of the turmoil, two armed men to each battered and terrified captive, whose white and bloodstained face stared startling and ghastly between the gray uniform greatcoats.  The first of them came to the deep arch, in whose recess is a lamplit shrine; I stood aside to see them go past.  The soldiers were wrenching the man along by the arms, each holding him on one side; I recall yet the prisoner’s lean, miserable face, with the suggestion it had of dissolute and desperate youth; and as they came abreast of the faintly gleaming ikon in the gate they let him go for a moment.  His dazed eyes wandered up to the shrine; he was already bareheaded, and with a shaking, uncertain hand he crossed himself in the intricate Russian fashion.  The soldiers who guarded him, too—­they shuffled their rifles to a convenient hold to have a right hand free; they crossed themselves and their lips moved.  Then they were through the arch and out upon the snow within the walls, and once again they had hold of their man and were thrusting him along to the prison which for him was the antechamber of death.

That was Russia then.  Prisoner and captors, soldiers and revolutionaries, blinded and bewildered by the rush and dazzle of affairs, straining asunder yet linked, knitted into a unity of the spirit which they neither understood nor questioned.

But a week ago, on those still, dreary lands which border the Prussian frontier, there was evidence of a Russia that has been born or made since those hectic days in Moscow.  The Germans who had forced Gen. Rennenkampf to withdraw to the border were making an attempt to envelop his left wing.  Their columns, issuing from the maze of lakes and hills in Masurenland, came across the border on both banks of the little River Amulew, and fell upon him.  There is a road in those parts that drifts south along the frontier, an unmade, unholy Russian road, ribbed with outcrops of stone, a purgatory to travel upon till the snow clothes it and one can go by sledge.  Away to the southwest, beyond the patches of firwood and the gray, steeply [Transcriber:  original ‘steply’] rolling land, there toned the far diapason of artillery; strings of army transport, Red Cross vehicles, and miscellaneous men straggled upon the road.

From beyond the nearest shoulder of land sounded suddenly some gigantic and hoarse whistle, an ear-shattering roar of warning and urgency.  There was shouting and a stir of movement; the wagons and Red Cross vans began to pull out to one side; and over the brow of the hill, hurtling into sight, huge, unbelievably swift, roaring upon its whistle, tore a great, gray-painted motor lorry, packed with khaki-clad infantrymen.  It was going at a hideous speed, leaping its tons of weight insanely from rock ridge to traffic-churned slough in the road; there was only time to note its immensity and uproar and the ranked faces of the men swaying in their places, and it was by, and another was bounding into sight behind it.  A hundred and odd of them, each with thirty men on board—­three battalions to reinforce the threatened left wing—­a mighty instrument of war, mightily wielded.  It was Russia as she is today, under way and gathering speed.