THE GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS

Taranaki Daily News, 14 August 1915, Page 9

THE GRAND DUKE NICHOLAS

In the Tretjakoff Gallery at iloscow ; there U a painting by Verestchagin, in which the harsh drama of war is made visible by the hand of a master. It is a small thing, a rough effect of red embers and black shadows and the dim shine of metal; it shows horses of XapoIcon's cavalry stabled in the cellar-like chapels of the strange church of St. Basil, where the dead saints sleep under nioau- ■ incuts of gold. The fires make a ruddy J gleam in the groined vaults; the troopers stand about among the tombs; war! has overflowed and filled the place like . a strong tide. I At Xiebuiow, before the Russians fell J back to the Rawa and Csura, I saw the companion-scene to this picture. General; Gurko, commanding a corps of the Sec- j ond Army, had his headquarters there in; the famous chateau of Prince Eadziwill. ; fn the hall, where stands of <irmor flank ' the great hearth, Cossacks lay sleeping on bundles of straw. Telephone wires i looped their way up the grand staircase, i hung from na'ils driven into antique ; Dutch tiles; and in the statuary gallery ; above, Venus languished at Adonis across j the heads of men in khaki working at J typewriters or telegraph-keys. j Beyond, in a state bedroom, was spin-1 die-legged gold furniture, tapestry, lofty mirrors, and a bed all scarlet and gold, j a <be& for dead princes to lie in state j on. A deal table had been brought from ] the kitchen and set down here in the. middle of the grave splendor of the great room, and at it sat General Gurko, a trayful of cigarettes at his- elbow, bowed above his pacers. . I was talking of all this to the aidede-1 .camp who guided me across the railway tracks at Siedloe wheTe the troop and provision trains that served the army jolted in noisy and intricate quadrilles between the switches. We were going to the chief of all headquarters, to the Genera! Staff of the Generalissimo himself. • "You won't see anything of that sort here," he said. "ilind that engine! | The Grand Duke doesn't trouble himaeli i about the picturesque." | }A spur of railway, branching forth j from the main line, held three or four | engineless trains, strings of saloon and I sleeping cars of the Wagon-lits Company. I The great ears, darkly ashine with glass | and:-brass and varnish, towered over us as we walked beside them, sombre and suggestive as prisons. Stumpy poles fceside the line caried festoons of telegraph and telephone wires; in a little camip beyond tne trains, there rose the slender steel mast and stays of a field wireless outfit; there were glimpses through windows, as, we passed, of men in uniform bowed above tables, intent. Already we w?*e clear of $e tracks outside Siedloe, and we could sec, about us and beyond, that dumlb and mournful sweep of snow and wood whkh is Russia in winter. "Well get in here," directed my companion at the foot of the steps of a great saloon car. Within the door of the car there was a sort of ante-room where the others—all Russians—who were to share the audience with the Grand Duke, were already present. The aide-de-camp'left me; ten minutes of waiting, then he reappeared at the inner door. "Pazhoust!" he said. "Please!" Xot one of us had spoken to another during the.interval of waiting, but we were very polite at the door, standing aside to let each other pass, insisting on giving picedciit. "Pazhoust," we said freely, making way eagerly. For, you must understand, we were moving into a presence which comprised, in the personality of a single man, the whole power and majesty of Russia, ift the moment when that power and majesty were achieving their highest expression. In all life there is nothing so daunting, so adventurous, as meeting a stranger, an alien soul, curiously armed and shielded in an unfamiliar body. That is what makes men of imagination shy and unhandy in company; and when the stranger is made potent by the unquestioning faith of scores of millions of human when he is God to a great nation in arms, then one always needs an extra moment in which to sharpen one's mind before encountering him. The name of the man I had forced to £0 before me was spoken. He was a large man; his vast back shut out the view'. Then — "Mistaire .ribbon!" announced the aide- ' de-camp in his ceremonial roar. I came forward through the door into a carpeted compartment whose wide window? filled the place with the arid white light which shone off the snow. There were smal! tables at the farther end, us in a dining ear, hut covered now with stationery and books. A telephone instrument stood on one of them. A group of officers waited around the farther door; so much I saw out of the margin of my eyes. Then the central Bafiire nf the group blotted out the rest. It l.ell forth a hand. ''Good lnornin?, Mr. Jibbon!' A man immense enough to be remarkable for his mere stature—six feet six or thereabouts of top boois, grey uniform, an.l grey, lofty fa-e. Russian railways still hold to the old broad gauge; their [■sr> arc spacious and lofty as chambers in a house. But the great saloon in v.iiich we stood was none too great for Xlkoiai Xikohievitch: he was a tower of a. man, a human heing built i iko a iroe; he seemed to impend over me from the level of the roof. A body spare with the light and athletic leanness of a horrenian—for Xikolai Xikolaicvitcli is a cavalryman from the spurs to the ' finger-tips; a touch of tailored and rpruceness to the hang of the riong-tallrd grey cc-ai: a something taut nnd contained in hearing and g<?;ture—these were the pedestal to the great grey, ecrious countenance of the Co:n-mnrdcr-ir.-Chief of all the Russian ar-

