I should have an escort, and the prisoner Huza was attached to me. Then, under pressure from the Branch, I had to go to Moscow, lest evil befall me, the Branch itself meaning to come afterwards. So I went to Moscow; but, on the very morning of my arrival, the fight began between the Bolshevists and Kerensky’s troops, and I suddenly found myself in the famous Hotel Métropole which Kerensky’s cadets rapidly transformed into a fortress. There I spent six days, hotly besieged by the Bolshevists. When, at last, the Kerensky cadets withdrew unobserved in the night, and the Bolshevists captured the fortress next morning—the Hotel was very solidly built, with massive walls—I was chosen as spokesman for the foreigners; the Russians, who feared to speak for themselves, choosing a Pole to represent them.
Later on, when I left Moscow for Kieff, I found myself in the French Hotel on the Krescatik during the Bolshevist siege of Kieff a dangerous place on account of its position. While we were conferring there, a huge shell fell into an adjoining room but, luckily, did not explode. Friends then insisted that I should move to a sanatorium, where the danger was certainly not less, because bullets found their way even into my room there, and I had to go regularly to the sittings of the Branch. One afternoon, Huza and I walked and ran through a hail of Bolshevist projectiles. Even now, years afterwards, when I think of what I went through during the Bolshevist occupation of the chief cities of Russia, it seems to me like a nightmare. By a singular association of ideas, the word “Bolshevism” recalls to my mind one scene among the many horrible and inhuman sights I saw during the Bolshevist Revolution. After the street fighting, at Petrograd and elsewhere, the bodies of the fallen were sent to their families, usually in the well-known Russian izvostchiks. The stiffened bodies were thrown like logs into the little vehicles, the legs sticking out on one side and the head or, sometimes, a hand on the other. Often the corpse was placed on its feet and bound fast with a piece of rope or a rag. I even saw one standing head downwards with the legs sticking up in the air. When I think of those gruesome sights, the unnecessary, senseless, barbaric killing of human beings by the Bolshevists always returns to my mind.
But it was from the standpoint of our army and of our military plans that I was chiefly interested in the Bolshevist Revolution. It soon became clear that, willingly or unwillingly, the Bolshevists would make peace with the Germans. Even in this they followed the example of the Tsar and of their
