It was certainly a matter of interest to him. Hanbury-Williams and I reconvened that evening, and I raised it with him, wondering, as you have, where the conversation might have led.

‘Our young friend,’ he told me – those words have stayed with me – ‘our young friend has a simple notion of democracy, but in some ways the truest nonetheless.’

I wasn’t convinced of that, with the eye of a king or emperor upon the boy’s preferred parliament, when our own country makes its way well without such interference, but my choice was to listen, not to contest my companion’s every sentence. He told me the Tsarevitch was studying to understand the world as best he could, but that he was caught in the abstract world of the classroom and the decidedly unusual world of a royal court.

The general stood up at that moment, walked to the doorway and checked the lobby, though I had heard no sound there. I believe he was confirming that we were alone. The bartender had called last drinks and left us to finish our wine.

When he came back to the table, he leaned a little closer to me than before and said, ‘There is a risk that starving people lack the patience for a gradual transition.’

Corruption, he told me, had led Russia to be short of supplies, and prioritising the military meant the citizens were short of food and fuel, a potential disaster with winter almost upon us.

He asked me, ‘Do you know why the Russian army is the largest in the world?’ It was clearly rhetorical. ‘Because it promises its soldiers food.’

The army was already sixteen million strong by the previous summer, and added several million more after a call in July. Boys and men coming in from the farms, to Mogilev and Petrograd and elsewhere, haggard creatures after years of hard labour on insufficient soup and black bread, and weeks later, there they were in uniform, fed and tall and ready.

Was the general a useful source of information?

I found him to be the most useful in all of Mogilev. Russia had a new prime minister, Alexander Trepov, in office barely a week, and Hanbury-Williams was ready to speak frankly of him in a way no Russian would. Trepov was, to the general’s mind, an able and cautious democrat, but with powerful enemies, among them his interior minister, Alexander Protopopov.