Aquiline, grey as iron, steady as rock, yet wearing the outward pliancy and high courte=y which are the authentic ■hill-mark cf the great aristocrat—the face is the index of the man. The mouth is straight, with a certain compression to the lins, yet with kindly and humorous slacknesses at moments; it is the nmi-tli of a man capable of frank laughter; revealing that innate good-nature, that, easy and natural kindliness and ppninMty which is the key to the Russian character.

A strong nose, brows with a slight inward slant, jaws whose ha,rd line shows through the sparse prey beard—a face nfactical. by every rule of physiognomy, as a hammer—and then, the contradiction of the eyes!

I have heard it aaid that what troubled fienera.l von HinderAnrjj, cMim'titffinj» ifce German armies on tie UniisitiTt front, was that he could nerer detect. in the Russian strategy, the central Idea, '.he l-ev-plan that governed its system. 'lt is liVe fijrhlin;? a lunatic." he is re-

(By Perceval Gibbon, in Everybody's Magazii.e).

•ported to have said; "one never knoas , whv he does anything!" I will give . General von Hindenfunr" a clue-the eye* , of the Grand Duke! His there that . ],e should look fw the temperament, the i intuitive inspiration, which selects trom . . the plans of Ms expats and professional . strategists the fashion of war which we, \ who sit up nights to study it, have come -. to recognise as Russian, r General Yanushkcvitch, the studious, .' silent genius, who\\vorks in the shadow •'of the Oradn DukV, makes the plans >' which should carry the Russians to Berjliu. They are good plans; V.i'"us;u <e - I vitch is a Russian Moltke; bu. ""cy are .' consistent as the mmfipiication table. 1: Ywi Eindenburg . could grope through .' them to the idea at tlieir core as surely ,! as a chess expert can plumb the purpose ! of a gambit; tout by the time they have \ '• passed the Grand Duke, there is in them r 5 that quality which his eyes betray, the I I incalculable element of the man's own ■ ; personal quality; and von Hinderiburg is »1 left guessing. ' ",' They are grey eyes, and large in that s 1 grey, hard face. They are steady, twin t ] drills t'hat bore at you when the great i general measures your quality. But in the scrutiny you detect something more a than the power of precise vision. In I those eyes there- is mysticism, ardor, a p ! fervency of illumination, a taint of the a poet. 'They are the eyes of a visionary e I with an aim. II It is the Grand Duke, the complicated a I product of an arbitrary civilisation, who J j sneaks to yon, a prince fashioned out of I manners and courtly formalities. Rut ~ | it is a Slav wfco listens to your answer, y the Slav whose turn to inherit the earth J has not yet come. "You find Russian difficult!'" he asks, s with, polite and perfunctory interest. „ "It is a very <easy language, if you g are content to speak it badly," you anL. swer —as I answered. • . And you "see" him understand, with ■t | an almost schoolbody relish of the mini ute jest. He knows; he speaks Rustf sian, French, German, English, and other tongues like any other efficient and wellj, trained royalty; and he knows the diffiT culties of the Russian "schtsch" for an d English-speaking foreigner. You see glee , I lights up in him in a momentary flash !' »3 his mind lights on words with three | 9 or four "schtsohs" in them. ■ j You have an impulse to challenge him, ~ to invite hira to pronounce "LlaneUy'' j, or "It's a braw hrieht moonlieht nicht the nicht"; but already the aide-de-camp, T with his bright air of contributing to a the entertainment, is bawling the name j. of the next man, and you take the great hand again, the hand calloused 'by the e cavalryman's bridle and sword-hilt, and , retire, as gracefully as your breeding V will let you. And, if you are like ™ me, you retire thinking: "Blame it, I like these royalties; they make me feel j. as if I were a royalty myself!" There is a story which is told discreetly