y called for them and the
military escort arrived to assist all the passengers to take, and keep,
their seats. Into the lorry were packed the Minister Plenipotentiary and
Envoy Extraordinary, the Charge d'Affaires, the First Secretary, the
Second Secretary, the Third Secretary, the Legal and Spiritual Advisers
and the Lady Typist. Their features were not easy to distinguish; when
the Bolshevists assume dominion over us they will not nationalize our
soap. One or two fell out, but were carefully replaced by willing hands
and bayonets; and so home.

Now that is a sight you don't often see: a Diplomatique Corps being
returned to store in a motor lorry. The disappointing thing about them
was that, for all their fiery propaganda and for all their drastic
resolutions, never a one of them produced so much as a squib-cracker.
The only people to derive any excitement from the affair were the small
children, who took it for a circus.

The best they could do for us was a general strike. What all this had to
do with trades or unions nobody seemed to know, least of all the
workers. But there was an attractive sound about the then novel phrase,
"Direct Action," and it gave a sense of useful business to that
otherwise over-portly word, "Proletariat." And the local politicians,
promised good jobs in LENIN'S millennium, made great use of the phrase,
"Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Thus many an honest workman joined in
under the belief that it meant an extra hour's holiday on Saturdays, an
extra hour in bed on Mondays and an extra bob or two of wages.

While it lasts, even a bloodless revolution can be very tiresome; almost
as disquieting as a general election. Everybody who isn't revoluting is
mobilised to keep the revolution from being molested. There are no
trams, because the drivers are demonstrating; no shops, because the
shopmen are mobilised; no anything, because everyone is out watching the
fun. So you go into the square to watch also. You see little groups of
revolutionaries looking sullen and laboriously class-hating. You see a
lot of soldiers looking very ordinary but trying not to. The riff-raff
scowl at the soldiers, who are ordered out to shoot at them. The
soldiers scowl at the riff-raff at whom they are ordered not to shoot.
And, for some reason which the experts have not yet fathomed, it always
pours with rain.

When we had succeeded in persuading the soldier who was posted to guard
our hotel that we were not the p