enquiry sent by any of the "bourgeois" governments actually
at war with them.


I am sure that there will be many in England who will
understand much better than I the drudgery of the revolution
which is in this book very imperfectly suggested. I repeat
that it is not my fault that they must make do with the eyes
and ears of an ignorant observer. No doubt I have not asked
the questions they would have asked, and have thought
interesting and novel much which they would have taken for
granted.


The book has no particular form, other than that given it by
a more or less accurate adherence to chronology in setting
down things seen and heard. It is far too incomplete to
allow me to call it a Journal. I think I could have made it
twice as long without repetitions, and I am not at all sure that
in choosing in a hurry between this and that I did not
omit much which could with advantage be substituted for
what is here set down. There is nothing here of my talk with
the English soldier prisoners and nothing of my visit to the
officers confined in the Butyrka Gaol. There is nothing of
the plagues of typhus and influenza, or of the desperate
situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from
abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at
home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded
on every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the
ballet which I saw a few days before leaving. I have said