about Nikolai Nikolaievitch which possibly is not true, but it is be- _ licved throughout Russia. It is said that the Czar, when events were beginl ning to take on a dark and perplexing fi color, sent for him to consult him about . the manifold possibilities of the war. They discussed the campaigns in East Prussia, on the Niemen, in Poland and „ the Carpathians; finally the lurking al; ~ re ternatire of peace with Germany was ,„ touched upon. t ° "Impossible!" said the Grand Duek". "The country and the army would never stand it. There'd be a revolution —a £ 0 I real one!" J "Bnt " the Emperor was inercdu- „ bus. The revolution of IDO'j and 1900 Qt was as dead as Julius Caesar. Hie whole .. | of Russia—Jews, Poles, Finns, and all — j had fallen into line; Germany itself was i ! not more united and disciplined. Of all ' I the ancient makers of trouble, not one 4 was extant. . "Who would lead such a movement!" i asked the Tsar. i "I would," answered Nikolai Nikolaie- ,, viteh. *l There is such a thing as imaginative a . truth, the truth that transcends mere , factual accuraey: in that sense, the story | is true whether it was invented or not. jit presents the Grand Duke in his most . I important character, more important | even than in his character of general and , , Commander-in-Chief. The war which j Russia is waging against Germany is . more than a war of bullets and hayo- . nets against an enemy in pickclhaulicn. . llt is also a campaign against German , , ascendancy in the internal' affairs of ~. Russia: against German commerce that j shuts the door to native enterprise; 'against German capital in every depart;ment of trade and industry: against the . | influences wi.ieh fer.d to Germanise anil I stultify the naticnalism and racial spirit , 'I of Russia. Tlio great diversity of Russia . | includes whole governments where more p German was spoken than Russian: there * had come into existence a definitely Cor- _= ' man party in social life, business and politics, which was potent in the highest circles of the realm, which had its propagandists at the Court itself. There '. ,r was no department in Hie Government m l but had, among its highest offi.iais, v'„ names ending in "berg" and "hcim' - : war *" j with Germany was, for Russia, like the '!"" ; movements of a man who has'to fight '"(with all his family clinging about his ■ ,or 1i.r1).-.. I V\ar with Germany meant :i surgical | operation upon the body of Russia. A | task for a surgeon with a steady hand; '"ijtko hand wa 3 the hand of Nikolai Niko"/ilaievitch. j 1 j It was steady enough. He had Lis staff "j | in view; the most important figures of n(1 j itjvere Yanushkeviteh, Russia and Ivanlc oIT. Tvanoff was known: he was chief l ™ of the Organisation Department of the • StafT; the other two were Nikolai's dis,at coveries. No one of them was a man ,:n '|Wlion> own individuality had availed to ar 'jc.-rrr Km to the front 'cf his profession or to glorify him—as Rcnnenkampf. for I example, was glorified—in the eyes of j the public and the newspapers. It wa» | only to the eyes of the Grand Duke that j their qualities were shining. They were l ouiet men, industrious professional solI diers with the minds of professors and liiatiitmaticians. Yanushkeviteh was a Pole, a stoulish man of middle age with weak eyes and ■halbils of extreme retirement. Russici was known to his b"othor officers as "the German," for his precise and formal manners and his studious preoccupation with 4'ie art and science of war. It was j-YsnusliWitcli who jettisoned Sukkomijlinoffs old pb.;u wliicii involved the abandonment of Warsaw to the lnvad- ■ ing Gonnans and improvised jneans of holding on to the city; it was Russk! who -forced the campaign against the Austrian in Souihc-n' Poland to talc the shape vfo'ich made hfa meagre railway ooroTmmf*at!oai most effective. Tt was Ivanoff who mar!e of the upper Vistula a fortress and a stronghold against which all attp.e!:-. fell back^haUoro''

