days
later blew up while passing the station of Odozerskaja, completely
wrecking the line between Archangel and Petrograd and killing nearly
three hundred people.

Each of these outrages was arranged in my presence, and I was compelled
to assist in counting the money which was afterwards given by the monk to
their perpetrators as price of their perfidy.

"We must create unrest," Rasputin declared one night to His Excellency
the Minister Protopopoff, as the precious pair sat together. "We must
prepare Russia for disaster."

Hence it was that they arranged for a series of most alarming false
rumours to be circulated throughout the length and breadth of the Empire.

Indeed, on the day following, I heard in a bank where I had business that
all Moscow was involved in a great revolution, that the Moscow police
were on strike, and that the troops had refused to fire upon the
populace. Everyone stood aghast at the news. But the truth was that the
telegraphs and telephones between Moscow and Petrograd had been wilfully
cut in three places by agents of Protopopoff, and while those alarming
rumours were current in Petrograd, similar rumours were rife in Moscow
that revolution had broken out in the capital.

Rasputin and his friends in the course of a few days created a veritable
whirlwind of false reports, hoping by that means to shatter or stifle all
manifestations of patriotic feeling, and prepare Russia for a separate
peace.

Meanwhile he had contrived, as the Kaiser ordered, to prevent the
offensive being resumed in Poland; and yet so cleverly did he effect all
this that General Brusiloff, who was at the south-west front, actually
gave an interview to a British journalist, declaring that the war was
already won, "though it was merely speculation to estimate how much
longer will be required before the enemy are convinced that the cause for
the sake of which they have drenched Europe in blood is irretrievably
lost."

The cold white light of later events has indeed revealed the black hearts
of Rasputin and his friends, for while all this was in progress Stuermer,
though so active in the betrayal of his country, boldly made a speech
deploring the fact that anyone credited the sinister rumours which his
fellow-conspirators had started, and to save his face he warned the
working-classes to remain patient and prosecute the war with vigour.

I recollect well the day he had made that speech--the day on which the
Labour group