Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/191

 motor-car, to which the strong shoulders of the soldiers had borne us, had left the meeting-place to return across country to the General Headquarters.

Suddenly a group of Cossacks, who had been listening at a little distance from the crowd, mounted on their horses, put them to the gallop, and executed round our motor-car a kind of fantastic dance, only stopping when their horses gave out. One of them went on after the others, and for long we could see his silhouette, like some centaur wheeling round us in the dusk uttering hoarse shouts.

Once more we endeavoured, after such memorable scenes, not to let ourselves be carried away by the impression of the moment, and to draw only prudent conclusions from these manifestations, but when we heard the men, as the officers of the Belgian armoured car whom General Nottbeck had tactfully invited to meet us at dinner that evening, affirm that as far as they knew, and speaking at least for the 7th Army Corps, the moral of the men had never been better since the Russian Revolution, we were compelled to believe