With those, and a filling in of looser men, the Grand Duke went to war. Sweeping ordinances had already teen formulated and put into operation, deporting Germans frdm the country, forbidding the use of the German languugc (I was arrested myself for speaking it), confiscating German property and patents, and singling out individual Germans for internment. The axe was laid to the tree which had nourished so prosperously in Russian soil; hut the deep-striking, tenacious roots were still there. They branched and tangled below all possible fields of activity: turn where you would ,in Russia, at the heart of everything that succeeded there was a keen, capalble, mentally and financially equipped German.

They wore in tlie sen-ices: whole departments of the army and the civil services leaned and depended upon their abilitv and driving power. Plans that should have been as secret as four walls could make them, were known to the enemy within a few hours; there were spies'wherever there was a general. And worse—there were men entrusted with great and vital work whose inmost topes and interests were hostile to Russia. A Kuropatkin, a Sukhomlinoff, would have been powerless, not even a ukase of a Czar could have been phrased liberally enough to give either of them power to strike with'deadly effect across social and military prestige at a ! ll the men who hampered the machine of war. It needed a Grand Duke, a Romanoff of the Blood Royal, accountable to none. And when he struck, in due and deliberate time, it was not at a small man. General Renneukampf was among the chief military figures of Russia. A cavalry man, an ex-commander of the frontier military district of Russia, a friend of the Czar, a -personality and an influence at Count, a man who might have been Commander-in-Chief himself! His was a reputation Which had survived th* debacle of the Russo-Japa.nese war; il died in the first months of the present campaign. There was the disaster of Allenstein, not yet sufficiently elucidated by the published accounts, when General Samsonoff and three army corps were blotted out of existence. There followed the disorderly and miserable retreat from Insterburg, concerning which not a line has appeared; and still Rennenloampf was strong, entrenched in favor.

Then, three months later, came the moment when the Grand Duke took hold of events by the scruff.

It was in December, during the operations round Lodz. Two German army corps, including a division of Prussian Guards, were trapped; eighty thousand of the pick of the German army were held up just where the Russians wanted lihean. Rennenkampf with his army was away to the nortlh-wcst; with his help, those eighty thousand Germans were cut off, ringed with death, as good as. finished. The word went to Rennenkanvpf—and Rennenkampf did not come. Whether he refused or not, is outside my knowledge; but 'he failed to come. Plehve, at the village of Bresiny, cut the Germans down in swatihs; their dead lay in hedges and long wails of corpses to each side of the road; he exhausted his ammunition and his men; and still a remnant of the Germans cut their, desperate way through his positions and got clear. It might have been a victory comparable to Austerlitz; it was merely an indecisive slaughter. But it was the cue for the Grand Duke.

Rennckampf, the secure, the influential, was deprived of his command forthwith; plucked out of it and sent ba-ck to Petrograd by a single stroke.of the pen. And with hint went every commander concerning whom there existed the least doubt. A German name was enough to condemn a general; tile "inans," the ''bergs," the "heims," fell like ripe fruit before the whistling gale of the Grand Duke's furious energy. There were injustices well as reform, I remember one such:

