th his children, when sitting in his house, when walking
by the way, when going to lie down, and when rising up, written upon the
posts of his house, and on the gates." The mystical or spiritual
temperaments of the two peoples are much the same. Russians have a
passion for GOD. They never want to be away from the sense and
consciousness of His presence. Only when they have gained some sense of
this spiritual endowment of the Russian race will my readers be able to
see where their religious life corresponds with our own, and where it
widely diverges from it. We have spoken of this war as a righteous war;
the Russians as a religious one! They have brought their religion into
it as they have never done into any war before. A Russian officer, for
instance, gave a very picturesque account of the great battle of the
Vistula last October, and ended with these words: "My company was the
first to cross the river, which seemed to boil from the bursting of the
shells. Afterwards nine companies rushed the enemy's position. A priest
with long, streaming hair, and holding high a cross amid a hail of
bullets, stood blessing the soldiers as they ran past." That is the true
Russian, his religion everywhere and in everything. There is nothing in
life, throughout the year, however secular it may seem to us to be,
which does not have that blessing by the priest. The war has had it from
first to last. All through mobilization, in the families from which the
bread-winner was to go, there would be special little private services
such as I have described in my last chapter. On the day when the
conscripts were to depart from the village there would be the Liturgy in
church, with all who could be present, and others outside. There would
be, it has been described for us, the solemn reading of the Holy Gospel
in the open-air, the book resting upon a living lectern; and as they
rode away the last thing the departing men would see, as with those nine
companies on the Vistula, would be the cross lifted high by a priest,
with his long hair streaming over his shoulders, or out upon the wind.

It would be just the same all through the long journeys: the sacred
_ikons_ were carried, the priest marched steadily along, or sat in the
railway carriages with the soldiers, and always with his cross. The
soldiers of course saluted their priests as they saluted their officers,
and for a time it was a little puzzling to decide how this salute should
be suitably re