The _officers_ have almost all gone over to Kerensky's
forces, or simply gone away. We are-ahem-in a most difficult
position, as you see...."
We did not believe that there would be any battle.... The Colonel
courteously sent his orderly to escort us to the railroad station.
He was from the South, born of French immigrant parents in
Bessarabia. "Ah," he kept saying, "it is not the danger or the
hardships I mind, but being so long, three years, away from my
mother...."
Looking out of the window of the train as we sped through the cold
dark toward Petrograd, I caught glimpses of clumps of soldiers
gesticulating in the light of fires, and of clusters of armoured
cars halted together at cross-roads, the chauffeurs hanging out of
the turrets and shouting to each other....
All the troubled night over the bleakflats leaderless bands of
soldiers and Red Guards wandered, clashing and confused, and the
Commissars of the Military Revolutionary Committee hurried from one
group to another, trying to organise a defence....
Back in town excited throngs were moving in tides up and down the
Nevsky. Something was in the air. From the Warsaw Railway station
could be heard far-off cannonade. In the _yunker_ schools there was
feverish activity. Duma members went from barracks to barracks,
arguing and pleading, narrating fearful stories of Bolshevik
violence-massacre of the _yunkers_ in the Winter Palace, rape of the
women soldiers, the shooting of the girl before the Duma, the murder
of Prince Tumanov.
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