He was a man who had fought since the cn'iy days of the war, without distinction ami without disgrace, an honest artisan of tile army, the commander of a division. hi the hull of the 'UkJstol Hotel at Warsaw, at the hour when the brief winter day darkens toward night, the little wicker Ua-tablos were crowded; three Grand Dukes were staying in the place, and it wa» the momentary hub of fashionable resort fur the higher ranks of the annv in Poland. Officers and ladies thronged the hall; every few minutes, a. 1 ] rose formally and bowed a.s M.nie general or royalty came striding through into the elevator. There was Prince Arsene Karageorgevitch, brother to the. King of Servia, with his worn old face of a boulevaidier; old Prince li.'o'ozckky-liielozeisT;'y, general and aide-de-camp to the Emperor; I'l'iuee I'eter Volkonsky, with the Red Gross of bis own ambulance-column on his arm, lofty and smiling at the summit of liio great stature; Prince-Prior Dolgoiouski, wlio.-o negro orderly, in the uniform cf a Russian dragoon, hovered around him solicilou.-ly; Prince Wvax-me-sky, the great racing man, talking KnglVn like an Englishman.

Theiu was Poiret, the aviator, spare us A jockey, with his satiric smile; there was Messale, Poland's vaudeville ~hu-, with her face of classic beauty and her Paris i'rtd;; there was me.

We diiink tea with cream in the Eng!i.:h fa.sliii.il, and ate apule-p.'e with it in the Po.ish manner; we rose and bowed to the boyish, striding comeliness of the Grand Duke Dimitri as lie passed; we rof-e again to the Grand Duke Cyril

and his Grand Duchess; we stood up for General Smirnoff, for Gcncinl l.etchlii--k)'., for General Soychc-wsky.

Then, entering swiftly past the hall poiter lame the man whose name was German, who ha.l fallen before the ,;-ythe of the Grand Duke A month Lefcrc, he had gone through slowly, stopping to click his heels and bow to his friends, to make his little appearance of a soldier snatching a moment of leisure between battles. People hu.l risen and Lowed as a matte,- of cour-e at hU enhance; he was a general, with a general's rights to the forms and court.-,iiH i,i deference. Now, l,e passed iu a v.vlni-slriding between the tables

to the eh-valor. entered, and passed fr.uu sight; and of a'l that ci.atti'iing assembly not one had made him the cheap gift of a ceremonial how. 1 re,all the grey hack of him, its h'aste to he out ol sight, and the bowed posture c-l" the shoulders that was not there before. One remembers how tie German name of the capital of Russia was changed from Petersburg (it was never "St." Petersburg; that is merely foreign corrupitien) to the definitely Russian name

of Petrograd, The German "burg" is rendered accurately by the Russian "grad." Both mean a town. Someone

brought to the Grand Duke a story that was em-rent at the time of the change. A well-known financier, whose name was

f-'-icroiburg. had been accosted at a din-ner-party by a fi lend,

t ''l say, Sternburg," said the friend, No answer; Sternburg seemed not to have heard. "Stenibiirg! T say, Sternburg: I Tang '' nr-. vov, -leaf, man''"

iSternburg turned, ''Were you calling mc! My deai'chap, 1 didn't know, You sec I've changed my name." ''Changed your name?" "Yes. My name now is Stenigrad!" The Grand Duke heard the story and laughed, ''Timt's clever," he said, and made a note on his writing-pad, "When you write him you'd better address the letter to him as Stenigrad—at Berlin." Within twenty-four hours, Iferr Sternburg, or Stenigrad, was on his way to the frontier under a deportation order. It casta something to be witty at the exipenso of Russia nowadays.

There is another tale about the Grand Duke which has currency in the army. He was upon one of his visits to the fighting front, touring Poland in an automobile, testing the machine of which he was the engineer. In a farmhouse behind the lines he lighted upon a detail of his vast war organisation—a court-martial upon a deserter. The officers, with their swords belted to them, were assembled; the prisoner was already accused, and the case was clear. A brow-ibeaten moujik ot a soldier, bullied in his regiment, incapable of learning the niceties of drill and the management of his weapons, had lit out for home; he had been recaptured, and the penalty was death. All that was needed was a verdict upon the plain facts of the evidence, -a flring-iparty, and a wall, Into this grouping there protruded itself the -six-foot-six presence and alien personality of Nikolai*N'ikolaievitch, who regards rules and regulations much as a dog,regards a chain: they are there to be broken.

