Owing to my fatigued condition and to the weight of my carbine and cartridges, I often lagged behind, whereupon the Cossacks would call out on Philipoff to wait for his master, "the gospodeen korrespondent "
(Monsieur le correspondant). When, finally, we did reach the Liao-ho, I was too tired to look at it. My only desire was to find a vacant " kang " in the village at which we stopped, and I must confess with shame that on this Christmas night I heard without an atom of sympathy — in fact only with irritation — the wail of women and children who were turned out of their beds and houses at that hour of the night to make room for the tired and desperate soldiery.
In the one unoccupied house which I and some officers at length discovered, we encountered unexpected opposition. The gate was barricaded, and when we climbed over the barricade we were met by three tall figures, all dressed from head to foot in white, who raised their arms and solemnly warned us not to enter. On finding that these people were Mahommedan Chinese and were in mourning for their father, whose dead body lay inside, we desisted in something like a panic and went elsewhere.
Late next night, when we were sleeping in another village on the east bank of the Liao, we were awakened by a scout, who came to tell us in a somewhat scared tone of voice that he heard a drum ("baraban ") beating in the village where we had slept the night before. Whether this eerie performance had anything to do with our attempt to enter the house of death I cannot say. We did not stop to see. But, trifling as it may seem, the faint roll of that Chinese drum, beating in the night on the frozen banks of the Liao-ho, impressed my imagination as strongly as anything that I saw or heard throughout the war.
CHAPTER IV
The advance of Mishchenko's three columns was the best thing from the spectacular point of view which I saw during the war, and, if not very successful, it was, at any rate, the most daring enterprise which the Russians essayed.
On December 26, the day after the Russian Christmas, or January 8 with us, General Mishchenko crossed the Hun River, near Suhudyapu, at the head of twelve regiments, that is seventy-two squadrons of cavalry, with the object of destroying nine million roubles' worth of stores which the Japanese had accumulated at Yinkow for the use of their army, and which they had only left three hundred men to guard. The Russians had, of course, agents in Yinkow, who made them acquainted with these facts, and the expedition of Colonel Plaoutine, as well as various expeditions of other detachments of Mishchenko's command — one of which, carried out by the Tersko- Kubansky regiment, a force of Caucasian volunteers, went as far south as the Taitsze River — disclosed the fact that, with the exception of a few small and isolated Japanese posts at Shalin, east of Liaoyang, at old Newchwang, and in one or two other places, the road from Mukden to Yinkow, along the eastern bank of the Liao-ho, was practically open. Mishchenko would not, of course, refrain from destroying any force of Japanese or Hunghuze, or from burning any of the enemy's transports that he came across, but his main object was Yinkow. •
Naturally this was kept secret, and in spite of all that has been said about the excellent, not to say miraculous, manner in which their Chinese agents served them, the Japanese did not seem to have suspected, until we had almost reached Yinkow, that our raid was anything more than one of the usual small Cossack forays against the Hunghuze. The cutting of the railway between Liaoyang and Yinkow in order to prevent the despatch of troops southwards, was a necessary part of Mishchenko's plan. I must say, however, that at first I did not know where Mishchenko was going to, and this secrecy made the expedition extremely attractive to my imagination. The Cossack officers said that we were about to march against China, and my profound ignorance of what was happening at that time in the outside world led me to believe it. There is a charm sometimes in being out of the world, in a place where you don't get your morning newspaper; news from the outside then becomes so beautifully vague! I had not seen any papers for months before, and I was not at all surprised, in consequence, to learn that this expedition would cross the Liao-ho and that it might be followed by trouble with England and the dismemberment of the Middle Kingdom. Why, this day week we might be stabling our horses in the Imperial Palace at Peking! " What's the game now? " I asked myself a thousand times as I walked along the frozen street of
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