Five nights I spent on the train and on the morning of the sixth day I was on the Nevsky Prospekt once more. Two weeks sufficed to reorganize our news service in Russia and to turn the situation over to our correspondent whose duty it was to look after affairs in that territory.
I had been doing war assignments pretty steadily now for more than two years and both my mind and body craved repose. My reprieve from further work came one night as I was chatting over Russian politics in one of Petersburg’s fashionable restaurants. I read my cable and sighed with satisfaction.
The assignment that had come to me months before in Peking was at an end. “Russia direct,” it had read and half around the world and into strange lands and among stranger peoples, it had carried me.
The next Nord Express that pulled from the Petersburg station bound for Paris carried me homeward turned and with a mind for the first time in months free from anxiety.
The situation was over.
My work was done.
Transcriber’s Notes:
The illustrations have been moved so that they do not break up paragraphs and so that they are next to the text they illustrate.
Typographical errors have been silently corrected.