crowd of ordinary citizens were passing in front of the Singer
Building on the Nevsky in Petrograd at noon February 25th, Russian time
(March 10th), stopping occasionally to watch a company of Cossacks
amiably roughing some students with a miscellaneous following who
insisted on assembling across the street before the wide, sweeping
colonnades of Kasan Cathedral. As the Cossacks trotted through, hands
empty, rifles slung on shoulders, the crowds cheered, the Cossacks
laughed.

A few trolley cars had stopped, though not stalled, and groups of
curious on-lookers had crowded in for a grandstand view. The only people
who did not seem interested in the spectacle were hundreds of women with
shawls over their heads who had been standing in line for many hours
before the bread-shops along the Catherine Canal.

[Sidenote: Some Cossacks and infantry in side streets.]

[Sidenote: People charged by police.]

People were going about their affairs up and down the Nevsky without
being stopped, and sleighs were passing constantly. Cossacks and a few
companies of infantrymen were beginning to appear on the side streets in
considerable numbers, but, as a demonstration over the lack of bread in
the Russian capital had been going on at intervals for two days with
very little violence, people were beginning to get used to it. I arrived
from the direction of the Moika Canal just as the cannon boomed midday
and I felt sufficiently unhurried to correct my watch. Then I hailed a
British general in uniform who had arrived, also unimpeded, from the
opposite direction, and we had just stopped to comment on the unusual
attitude of populace and Cossacks, when there was a sudden rush of
people around the corner from the Catherine Canal and before we could
even reach the doubtful protection of a doorway a company of mounted
police charged around the corner and started up the Nevsky on the
sidewalk. We were obviously harmless onlookers, fur-clad bourgeois, but
the police plunged through at a hard trot, bare sabres flashing in the
cold sunshine. The British general and I were knocked down together and
escaped trampling only because the police were splendidly mounted, and a
well-bred horse will not step on a man if he can help it.

[Sidenote: Display of stupid physical force.]

This was a display of that well-known stupid physical force which used
to be the basis of strength of the Russian Empire. Its ruthlessness, its
carelessness of life, howeve