“Well, he had a store—­heaven knows where, but somewhere in the war zone.  First came the Cossacks.  They took all he had—­his goats and his clothes, and everything in the place—­and then they beat him.  Then the Russians retired, beat him again, en passant as it were, and then came the Germans.  They fired his house with their guns, pulled off his boots, and beat him.  Then he entered the service of the Germans, carrying water and wood, and received his food and beatings in return.  But to-day he had got into trouble with them in some incomprehensible fashion; no food after that, only the beatings; and was thrown into the street.

“The beatings he referred to as something altogether natural.  They were for him the natural accompaniment to any sort of action—­but he could not live on beatings alone.

“I gave him what I had on me—­money and cigars—­told him the number of my house, and said he could come to-morrow, when I could get him a pass to go off somewhere where there were no Germans and no Russians, and try to get him a place of some sort where he would be fed and not beaten.  He took the money and cigars thankfully enough; the story of the railway pass and the place he did not seem to believe.  Railway travelling was for soldiers, and an existence without beatings seemed an incredible idea.

“He kept on thanking me till I was out of sight, waving his hand, and thanking me in his German-Russian gibberish.

“A terrible thing is war.  Terrible at all times, but worst of all in one’s own country.  We at home suffer hunger and cold, but at least we have been spared up to now the presence of the enemy hordes.

“This is a curious place—­melancholy, yet with a beauty of its own.  An endless flat, with just a slight swelling of the ground, like an ocean set fast, wave behind wave as far as the eye can see.  And all things grey, dead grey, to where this dead sea meets the grey horizon.  Clouds race across the sky, the wind lashing them on.

“This evening, before supper, Hoffmann informed the Russians of the German plans with regard to the outer provinces.  The position is this:  As long as the war in the West continues, the Germans cannot evacuate Courland and Lithuania, since, apart from the fact that they must be held as security for the general peace negotiations, these countries form part of the German munition establishment.  The railway material, the factories, and, most of all, the grain are indispensable as long as the war lasts.  That they cannot now withdraw from there at once is clear enough.  If peace is signed, then the self-determination of the people in the occupied territory will decide.  But here arises the great difficulty:  how this right of self-determination is to be exercised.