At Ko\Tio, where the enemy were at last driven from Russian soil, Ney and his rearguard made a final heroic stand. After another victory stubbornly won, Platov and his Cossacks heard a Te Deum in the public square, the horsemen drawn up in grim and silent ranks, wliile the inhabitants knelt about them. Before the bells which rang out so joyfully in the cold air had ceased their pealing, the Cossacks swept beyond the frontier into "Europe."*
History next notices Platov and his Cossacks preparing to take part in the attack on Danzig, still in the possession of Napoleon's German allies. The news that Frederick William of Prussia had finally simmioned up courage to join the Alliance in the "Befreiungskrieg" caused the surrender of that place. On the road near Kahce, Platov was sent to meet the none too heroic HohenzoUern and soon after conducted him to the General Staff of Em-
* The true Slav always refers to the land west of Russia in this way.
peror Alexander, the real Liberator of Germany. At the famous "Battle of the Nations," fought at Leipzig in October, 1813, Platov received the Cross of St. Andrew.
To reward his conduct during the engagement near Frankfort-on-Oder, there remained no higher honour to bestow upon the hetman. The thanks of his sovereign and a diamond aigrette to ornament his Cossack Tshapka were the only official means of recognizing the valor of his troops. It was, perhaps, fortunate that the war was drawing to a close! •
The last warlike enterprise in which we hear of Platov and his Cossacks was their chivalrous attempt to rescue the captive Pope at Fontainebleau. But the unfortunate head of the Roman Church (dragged about together with the royal treasures of France in the wake of the faUen conqueror) had already left that place. Thus the strangest booty that could have fallen into the hands of the orthodox Cossacks of the Don escaped their wellmeant efforts.
Soon after the peace of Paris, Platov made his famous visit to London of which we have already had occasion to speak. The "hundred days" following Napoleon's return from the island of Elba cost the veteran a last long ride across Europe to the battle of Waterloo.
His next return to the now peaceful shores of the Don was, however, to be the last. For three years the tired veteran enjoyed unbroken rest and the ineiatable reaction ensued. The steel springs of his energy uncoiled, and after a short illness due to a cold the Hetman Platov died peacefully in his bed in the year 1818.
CHAPTER X
F TO-DAY:
AT the close of the imperial regime, the term "Cossack" was legally applied to a distinct class or caste within the Russian state, differentiated by well-defined rights and duties from the ordinary subjects of the empire. For military reasons the Tsar's government fostered the clan spirit and esprit de corps which has always characterized the "Free People."
To the North Russian peasant the Cossack troops were often associated with measures of police and oppression. Historical reasons, as we have seen, have also played their part in separating the Cossack from the Moujik class — whose infinite docility the former have always regarded with contempt and aversion. Yet the distrust existing between them and the "great gray mass" of the Russian peasantry did not prevent the Cossacks from playing a notable role in the events which brought about the constructive revolution of 1917.
The Cossacks are at present organized into eleven "armies," each occupying its own settlement or allotted territory. Their stanitzi, or set-
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
tlements, are generally distributed along the frontiers, old and new, of what was formerly the Empire of All the Russias. Officially these stanitzi were known as the territories of the Cossack armies of the Don, Ural, Terek, Kuban, Orenburg, Astrakhan, Trans-Baikal, Siberian, Siemriechinskoe (Seven Rivers), Amur and Ussuri. (See Map.) Thus with every Cossack "army" or its subdivision was associated some definite grant of land to which it was "territorially" attached.
The Cossacks of the later "armies," formed for the purpose of patrolling and safeguarding the long frontiers of Russia's newly acquired Asiatic provinces, never enjoyed the same generous grants of land that were conferred upon the earlier subdivisions, such as the Cossacks of the Kouban and Terek.