For this time no headway was to be made against the devils opposite. Not even once as far as their barbed wire defences! So well was their artillery posted. To such a raking fire was every moving object exposed which came in sight within an area several hundred meters wide! A tiresome game that--an accursedly tiresome game--and if Gabriel Gabrilovitch himself should be one of the victims! He sprang up and began to pace with heavy steps the uneven clay floor. He knew of better things than that! Those Petrogradians--look, look! The slender, willowy, singing girl there in the _Nida_, with that smile which was in itself a seduction! She evoked another image in his excited fancy. It was his last evening of pleasure in golden Petrograd. In a variety cabaret, too. The stage is already empty, the programme finished. But in a room off the stage reserved for the performers and their guests he sees just such a piquant little creature take form in the thin smoke clouds of his cigarette. Exactly the same smile--acquired in Paris, and then carried triumphantly from stage to stage, from banquet to banquet. The imitation diamonds glitter in the deep corsage of her dress. The coquettish curls hang like golden orchids over her ears. The atrophied stare of the wide pupils has the fascination of a serpent's eye. Before her stands a tall, narrow glass vase, out of which nod the blood-red, long-stemmed pinks which he had brought her. He, Gabriel Gabrilovitch! It is a picture imprinted so vividly on his senses by the warm rush of recollection that he thinks he really sees it--not least of all the purplish red of the vase of flowers. They take it easy, those Nevsky Prospekt loungers--they take it easy! He reaches for the glass--already cold, curse it! Not very long now and it will be day again and a new assault, as vain as the others, will bring them face to face with death. A cold draft strikes his neck. He turns around, half angry, to see who has entered. II--THE COSSACK LIEUTENANT'S HATRED "Ah, so!" It is the sotnik (lieutenant) of a Cossack detachment which has received the order to drive the last Jews out of the surrounding villages, so that the army can have a free field. The snow, which has frozen finger thick on his green overcoat, begins to melt in the close, hot air of the room. The small, hard Asiatic eyes shine. The red, frosted fists are still clenched, as if they had just beaten somebody. "One can't be really angry with these fellows," says the colonel to himself, with a feeling of soldierly satisfaction. "They are such splendid beasts." But he asks aloud: "Finished?" The Cossack's laugh is quick and harsh. "All herded together, Colonel. Nothing is lacking but the Red Sea." "How many?" "Several hundred." "And where are you going to drive them?" The young lieutenant raises his shoulders slowly, so that the snow on them touches and cools his red cheeks. "I'll have to get an order from you as to that!"