My heart was utterly ravaged as I left; I was severing attachments of a unique quality. I should have liked to have those dear faces, that I would never see again, imprinted on my brain, and those landscapes of white countryside, and even the image of our vast Russian misery, lived out by this brave, gritty, patient people. If I could have believed in any reasonable chance that I should not ultimately have been obliterated in a voiceless struggle that was already sterile, I would have been content to remain there even if it were in some little Mongol fishing village inside the Arctic Circle. But we do not live for ourselves; we live to work and fight.