They screamed here, and called out: to their comrades, to their mothers, to a merciless God; confessing, entreating, cursing; in pain, in confusion; in Russian, in tongues of the almost dead already calling out from places beyond. All had lost something: a leg, sight, sanity, the will to fight whatever they were fighting for. Nicholas II came in but not for long, a few words in the silence of men biting the bullet. Then confusions of German, Finnish, Russian: barked orders, pleas for clemency, the rough search for Reds under the bed. Then the complaining of the third class, and the subdued talk of ladies, opinions expressed sotto voce. And where the beds stood in four rows, the raised voices of the hard-of-hearing and the ringing bells of the ticket desks.