There is something very low about a crowd, it seems to me. One moment it is ready to curse the war and its cruelties, the next to gloat over it with a morbid pleasure. It may be due to our successes in Galicia, or perhaps to the general excitement over military engagements, but to my mind there is too much noise and rejoicing, both in the papers as well as in our office. No one denies that the Belgians are heroes and that King Albert is an exalted personality, worthy of his crown, but since the throats of these heroes are being cut wholesale, what is there to rejoice about? I hold my tongue in my usual manner, of course, but their attitude is amazing. However, I couldn’t resist the popular enthusiasm, and paid my tribute to it by buying a portrait of King Albert. It doesn’t mean, though, that I am carried away by the war. The sight of staring headlines such as “Yaraslav Ablaze,” “Sandomir in Flames,” sends a sharp pain through my brain as if some foreign matter had got into it. What an imagination a man must have to visualise the picture of “Yaraslav Ablaze,” or “Sandomir in Flames”! Unconsciously you find yourself thanking your stars that Petrograd is so far removed from those horrors. + 