Morgan Philips Price, the author of this valuable eye-witness account of the Great War and the early Russian Revolution as seen from the vast territories of the Caucasus in central Asia was a British left-wing journalist. A pacifist on the outbreak of war in 1914 he was recruited by the liberal 'Manchester Guardian' as a Russian-speaker to cover the war on the Eastern Front. The first part of the book describes Russian reverses and the chaotic state of the Tsar's war effort. Shocked by the chaos ( and unable to report if because of military censorship) Philips Price retreated to the Caucasus where he organised relief work for refugees. On the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1917 he saw - with sympathy - the emergence of workers, soldiers and peasants' Soviets which he hoped would overturn what he called the 'medieval barbarism' of the Tsar and usher in a new era of peace and progress. He was not to know that he was seeing the birth of a new barbarism far worse than the old. Philips returned home, became a long-term Labour MP, and died in 1973.