Russians were a blindfolded, naked people, fighting a nation fully armed.  Now, Europe was vast continents away, and only Germany, that old Germany whose soul was hateful, whose practical spirit was terribly admirable, was close at hand.  The Russian people turned hither and thither, first to its Czar, then to its generals, then to its democratic spirit, then to its idealism—­and there was no hope anywhere.  They appealed for Liberty.  In the autumn of 1916 a great prayer from the whole country went up that the bandage might be taken from its eyes, and soon, lest when the light did at last come the eyes should be so unused to it that they should see nothing.  Nicholas had his opportunity—­the greatest opportunity perhaps ever offered to man.  He refused it.  From that moment the easiest way was closed, and only a most perilous rocky path remained.

With every week of that winter of 1916, Petrograd stepped deeper and deeper into the darkness.  Its strangeness grew and grew upon me as the days filed through.  I wondered whether my illness and the troubles of the preceding year made me see everything at an impossible angle—­or it was perhaps my isolated lodging, my crumbling rooms, with the grey expanse of sea and sky in front of them that was responsible.  Whatever it was, Petrograd soon came to be to me a place with a most terrible secret life of its own.

There is an old poem of Pushkin’s that Alexandre Benois has most marvellously illustrated, which has for its theme the rising of the river Neva in November 1824.  On that occasion the splendid animal devoured the town, and in Pushkin’s poem you feel the devastating power of the beast, and in Benois’ pictures you can see it licking its lips as it swallowed down pillars and bridges and streets and squares with poor little fragments of humanity clutching and crying and fruitlessly appealing.

This poem only emphasised for me the suspicion that I had originally had, that the great river and the marshy swamp around it despised contemptuously the buildings that man had raised beside and upon it, and that even the buildings in their turn despised the human beings who thronged them.  It could only be some sense of this kind that could make one so repeatedly conscious that one’s feet were treading ancient ground.

The town, raised all of a piece by Peter the Great, could claim no ancient history at all; but through every stick and stone that had been laid there stirred the spirit and soul of the ground, so that out of one of the sluggish canals one might expect at any moment to see the horrid and scaly head of some palaeolithic monster with dead and greedy eyes slowly push its way up that it might gaze at the little black hurrying atoms as they crossed and recrossed the grey bridge.  There are many places in Petrograd where life is utterly dead; where some building, half-completed, has fallen into red and green decay; where the water lies still under iridescent scum and thick clotted reeds seem to stand at bay, concealing in their depths some terrible monster.