lways,
everywhere, covering every inch of ground flying, as it seemed, from
the air, on to roofs, in and out of windows, from house to house, from
corner to corner, was the humorous, pathetic, expectant,
matter-of-fact, dreaming, stolid Russian soldier. He was to come to
me, later on, in a very different fashion, but on this dreadful day in
O---- he was simply part of the intolerable, depressing background.

If this day were dreadful to me what must it have been to Trenchard!
We were none of us aware at this time of what had happened to him two
days before, nor did we know of his adventure of yesterday. O----
seemed to him, he has told me, like hell.

We spent the day gathered together in a large white house that had
formerly been the town-hall of O----. It had, I remember, high empty
rooms all gilt and looking-glasses; the windows were broken and the
dust came, in circles and twisting spirals, blowing over the gilt
chairs and wooden floors.

We made tea and sat miserably together. Semyonov was in some other
part of the town. We were to wait here until Molozov arrived from
B----.

There can be few things so bad as the sense of insecurity that we had
that afternoon. The very ground seemed to have been cut away from
under our feet. We had gathered enough from the officers of our
Division to know that something very disastrous "somewhere" had
occurred. It was the very vagueness of the thing that terrified us.
What could have happened? Only something very monstrous could have
compelled so general a retirement. We might all of us be prisoners
before the evening. That seemed to us, and indeed was afterwards
proved in reality, to have been no slender possibility. There was no
spot on earth that belonged to us. So firm and solid we had been at
M----. Even we had hung pictures on the walls and planted flowers
outside the dining-room. Now all that remained for us was this
horrible place with its endless looking-glasses, its bare gleaming
floors and the intolerable noise through its open windows of carts,
soldiers, horses, the smell of dung and tobacco, and the hot air, like
gas, that flung the dust into our faces.

Beyond the vague terrors of our uncertainty was the figure, seen quite
clearly by all of us without any sentiment, of Russia. Certainly
Trenchard and I could feel with less poignancy the appeal of her
presence, and yet I swear that to us also on that day it was she of
whom we were thinking. We had been, until th