As a pastime pursued for its own sake, war — of the kind which old Mishchenko gave us on that occasion leaves fox-hunting far behind. In both cases you have the hard riding and the open air and the glorious sweep of country; but in war you have the piquant spice of danger, and even if you are a non-combatant the intoxicating sense of power, without which a ride across country will ever afterward seem to you like salad without vinegar, like an egg without salt. Little wonder, then, that when, on the day after the fight at Yinkow, I left my orderly, my Caucasian friends and Mishchenko in order to ride into a part of the country that had not yet been visited by the belligerents, I felt like Brigadier Gerard after Waterloo, and determined to get back to the army again as speedily as possible.
Nearly every Cossack engagement opens in the same way. A Cossack scout rushes back breathlessly to his leader, and somehow or other there is never any mistaking the news he brings. On two occasions, at all events, when I marked the agitation of the courier and the fleetness with which he rode, and noticed our leader bend forward in his saddle in an attitude of keen expectation, I said to myself, "Something serious has happened," and on both occasions I was right — a man had been shot. One of these occasions was the present, but when the man reached Colonel Bunting and saluted, he gasped and remained silent. It was not that he was wounded or breathless. The reason of his silence was that he was a Caucasian and unable to speak a word of Russian. A few moments before, the first rifle had cracked, and Staff-Captain Chaplin had fallen from his horse, shot through the heart.
An interpreter having been found, Colonel Bunting succeeded in ascertaining from the Caucasian scout that there was a band of Hunghuze in the vicinity of a village called Lee-quee-shou. H< therefore gave the order to charge, and the Tersko- Kubansky and the Donsky Cossacks received at the same time a similar command. The Hunghuze were on the opposite bank of the Hun river — we were not far now from the point where the Hun joins the Liao — and had apparently fired at us from behind one of the earthen mounds which the Chinese have constructed for scores of miles along the banks of the river in order to protect their fields from inundations. The Cossacks, therefore, crossed the ice (see photo.) and swept like a whirlwind on the Hunghuze. The memory of that charge will remain with me the longest day I live.
The horses rushed across the plain at a speed which one could scarcely have believed possible considering the nature of the ground, and, amid the clouds of dust raised by their horses' hoofs, the swords of the Cossacks flashed. The Hunghuze scattered so rapidly that I could form no idea of their number, but some officers put it at five hundred. Many of them stood their ground bravely, firing on the Russians until their heads were cloven by the Caucasians, who did not, I must say, keep them waiting long. They did not fall in heaps, however, as you see in battle pictures, but were very widely scattered over an immense plain, so widely that I only saw two corpses, both corpses of Chinamen, dressed like the Hunghuze we had killed during Plaoutine's raid, and with nothing remarkable about them.