-third of the
year. And finally, the half-brutal, half-savage, wholly ignorant
condition of her one hundred and forty million peasants, is due, not in
any wise to the tyranny of mere kings and overlords, but to the
relentless, never-dying, never-staying cruelty of that unconquerable
ruler, whose abuse of power is to be stopped by neither rebellion nor
assassination; and whose heart is to be warmed to humanity by no tears,
by no appeal; by the lashes of whose frozen knouts a great people has
been beaten into apathy, their brains deadened through physical
suffering, their children's children bearing a hopeless heritage down to
generation after generation of those who wage, from birth to death,
their dreary, dragging warfare with the real tyrant of Russia, monarch
unlimited and unapproachable, the Winter of the North.

It is, then, in this grim fact, that there is to be found the origin of
the curious custom of the Russian army to take all its lessons in the
art of warfare, together with all discipline, drill, and general
training, during those ten weeks of summer when the daily parade will
not produce a hospitalful of frozen ears, hands and feet. During the
winter, indeed, only the guard regiments, quartered in the large cities,
are kept at anything like full complement, the whole army of the line
dispersing to village and farm, country estate and smaller town, whence,
in the first weeks in June, they come pouring into the half-dozen huge
camps stationed at various points of the Empire. These camps had all of
them been designed by Nicholas I., and they serve his purpose to this
day. Of them all, the most important is naturally that nearest the
capital and, therefore, under royal supervision: Krasnoe-Selo, distant
from Petersburg between fifteen and eighteen miles, and about half a
mile from the little town of that name. Thither, therefore, Ivan and
Vladimir were about to proceed, with their regiment.

Naturally enough every cadet, before leaving his Corps, was made aware
of many of the facts of this camp-life. But its more intimate details,
those making the existence tolerable or intolerable, were to be
discovered only by experience; and, moreover, depended largely upon the
name and the reputation of the individual, and the standing of his
regiment.

Ivan himself obtained considerable information from de Windt, to whom
camp life was by no means a novelty. Certainly the work would be hard,
the days long, and the quarter