general. He had not imagined the terrible Trebassof with so
paternal and sympathetic an expression. The Paris papers had
printed redoubtable pictures of him, more or less authentic, but
the arts of photography and engraving had cut vigorous, rough
features of an official - who knew no pity. Such pictures were in
perfect accord with the idea one naturally had of the dominating
figure of the government at Moscow, the man who, during eight
days - the Red Week - had made so many corpses of students and
workmen that the halls of the University and the factories had
opened their doors since in vain. The dead would have had to arise
for those places to be peopled! Days of terrible battle where in
one quarter or another of the city there was naught but massacre or
burnings, until Matrena Petrovna and her step-daughter, Natacha
(all the papers told of it), had fallen on their knees before the
general and begged terms for the last of the revolutionaries, at
bay in the Presnia quarter, and had been refused by him. "War is
war," had been his answer, with irrefutable logic. "How can you
ask mercy for these men who never give it?" Be it said for the
young men of the barricades that they never surrendered, and equally
be it said for Trebassof that he necessarily shot them. "If I had
only myself to consider," the general had said to a Paris
journalist, "I could have been gentle as a lamb with these
unfortunates, and so I should not now myself be condemned to death.
After all, I fail to see what they reproach me with. I have served
my master as a brave and loyal subject, no more, and, after the
fighting, I have let others ferret out the children that had hidden
under their mothers' skirts. Everybody talks of the repression of
Moscow, but let us speak, my friend, of the Commune. There was a
piece of work I would not have done, to massacre within a court an
unresisting crowd of men, women and children. I am a rough and