going backwards and forwards, hither and
thither, not in an aimless dejected manner
but as if they had business to do, as if there
were some purpose in their being out. It is
true the closed shops give a funereal appearance
to the streets, but apart from this there
was nothing to show that work of some kind
was not being carried on.
As in the case of the children, so in that of men and women. Again and again I stopped the friends who were with me and asked them to look at little groups of people we came across. They did not look anything like so dejected or pasty-faced as the men and women in Cologne, indeed not at all so bad as many people I have met in towns in England. This does not mean that I am asserting that everybody is well fed, that everybody has enough. But there is something in the Russian constitution that enables it to endure, a certain something which has enabled it to endure the tragedy of the past few years and still to carry itself with a certain amount of dignity and strength. A Russian once said to me, “ You cannot kill the Russian people by hunger, they will live if obliged to subsist on raw corn and water only.”
Travelling away down from Petrograd to Moscow, going through the trains, talking with the people, it was easy to discover how much there was to complain of and how
