’s trenches were not unlike those I had already before visited, except that one could get into them in the daytime without risk of being shot at if one came up through the woods, which ran rather densely to the very crest of the bluff.