tined ever to emerge again."

_See page 385._]

* * * * *

On the 8th of January a swift warship, attended by two dynamite
cruisers, left Portsmouth, bound for Odessa. She had on board the
last of the Tsars of Russia, and those of his generals and Ministers
who had been taken prisoners with him on Muswell Hill. A thousand
feet overhead floated the _Ariel_, under the command of Alexis
Mazanoff.

From Odessa the prisoners were taken by train to Moscow. There, in
the Central Convict Depot, they met their families and the officials
whose share in their crimes made it necessary to bring them under the
sentence pronounced by Natas. They were chained together in squads,
Tsar and prince, noble and official, exactly as their own countless
victims had been in the past, and so they were taken with their wives
and children by train to Ekaterinenburg.

Although the railway extended as far as Tomsk, Mazanoff made them
disembark here, and marched them by the Great Siberian road to the
Pillar of Farewells on the Asiatic frontier. There, as so many
thousands of heart-broken, despairing men and women had done before
them, they looked their last on Russian soil.

From here they were marched on to the first Siberian _etape_, one of
a long series of foul and pestilential prisons which were to be the
only halting-places on their long and awful journey. The next
morning, as soon as the chill grey light of the winter's dawn broke
over the snow-covered plains, the men were formed up in line, with
the sleighs carrying the women and children in the rear. When all was
ready Mazanoff gave the word: "Forward!" the whips of the Cossacks
cracked, and the mournful procession moved slowly onward into the
vast, white, silent wilderness, out of which none save the guards
were destined ever to emerge again.

EPILOGUE.

"AND ON EARTH PEACE!"

The winter and summer of 1905 passed in unbroken tranquillity all
over Europe and the English-speaking world. The nations, at last
utterly sickened of bloodshed by the brief but awful experience of
the last six months of 1904, earnestly and gladly accepted the new
order of things. From first to last of the war the slaughter had
averaged more than a million of fighting men a month, and fully five
millions of non-combatants, men, women, and children, had fallen
victims to famine and disease, or had been killed during the
wholesale destruction of fortified towns by the war-balloon