Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/122

 We arrived there on the 6th of June. The spacious and comfortable railway waggon in which we had travelled, and which we were to have at our disposal during our whole trip, was formerly used by General Rousski; it had during the early days of the Revolution been used by the delegates of the Provisional Committee to go and meet the Czar and obtain his signature to his act of abdication in the station at Pskov.

Generalissimo Alexeieff, who received us at the Stavka, was about to surrender his post to General Broussiloff. Thus we had the good fortune to meet the two great leaders of the revolutionary army, one at the close and the other at the beginning of his office. Both, in their different ways, made a great impression on us.

We knew General Alexeieff from his photographs, that show him possessed of the typical physiognomy of the moujik—large mouth, large nose, with small and baggy eyes under bushy eyebrows. What a surprise it was to find beneath this rough-hewn plebeian mask a fine and expressive physiognomy. Alexeieff truly is more like