of the room where the Bolshevik treaty with Germany was signed. 'Neither Peace, nor War.' it reads, and is signed 'Leon Trotksy, December 1917, Brest'- certainly not a bad estimate of the situation, especially so, considering the date." Heading on towards Baranowicze, Koehler's party travelled through miles of burned land, for which he observed that, "[I]n accordance with age-old Russian strategy the armies laid waste the countryside as they retreated... Wonderfully thorough they were, these poor Russians, in destroying their own houses and fields." Arriving at the border, they found "a long line of prairie schooners coming in. 'Is this Poland? Are we out of Russia? God be praised!' came again and again in the same jabbering Russian, Polish and German. It happened that in this crowd were German colonists from Russia. They had been in Russia for many generations, they had never mixed with the Russians but kept close together in their little farm colonies along the Volga.... I talked to one peasant who was under twenty-seven although he looked over forty- and small wonder, for he had tramped over five thousand versts and during the last stretch had dragged the cart himself, as the Bolsheviks had taken away his horse. I examined the cart he had brought all this distance and with so tremendous an effort. An old bed, bits of sacking, an assortment of battered pots and pans, an old sheepskin, part of a wolfskin, rags, nine potatoes, a handful of radishes, some pieces of tallow- nothing else. The complete inventory would not net a dollar; he explained that he had had a cow but the Bolsheviks had taken it away from him at the border. Yet he was much better off than thousands, for having been out in the open he was in comparatively good health although drawn and wasted, whereas the others who had come back by train were feeble and diseased and bleeding from bites. The children of course, were the most tragic sights. They are young only when they smile." In his travels through Germany, when Koehler met German women with babies, he would ask them if they were raising them to be canonenfutter (cannon fodder). Invariably, they would respond, " 'No,' indignantly. But on further talking, they would just as invariably intimate that these boys would have to someday fight as their fathers did, because the French would not let them do