"Well, brother," ilie" said to the soldier, in homely Russian, "so you don't like the war''"

The prisoner said emphatically that he didn't; he hated it, and was having a perfectly rotten time. Germans had tried to kill him, and, what was worse, his officer had continually beaten him. "Better to be beaten Mian shot, though'r'' suggested the Grand Duke. The soldier agreed, a little doubtfully, • 'Nikolai rose, "Well," lie said, "something's got to be done to a man like you," and with his long arm he smote the prisoner forcibly upon the head. "That'll teach you," he remarked, and turned to the aghast court, ''Discharged!" ihe directed. And that was tile end of the. court-martial. lie is the friend of the Russian soldier, of Ivan Tvanoviteh, who, in his simple loyalty tcf- authority, brackets God and the Grand Duke in the same order of omnipotence. To understand the Grand Duke, you mu-i understand the soldier; in both of llirin there is the essential Russian. It is a factor that keeps the Westerner guessing. You and I, we know sheer cold courage, we know wiimal ferocity—we even know that curious 'instinct for military proficiency .vhich makes a man respect himself more, the more he as drilled and accomplishes fit the heel-clicking, shoulder-rigid arts of the drill-ground. But the Slav, whose battle-songs are slow, like mournful hymns, wilio goes draggle-tailed to victory, wlio is more heroic in defeat and moat terrible when he falls back before an enemy—the Slav who set Moscow in flames before Napoleon—he is another mind, a soul alien and remote, whose mission in the world is to make it different. Dostoievsky is the apostle of his pity for humanity; Tolstoy exemplifies his perception of mankind as a cause; Gorky, is on fire with his impatience for the new judgment. Pan-Germanism is at war with TaniSiavism. The first means the ascendency of Prussia, of a military order and a military idea w'hk-ih has survived from the Middle Ages, a feudalism that persists like a weed in the garden of a demo: ratic civilisation. Pan-Slavism mcaiis the ascendancy in human affairs of that apirit, that attitude toward life and the concerns of men, of which Nikolai Nikolaicvitch .is the living embodiment. It is nothing one can define in brief and precise words; it is an atmosphere} and the truth of it is veiled behind those eyes of a videnary with an aim, that gaze of a man who steers Ihroug a. fog to an unseen goal.

Officer.; in the Russian army spoak of the firaiuUDiikc with a tempered enthusiasm ; they know him for a great commander, but he his not wasted effort in winning their personal liking. lie belongs to that class of Russian generals—to which, by the way, Rennenkmmii nlso belonged—who are mor? beloved by the soldier than by the commissioned ranks. If he has an affectation, it is his faJion of appealing to the men, of speaking the homely and hearty Russian which is the vernacular of the ranks. '•llalushka" or '<Batka" is the name he goes by among them—Little Father in the affectionate diminutive, or Father. To the simple and docile minds of the soldiers, simple as those cf children, hut with the uncanny penetration of children also, Nikolai Nikolaieviteh stands for a living figure of all that mere "patriotism" would present cs an empty symbol.

He spent an hour with tho Second Siberians at Bartuil.i; I heard of it from a sergeant:

'ife had », cigarette in his hand, tinligblcd. 1 lit a match for him, but it went out. He called me '(Jural;' (fool) and I lit another. Then he gave mo a cigarette, too,"

"Did you keep it as a souvenir!" I asked, remembering a person 1 once knew who treasured like a relic a cigar that n king had given him. 'Keep it?" said tlie sergeant in astonishment. "No: I smoked it, of course." The supreme thing which the Grand Duke has given to Russia is a personality at Mie head of affairs. It is years since R inula knew the feeling of a single strongly-characterised man at work upon her. For all the steps she has taken toward democracy, Russia has yet a welcome for the natural autocrat, for the man whose warrant to govern is in (lie we'ght of his hand and tlie warmth of his heart. Now at a moment when one might have expected that the prestige of the army, and of the oMecr-eastc hi particular, would have been all-pnwrrfiil, and a renewal of militarism would have swamped nil that is progressive ami democratic in the nation, she finds her man In Nikolai Nikloaievileh, for whom <,(||- cers in general lone no special liLing. who is adored by the i-ummon soldier. The anecdotes wl,ieh each week produces aro all of his rough manners to men cf Iniiportance—how he swears at the generals, who have to do with him. how he took his stick und hit. one of biu-ni, l-.oiv he feeds at the field-kitchens he finds behind the lines, and what an infi'-rnal row he makes if he lints anything wrong with the men's food.

