had been a serious revolt in Petrograd. The Semenovsky
regiment had gone over to the mutineers, who had seized the
town. The Government, however, had escaped to
Kronstadt, whence they were bombarding Petrograd with
naval guns.


This sounded fairly lively, but there was nothing to be done,
so we finished up the chess tournament we had begun on the
boat. An Esthonian won it, and I was second, by reason of
a lucky win over Litvinov, who is really a better player. By
Sunday night we reached Terijoki and on Monday moved
slowly to the frontier of Finland close to Bieloostrov. A
squad of Finnish soldiers was waiting, excluding everybody
from the station and seeing that no dangerous revolutionary
should break away on Finnish territory. There were no
horses, but three hand sledges were brought, and we piled
the luggage on them, and then set off to walk to the frontier
duly convoyed by the Finns. A Finnish lieutenant walked at
the head of the procession, chatting good-humouredly in
Swedish and German, much as a man might think it worth
while to be kind to a crowd of unfortunates just about to be
flung into a boiling cauldron. We walked a few hundred
yards along the line and then turned into a road deep in
snow through a little bare wood, and so down to the little
wooden bridge over the narrow frozen stream that
separates Finland from Russia. The bridge, not twenty yards
across, has a toll bar at each end, two sentry boxes and two
sentries. On the Russian side the bar was the familiar black
and white of the old Russian Empire, with a sentry box to