I

Then I went to Oxford, and when the war broke out I joined the Navy. But just before the revolution, Admiral Butt, who had gone on a special mission to Russia, applied for my “Anglo-Russian” services.

I still remember very vividly the morning following on my arrival in Petrograd, when I had to meet the Admiral for the first time at the British Embassy. I ascended the broad staircase with its worn red carpet to the Chancery. Very perfect young men, very perfectly dressed, were conversing in very perfect intonations about love among monkeys. It struck me as delightfully human for diplomats. When I descended, the Admiral had not yet arrived. I talked to Yuri, the hall-porter, a clean-shaven individual of uncertain nationality, violently pro-British, and speaking several languages all very badly. Every now and then the great heavy door would open⁠—it was snowing heavily outside⁠—and some man or woman would come in and inquire if this was the Military District Staff. “It is the British Embassy,” replied Yuri proudly. And he explained the error. The Military District Staff was 4 Palace Square; the Embassy 4 Palace Quay. In peacetime people did come in occasionally and inquire if this was the Military District Staff; but since war had been declared they seemed to be doing little else. I pondered over the possibility of Yuri, unable one day to withstand the increasing pressure of inquiries, going mad and holding forth on this subject to his brother inmates henceforth indefinitely in a lunatic asylum.

Helping me on with my coat, Yuri was suddenly seized by a strange panic. He dropped the coat on the floor and dashed to the door. I followed him, thinking it was the revolution. I was rewarded for my exertion. The Ambassador’s car drove up, and sitting in it were Sir George Buchanan and the French Ambassador. Yuri sprang up and pulling off his cap opened the door of the vehicle and stood still in a paroxysm of reverence and awe. But the two great men within continued talking, the Frenchman in that agitated, agile manner that Frenchmen have, the Englishman with a fine superiority of distinction. The Ambassadors of the two friendly powers sat talking, evidently unaware that they had arrived. Yuri held the door open, still bareheaded, the incarnation of servility and devotion. Then they entered. Yuri made a dash for Sir George’s feet, and began hastily to unbuckle his felt goloshes, while the great diplomat with his fur collar still up to his temples and his round fur cap cocked over one ear stood panting in his great fur coat. I had an absurd idea that something great must be happening on the political horizon.

Finally the Admiral arrived. He was a tall, imperious figure. His movements were powerful and sweeping. He had the air of a man engaged in winning the war while everybody else about him was obstructing him in his patriotic task. His voice was the voice of such a man. His look seemed specially selected to match his voice. That war-winning quality was clearly manifest in his personality, but his actual work towards that end was all very obscure.⁠ ⁠…

Then one morning, as I was about to cross the Troitski Bridge to meet the Admiral, I was stopped by the police and was compelled to go home and change into uniform. When I returned the revolution had already broken out. The Admiral had just witnessed the sacking of the Arsenal by a disorderly crowd. Regiment after regiment was going over to the revolution. Solitary shots, and now and then machine-gun fire, were heard from various quarters of the city. The Admiral and I stood at the window and watched. Lorry after lorry packed with armed soldiery and workmen, some lying in a “ready” attitude along the mudguards, went past us in a kind of wild and dazzling joy ride, waving red flags and revolutionary banners to shouts of “Hurrah!” from the crowds in the street. The Admiral stood with his hands folded on the windowsill, unable to withhold his enthusiasm. It was a clear, bright day, I think, and very cold.

That evening following the outbreak of the revolution was vividly impressed upon my memory. During the day I had listened to innumerable speeches, some of a Liberal loftiness; others of a menacingly proletarian character, threatening death to capital and revolution to the world at large. There was a tendency to flamboyant extravagance and exaggeration. “Down with Armies and Navies!” shouted one speaker hysterically. “Down with militarism! Through red terror to peace, freedom and brotherhood!” There were placards and banners and processions. “Land and Liberty!” was a popular watchword. Red was the dominant colour, and the opening bars of the Marseillaise were a kind of recurring leitmotif in the tumult. Crossing a bridge I passed a company of soldiers newly revolted. They marched alert and joyous to the sound of some old familiar marching song till they came to the words “for the Czar.” Having sung these words they stopped somewhat abruptly and perplexed. “How for the Czar?” one of them asked. “How for the Czar?” they repeated, looking at each other sheepishly. Then they marched on without singing. There were peasants who did not know the word “revolution” and thought it was a woman who would supersede the Czar. Others wanted a republic with a czar. And there were others still who interpreted the word republic as “rieszshpublicoo,” thinking that it meant “cut up the public.” In the Troitski Square I was stopped by a young enthusiastic Russian officer who, attracted by my British uniform, spoke to me in English, his eyes glittering with excitement. “Sir,” he said, “you now will have more vigorous Allies.” And then in the Nevski I passed a procession of Anarchists who are regarded by the Bolsheviks with about the same degree of unmitigated horror as the Bolsheviks are regarded by the Morning Post. They marched with a gruesome look about their faces, bearing their horrible colours of black, crested with a human skull and crossbones.

And somewhat later in the day I sat at dinner with Zina’s people on the Petrograd side, and the presence of a score of students, male and female, an engineer, a lawyer, and a journalist or two, all of that revolutionary intelligentsia, probably accounted for the Liberal atmosphere that prevailed. Yesterday they had been revolutionaries; today they were contented Liberals, hailing Lvov and Miliukov as the heroes of the day. The engineer drank to the future: “The old world is dead: long live the new world!”

The two ancient grandfathers were much too old and feeble to intervene on behalf of the old order of things; they had exhausted their Liberal aspirations with the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and could not see what in the world more anybody wanted. Zina’s father, underpaid and ill as he was, had lost forever the hope of seeing better days, and failed to see how the revolution could affect his own position. Nikolai Vasilievich was still keeping him so far. These Liberals interpreted the revolution as a protest against the pro-German tendency at court, and as an attempt to get into line with the Western Democracies in this hitherto unconvincing struggle against militarism and autocracy. The news was rumoured that the Czar had abdicated. Again, it was said that a section of the court had been planning a revolution to depose the Emperor and substitute his brother Michael in order to carry on the war more vigorously; and that the people’s revolution had preceded it by two days. Some monarchists now wanted to put down the revolution in order to carry on the war; other monarchists wanted to put down the war in order to put down the revolution; and still other monarchists wanted to put down the revolution and did not care a hang about the war. The Liberals wanted the revolution to carry on the war; the Czar wanted to put down the revolution; the Socialists and workmen wanted to put down the war and to put down the Czar; and the soldiers and sailors wanted to put down their officers. The Liberal gathering drank to Russia’s Allies; and then Uncle Kostia, obviously moved by the great event, rose and said in a slow, melodious voice:

“We will not talk about or criticize the past. We will carry it gently into the depths of the garden and bury it there among the flowers. And then, carefully, we will look into the cradle and nurse very tenderly the slumbering future.⁠ ⁠…”

This attitude, we all felt, was befitting to the great bloodless revolution.