It was Uls l;i:n\vn character wliicli gave derive weight to hla proclamation to ll'c t'cla--. in wliiclilse offered them into-rrn-.y and the restoration of their kingdom under the sceptre of the Czar. The flerinasi Emperor's answering pro:lmnation ofi'ere I them (jiiite a,s much • a:ul Poland had no special reason to lean to the Russian stride of the struggle, SJie has been cheated before; but this time tlio promises were wetted with the srnamnteo of the Grand' Duke's own uprlghtiicsa and honesty; and Poland accepted .them. Jlnf, for the true measure and quality ■ - : ■ • une must look al wa ya to h'a

work. The Grand Duke is, before all things, a soldier. lie was twenty-one when he fought in the Rauso-'furkish war; tie was inspector-general of cavalry in the Manduiriftn campaign, It is probable that he would have been advanced to the supreme command in the field 'but for the sudden arrival oi peace; he continued his career as commander of the Petersburg military district, with an interval as .President of the Council for National Defence. But it is only now Dhat he has work to do commensurate with his capacity. The need was for a man capable of spacious thinking. Russia, relatively to the extent of the front on which she has to wage war, has not a great army. And she was handicapped by the initial difficulty of her slow mobilisation, The Grand Duke met that by the decree that abolished vodka and mobilised in twelve days. lit was a measure of military necessity, not one of social reform; but look at wlhut it did! There were no regiments filling up slowly witlh sodden and sick drunkards, no drafts astray on the roads, no murders and free fights; 'but a Russia that rolled up to the colots briskly and silently, where everybody had more money uhlan he was used to—a Russia who.se .pnxhiotivity had increased 'by from thirty to fifty per cent. Germany wastes forty years of life in making her people fit for war; Russia does it in a night—discredits nearly half a century of fanatic militarism by a single order! In dealing with the actual technical problems of the situation the Grand Duke showed his subtlety. Germany was equipped for an advance in Russia — enormously, portentously equipped, prepared to the last button of the last soldier for a. swoop. Good! It is an old wrestling trick to pull at the adversary who .pu--lhos and push at the adversary wlio pulls. Since the enemy had gathered strength for an advance, it was sound strategy to let him expend that strength; the line of defence was fixed at the Vistula and the Niemen—both naturally strong defensive lines. Germany had chosen for herself the role ot a rising tide; well, tides rise only to high-waiter mark—let her rise till the time caimc for the ebb!

In October of 1914 that tide flowed to within six miles of Warsaw, to break below the windows of the town in receding froth and wreckage. When next it flowed it came only as far as the Rawa and the Bsura and broke there. There followed the flood that rolled in from East Prussia; it came at one point as far as the Niemen; and then rolled back. And meanwhile, first Russki and then Ivanoff were putting out their strength against the Austrians, capturing Lomberg and Przemysl, climbing at the passes of the Carpathians, aiming toward the plains of Hungary, the granary' of the enemy, and toward the commuiilca. tions which link Germany with her ally. In all the Russian strategy there has been nothing of "the Russian steam roller," which at the beginning of the war, people in the west of Europe expected to see moving on Berlin in an even progress of victories. Wlhenthis war, which has littered Europe with dead men and dead reputations, shall have come to an end. Nikolai Niko-' laievitcli will be among the two or three most {powerful men of his time. He will have Russia in the hollow of his handher future will be his to mould between his fingers. Power will .be his, the power of the groat devoted army at his back and the prestige of his rank and blood; and with tihem will be that voiceless worship, that slavish and Slavoit> fidelity which Russia renders to )v>-. ' copted leaders. How will Ijo u*- it / T ." nliose .profit will he turn H»

In Russia, all thins* ~m , ' ... , tj on end with a ques