In his mind, still unassimilated, were countless impressions, gruesome and inspiring, petty and magnificent, appalling and ennobling; impressions of broken men and broken villages, of pock-marked country and unbruised valour. As the battered military car, mud-brown over its gray, wallowed back from the front lines, he seemed to be leaving the war behind him, though he knew that he was approaching the nerve centre from which emanated the impulses which forged and wrought the purposes of the Inferno. Finally in a village less hideously war-spoiled than its fellows, and in a small but tidy room of what had been the inn, he awaited the pleasure of the Commander. Of his conductor along the front he had put questions as to General Makailoff. Yes, the officer, of course, knew of the General, but where he was now he could not say. The General was a wheel in the mechanism of Brussilov's staff--and that directing force was remote from the lives of lower grade officers. It belonged to the part of the temple which lay behind the veil. Even in attempted description of the man, the intelligence officer grew vague, and Boone did not press him for a greater explicitness. That military reticence that no civilian could justly appraise might be parent to the officer's indefinite responses, and, if so, its covertness must be respected. So in the room of the Russian inn the man from the Cumberlands waited, and at length, when he opened his door in response to a light rap, he saw an officer in a major's uniform, who saluted smartly and announced in excellent English, "General Brussilov will receive you now, sir." Again a battered military car lurched through village streets darkening to twilight, and brought up before a plain two-storied house, whose walls, though shell marked, stood upright. Into a whitewashed room, littered with map-strewn tables, and empty until they entered it, Boone was ushered and left alone. A lamp upon a crude table stood as yet unkindled, and only candles in two tall sticks on a wall-shelf gave a yellow effect against which the shadows stirred cloudily. Even the whitewashed walls were the gray yellow of putty in that feeble light, and Boone turned his eyes toward the brighter spot of the door, giving upon another room, where operators sat at switchboards and where were mingled the buzz of voices, the tramp of booted feet, the clink of spurs and accoutrements, into a tempered babel as restlessly constant as surf on rocks. That door was a kaleidoscopic patch of changing colour, and Boone watched it with a sense of confused unreality until a second opened, letting in a draught under which the candles wavered and grew more dim, and a spare figure entered through it, clad in a field uniform which had seen heavy wear, and holding between the tapering fingers of the left hand a freshly lighted cigarette.