From all that Philipoff told me about the Transbaikal Cossacks, and from what I saw of them with my own eyes, I came to the conclusion that these much-maligned horsemen are gentle, inoffensive farmers' sons, who do not like war at all, who are apt to
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fall asleep at any time in the day (Pushkin notes that characteristic in his " Prisoner of the Caucasus "), and whose only ambition is to till their fields, sing songs, and live happily with their wives, for all of them are married. And yet these simple lads are the folk of whom a Frenchman wrote in 1814, " le viol, le meurtre, le fer, le vol, le pillage, l'incendie, le carnage, tous les maux de la terre, leur sont familiers. Le recit de la ferocite de ces barbares fait fremir la nature."
As for their officers and for Russian officers in general, they are an extraordinarily hospitable and genial people. It would almost seem as if Russian officers were influenced by that beautiful superstition, which still prevails among the Russian peasants, that one must never refuse to offer hospitality lest he repulse angels unawares.
Scores of times throughout the course of the war, I lost touch with Mishchenko's detachment, and in such cases I had to rely on the hospitality of strange officers whom I happened to meet with. As a rule I did not know these officers, and my "udostoverenie" gave me no claim on them whatever, but nevertheless their treatment of me was invariably very kind.
Again and again have I arrived when the officers were making a meagre dinner of a few tins of Russian preserves — a quarter of one small tin, say, to each man — and, although I have never been regarded as an entertaining individual, they always hailed my advent as gladly as if I had brought them a fresh supply of provisions and a case of vodka.
I sometimes stumbled on them in the early morning at an hour when no society tolerates callers, and when some of them were in bed and some of them walking about in their pyjamas, but it never made any difference in the manner of their reception. On such occasions they did not shake hands — for in the morning the Russians do not shake hands until after they have washed — but the loud, cheery tones in which they said, first, " Z dobrym utram " (good morning), and then, without pausing to take breath, "stakan chai pajaluista?" (a cup of tea, please?) were as brimful of friendly feeling as they could possibly be.
On such occasions I have seen officers produce cherished stores of sweetmeats, a precious tin of butter, or a last box of chocolate — objects worth their weight in gold at such a time — and place them in front of the visitor whose name they did not know, and whom they never expected to encounter again. If these pages happen to meet the eyes of any Russian who has thus befriended me I hope he will take this as an expression of my warmest thanks.
Another characteristic of the Russian officer is his high spirits and his marvellous health and vitality. He seems to be simply bursting with vitality and overflowing with animal spirits. In most of the messes the officers are large-limbed, young, ruddy-faced, bright-eyed, and to hear the racy, enthusiastic, jovial way in which they recount their experiences would make the most confirmed old misanthorpe feel cheerful. Their hearty laughter is infectious; and their gaiety does not depend on good food and good drink, for I have found them as cheerful after dining on a few fragments of stale bread as after a champagne lunch.
During the battle of the Shaho, Mishchenko had been stationed near the village of Fudyapu, on the banks of that river, a few miles south-east of Hwang-shan; and, instead of doing anything with his Cossacks, he had been chained, as usual, to a bare hill-top, where his horsemen were quite useless.
In November he left this village, and went into the reserve at a hamlet called Mudzetun, a few miles south of the Hun river. With their usual ingenuity, the Cossacks had marvellously transformed this erstwhile Chinese village, so that it had become as Cossack in appearance as Verkhnyudinsk or Arshinsk, the only evidence that it had ever been inhabited by Celestials being a small Buddhist temple on the roadside.