"It was a ghastly moonlight night of the Fall. A bleak wind whistled and howled around the ruins of the village, in which there had been so much human joy before and so much misery after. I was riding with a company of twenty-five men to trace the retreating enemy. Though the amphitheatric hills that rose before us seemed dead and bare, yet mysterious flashes of light appeared here and there, like magic signals. They warned us of the hidden batteries of the enemy. As we galloped on, I could see the road strewn with broken boxes, knapsacks, household implements, dead horses and men which the enemy had left behind in his hurried retreat. "'Excellency,' whispered my orderly, I see there beyond the hill a moving dot. It's probably the head of a "dady"' (as we called the Germans). As we were in the shadow of the ruins, we could discern distinctly the bare field in the moonlight. Before us was the first line of the trenches of the enemy. I pulled my rifle and aimed. A shot. The dot became a black figure that rose and staggered and fell. It was a distance of 150 steps, and I could see how a gray ribbon of trenches stretched in both directions before us--a ribbon that always fascinates and yet frightens because it is the home of death. More black dots were visible, moving in the direction where the one before had fallen. "Little by little I could see dots in every direction beyond the ribbon. A few figures climbed out and started running toward us. 'One, two, three!' I whispered and then followed a salvo from my men. The figures either fell or ran back behind the ribbon. From behind a hill flashed a light and then the battery of the enemy opened fire at the village where we were. It was the machine guns. 'Nu-ka, Misha, tickle the dadies, quick!' was the humorous remark of one of my soldiers to me. We must have killed and wounded a hundred or more. Then we turned around and rode away, without having lost a single man and without having any men wounded." Mme. Koudasheva is a student of soldier psychology on the battlefield, as is shown in another letter. "When you feel the invisible fingers of fate so close to your life, as on the battlefield, the problems that interest you before and the feelings that you experience in a peaceful feminine activity die out and a new view opens. It is not the feeling of sport, it is not the feeling of being killed, that takes hold of the mind of the battlefield, but it is a queer, dramatic hypnose, like an actor feels before opening a play. "It all seems a huge cosmic play--a stern tragic panorama of life--but still a play. The whole human organism seems to work against all laws of nature, for, though you stay in the cold and rain day and night, yet you catch no cold, no ailments that are usual in everyday life."