In one of their songs, wherein a soldier is lying dead and his black horse is bending over him, all the Cossacks join, after every second line, in a wild barbaric chant of " Akh! Mo'i Bozhin'ka! Akh! Moi Bozhin'ka! " which is extraordinarily weird and effective. Another favourite subject is a Cossack youth languishing in a Moslem prison.
There are continual references to the great rivers along which most of the Cossacks live. In fact, the Don Cossacks regard the Don as the early Romans regarded Father Tiber; it is almost a divinity. They call it Don Ivanovitch (Don, son-of-Ivan, for the Cossacks have a tradition that the Don is the offspring of Lake Ivan), much as the Japanese peasants call their famous mountain Fuji San (Mr. Fuji), and generally designate it as "the quiet Don Ivanovitch,'' by way, I suppose, of contrasting it with the unquiet peoples who roam its banks.
Cossack ballad-makers refer often in their songs to beautiful girls, differing greatly in this respect from Japanese ballad-makers, who would as soon think of referring to the binomial theorem.
The Cossack song lays great stress on a free life, independence, and contempt of death.
It does not seem, however, to show any extraordinary respect to the Tsar, or at least to his representatives, some of whom the Cossacks decapitate and cast into the " quiet Don Ivanovitch," addressing insulting remarks to them as they float down the stream. No Tsar has ever been so reverenced by the Cossacks as Stenka Razin, who for years defied St. Petersburg and devastated all the country between the Volga and the Don.
I once heard recited at the camp-fire a splendid ballad which a poet, called Zhukovsky, I think, composed in the Russian camp on the eve of the battle fought on the Tarutina during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. It begins with a powerful description of night in camp —
Na polye brannom teesheena; Ognee mezhdu shatramee!
Silence rests on the battlefield, Fires burn among the tents.
But the best thing in this ballad is the invocation of a dead hero, an invocation which B6ranger, by the way, borrows in his Chant du Cosaque.
" Who," asks the poet, " is this tremendous giant, this horseman from the North, that glares with terrible eyes at the camp of the sleeping enemy?
" Ghosts fly with fearful cries from his path, which, far as the snowy fastnesses of the Alps, is strewn with thunderstorms.
" The Gaul grows pale. Beneath this baleful glare the Sarmate trembles in his tent. Woe! woe! to the foeman! 'Tis the spirit of our terrible Suwaroff! "
Naturally enough, the Cossack does not forget to mention the horse in his ballads. In fact, he manages to introduce him into the most unlikely subjects. One of the Russian marriage songs begins, for instance, as follows:
Matushka! What makes that dust on the plain? Sadar'nya! What makes that dust on the plain? „ My daughter! the hoof-beats, the hoof-beats of horses! Sadar'nya I the hoof-beats, the hoof-beats of horses!
Of course the lover is astride one of the horses, although the fair one is not supposed to know it. Again, in another marriage song:
'Tis not a falcon flying through the sky, 'Tis not a falcon with its feathers blue, 'Tis a bold youth who gallops bravely by.
When winter came on, some of the "skazki" (stories) those Cossacks used to tell during the long nights around the samovar were calculated to make one's flesh creep, stories of the old days when a Cossack who had murdered another Cossack (if he killed a person who was not a Cossack, it did not seem to be regarded as murder at all or even manslaughter) was buried alive underneath the coffin of the man he had murdered. Sometimes the ghost of a murderer used to appear with the coffin of the victim on his back, and to pursue any one who passed his grave by night, and the fear of being chased in this frightful way was sufficient to prevent the boldest horseman from approaching the haunted spot.
I first heard this story one night immediately after the battle of the Shaho, and in the middle of a desolate valley where some ten thousand men had just been killed, and I could not help thinking it strange that not one of the Cossacks, who, in Russia, would be frightened to death if asked to pass the grave of a murderer by night, was in the least disturbed when told to traverse alone, at any hour in the twenty-four, this valley of dead men's bones. The Cossacks seemed no more to expect ghosts to appear in a battlefield than in a butcher's shop.