Page:John Reed - Ten Days that Shook the World - 1919, Boni and Liveright.djvu/294

242 “‘Very well. But you must give me a guard on which I can count.’

“‘Good.’

“I went out and called the Cossack Russkov, of the Tenth Regiment of the Don, and ordered him to pick out ten Cossacks to accompany the Supreme Commander. Half an hour later the Cossacks came to tell me that Kerensky was not in his quarters, that he had run away.

“I gave the alarm and ordered that he be searched for, supposing that he could not have left Gatchina, but he could not be found…”

And so Kerensky fled, alone, “disguised in the uniform of a sailor”, and by that act lost whatever popularity he had retained among the Russian masses…

I went back to Petrograd riding on the front seat of an auto truck, driven by a workman and filled with Red Guards. We had no kerosene, so our lights were not burning. The road was crowded with the proletarian army going home, and new reserves pouring out to take their places. Immense trucks like ours, columns of artillery, wagons, loomed up in the night, without lights, as we were. We hurtled furiously on, wrenched right and left to avoid collisions that seemed inevitable, scraping wheels, followed by the epithets of pedestrians.

Across the horizon spread the glittering lights of the capital, immeasurably more splendid by night than by day, like a dike of jewels heaped on the barren plain.

The old workman who drove held the wheel in one hand, while with the other he swept the far-gleaming capital in an exultant gesture.

“Mine!” he cried, his face all alight. “All mine now! My Petrograd!”