do our best. Having made our farewells, our little party
proceeded straight from Tiflis to Moscow.

In that famous city we were put up in the palace within the Kremlin,
and we passed a couple of days mainly devoted to sight-seeing. What
has become of all the marvels gathered together within the grim
fortress walls in the heart of the ancient Russian capital? Of the
jewelled ikons, of the priceless sacerdotal vestments, of the gorgeous
semi-barbaric Byzantine temples, of the galleries of historic
paintings, of the raiment, the boots and the camp-bed of Peter the
Great? One wearied of wandering from basilica to basilica, from
edifice to edifice and from room to room. Only the globe-trotting
American keeping a diary can suffer an intensity of this sort of
thing. But then we were taken out one of the afternoons by car to the
Sparrow Hills ridge above the Moskva, about three miles outside the
city and not far from where one morning in 1812 the Grand Army topped
a rise and of a sudden beheld the goal which it had travelled so far
to seek. From there we viewed the spectacle of a riot of gilded
cupolas gleaming in the sun, a sight incomparably more striking in its
majesty than that of the interiors and memorials of the past we had
been reconnoitring at close quarters.

Another afternoon we drove out to a palace in the outskirts, which
had been converted into a military hospital and was being maintained
by the Emperor out of his private purse. There are some writers of war
experiences on the Western Front who have revelled in pouring ridicule
upon the inspections that are ever proceeding at our hospitals in the
field, although these functions furnish the humorist with just that
opportunity which his soul craves for. My experience, however, is that
in the military world doctors and nurses simply love to have their
tilt-yard visited by people who have no business there. You could not
meet with a Russian hospital-train on its journey, drawn up at some
railway station, but you were gently, if firmly, coerced into
traversing its corridors from end to end. When following the course of
the Turko-Greek conflict in 1897 on the side of the Hellenes, where
almost every known European nation had its Red Cross hospital, I was
dragged round these establishments one and all. To have strangers
tramping about staring at them must be an intolerable nuisance to
wounded men who are badly in need of peace and quiet. One went through
the "starova