turn. Then, as the
Bycenie, beyond, suddenly filled with revolutionists coming from some
other quarter, we turned to cross the Litenie. Twenty minutes earlier
Captain McCulley had passed there and the Government troops controlled
for another quarter mile. Now we passed a machine-gun company commanding
the street, which dared not fire because there was a line of soldiers
between it and a vast crowd pouring through the street toward us. The
crowd had already overwhelmed and made revolutionists out of hundreds of
soldiers, and the situation for a moment was dramatically tense.

Down the bisecting Litenie another crowd was advancing, filling the wide
street. Before it there was also a company of soldiers, and it did not
know whether to face the Bycenie or the river. Three immense mobs were
overwhelming it, though it knew of but two. Suddenly, just at the moment
when we expected a shower of bullets, and flattened ourselves against a
doorway, the company grounded arms and in three seconds was in the arms
of the revolution.

[Sidenote: Company after company joins.]

As we retreated to the Nevsky ahead of the victorious crowd we could see
company after company turn, as if suddenly deciding not to shoot, and
join.

[Sidenote: Thunder of motor trucks.]

I walked rapidly back to the Morskaya and down to the cable office,
which I found closed, not encountering on the whole two miles a single
soldier or policeman until I reached St. Isaac's Cathedral, where a
regiment of marines turned up the Morskaya toward the Nevsky, swinging
along behind a band. Five minutes later I followed them up the Morskaya,
but before I reached the Gorokawaya, half the distance, I could hear the
thunder of the revolutionary motor trucks and the glad howls of the
revolutionists. They had run the length of the Nevsky, and the city,
except this little corner, was theirs. The shooting began at once, and
for the next three hours on both the Morskaya and the Moika there was
steady firing. This was still going on when, at nine in the evening, I
passed around the edge of the fight, crossed Winter Palace Square,
deserted except for a company of Cossacks dimly outlined against the
Winter Palace across the square. By passing under the arch into the head
of Morskaya again I was once more with the revolutionists.

I have since asked Mr. Milukoff, now Minister of Foreign Affairs, at
that moment a member of the Duma's Committee of Safety, how much of an
organizati