The greatest podvig is in patience,
Love and prayer.
The sound of these Russian words is so beautiful in the original tongue that inevitably after you have read them you go on murmuring them till they are yours—a possession of the heart:
Podvig yest ee f srazhenie:
Podvig yest ee f borbay:
Veeshy podvig f terpenie,
Liubvy i molbay.
This is not absolutely correct transliteration, but I have written in the hope that it maybe easier to say.
This picture is true for Russia and will be valuable long after peace has come as a historical witness of the spirit of the time. In the war, despite all its ugliness and accidentoriness, human nature is revealed as more beautiful, more daring, also more tender. The Russians have this picture, and we also have the reality. There is a strong spiritual life manifest among us. It is manifest in the faces of the soldiers and in the life of their anxious and loving women they leave behind. Will not some one paint it for us?