In the Cossack "skazki" the dead are sometimes represented under an altogether dreadful aspect, horrible stories being told of corpses, animated by demons, rising at midnight and attempting to rend their watchers. Warlocks, vampires, and all that terrible brotherhood trouble the Cossack imagination^ and sometimes, especially on a dark night, one gets quite unnerved by a course of these stories, which are so different from the sunny myths of the Japanese. As for the songs and superstitions of our Mongol and Caucasian contingents, I have neither the space nor the knowledge to deal with them.
The only outdoor exercise the Cossack got at this season, besides his daily drill, was attending to his horses and stacking up the straw and " kiaoliang," which was conveyed to Cossackville from villages to the north of Mukden in long lines of Chinese carts. This spectacle of the men building up stacks of straw was very peaceful and rural, and harmonised well with the sound of the hammer, which was always ringing on the anvil in our village smithy, but not, I am sorry to say, converting swords into plough-shares.
As for outdoor sports, there was not such a thing as a football in the entire army, and the only exercise the officers got was riding into town or practising pistol-shooting for bets. Indoors they read Anton Tchekhov, Turgueniev, Grigorovitch, Pisarov, and heavy reviews giving a very complete account of foreign literature. Many of them took in the leading daily papers of St. Petersburg, and several received technical reviews, periodicals dealing with military matters, with the horse, etc. On the whole their reading was solid. They also played cards, but they were not happy till they had got from Harbin a gramophone, which reeled off Russian songs during mealtime. Sometimes a rattling old Cossack tune would so excite the younger members of our community that they would jump up from table and dance the M Kazatchok."
I still seem to hear this gramophone grinding out select pieces from Glinka's " Life for the Tsar." Meanwhile the steaming "samovar" purrs gently on the table, swift justice is being done to the " pirogi " (patties) and "caviare." The "borsch" is carried round by the boyish Zeemeen, whose wide kaftan is confined by a narrow belt studded with bright brass rivets like a prison door, whose head is crowned by a huge wolf-skin busby, even in the dining-room, and whose feet are always encased in high boots. We are also waited on by the jocose, mysterious-looking Buriat, Munkusha, whose name everybody pronounces in a different way.
Owing to the fact that I wore no uniform, I was for a long time a puzzle to the Cossacks.
PhilipofT once said to me, " I suppose, Vashe Blagarodie (one of noble birth), that before entering the service of his Most Gracious Majesty the Tsar, our Gosudar, you had to renounce allegiance to your own Gosudar? " And when I told him I had done nothing of the kind, he attempted to cheer me up by saying that I would probably get a decoration anyhow.
The Cossack never wearies of talking about decorations, and speculating on the order which he himself will receive when the war is over; and when he does receive an order he seems to wear it continuously day and night.
The Cossacks and the Russian soldiers generally are treated far more gently by their officers than the Japanese soldiers are by theirs. When I was in Japan there was a regular epidemic of suicide among soldiers, the result of ill-treatment on the part of officers, who were not brutal, however, but only over-zealous and over-anxious to imitate the German system to the letter. During my stay with the Russians I never saw anybody ill-used except in two cases. In one case all the orderlies in a houseful of officers got drunk, for which offence one of them — the worst
— was sent to the guard-room. As it was extremelycold, however, Essaoul Cheslavsky, the officer on duty, gave orders that the prisoner was to be released in three or four hours. In the second case a Cossack, who formed part of an expedition which I accompanied, got intoxicated on some liquor which he had obtained in a Chinese house, and for this he was made to dismount and go for some distance on foot.
Towards the end of 1904, Mishchenko's whole force, now consisting of 7500 horsemen, including Cossacks, dragoons, mounted infantry, horse artillery, and Caucasian volunteers, suddenly moved from their quarters at Mudzetun to Suhudyapu on the Hun river, about a dozen miles to the south-west of that city, with the object, as afterwards appeared, of making southward raids during the winter and cutting the Japanese line of communications.