I do not know if Russia did a wise thing in sending these men out to Manchuria at all, for if there is any truth in the accusations of barbarity the Japanese have made, these Caucasians must — although nearly all of them are princes — have been the guilty parties. They are decidedly picturesque, it is true, but they are not much good against plain unimpressive foot soldiers. Then again, they came to Manchuria under a misapprehension. They thought the war with Japan would be run on exactly the same lines as the war with China; and they cannot be blamed for falling into this mistake, since their officers also thought so. As soon as they had ascertained that the Japanese were not naked savages, armed with bows and arrows, they got discontented and wanted to go home, but were refused permission to do so, whereupon many deserted and were immediately caught and shot.
The Russian non-commissioned officers amongst these Caucasians belong to the Cossacks of Kuban and Terek, the " line of the Caucasus," names of rivers which recall bloody battles and the memory of the unhappy Lermontov. Up till a short time ago they fought continuously against these fierce Tcherkesses, whose arms and equipment they have adopted, and whose very features they seem to have borrowed — a fact which is explained by a venerable custom these Cossacks still have of massacring all the men in an aoul and conveying the best looking women to their " Stanitzi " in order to marry them.
Like the Transbaikal and unlike the Ural or Don or Black Sea Cossacks, these Caucasians have no lances, but depend altogether on their good sabres. Among them rode the grandson of I mum Schamyl, who within the memory of living men troubled Russia with a guerilla warfare, which he conducted with a genius and energy scarcely paralleled in history. The St. George's Cross, which the aged standard-bearer of the Daghistan regiment wore, was won on the day that Schamyl surrendered.
At the head of the Caucasian brigade was Prince Orbelliani, of an ancient Georgian family, which claims to be descended from two Chinese princes who obtained in 240 a.d. the protection of Artaxerxes, whose son Sapor transferred them with their followers to Armenia. Prince Orbelliani did not, however, take part in the raid, being sick at Harbin, but his place was taken by an equally picturesque figure, Prince (Han) Nahitchivansky, a Mohammedan nobleman. The adjutant of Prince Nahitchivansky bore the name of Hadji Murat, a name which speaks for itself.
The names of the officers with whom I rode were all historical. Some of them are borne by the oldest Cossack families — Grekoff, Plaoutine, Platoff, Kaznetzoff, Krasnoff. One young colonel from the General Staff, who accompanied us bore the name of that gigantic barbarian who loved Catherine the Great and who strangled her Imperial husband. He is a polished diplomatist, a great linguist, a landowner, a courtier, an influential man at headquarters. He rode on this occasion a horse which was almost worth its weight in gold, and, according to his invariable custom on such occasions, carried in his pocket a copy of one of Shakespeare's plays. His knowledge of English literature and of every nuance of expression in the English language is extraordinarily extensive.
The colonel of the regiment to which I was attached was called Bunting, and was of English descent. One of the officers, a polite and well-educated young man from the Guards, was of Tartar descent, as his name, Turbin, indicates. Another was young Burtin, at one and the same time lieutenant in the Arab cavalry of France and centurion in the Mongol Cossacks of Mishchenko.
To make our crowd still more variegated, there was a full-blooded negro in it. He had been born in the Caucasus, spoke only Russian, and seemed to be exactly on an equality with his white comrades-inarms. With the exception of Burtin, I was the only non-Russian at this memorable trysting-place in the valley of the Liao-ho.
However much I might try to persuade myself that the Cossack is a thing of the past, I could not fail to be impressed by this great gathering of the men who guard the Russian frontier from the shores of the Pacific to the shores of the ebony and amber sea, and whose very designation, recalling the names of great rebels like Mazeppa, Stenka Razin, Pugatcheff, the false Dimitri, made me see, dimly, gigantic upheavals more Asiatic than European, and made me hear faintly, as at a great distance, the hoof-beats of innumerable hordes of horsemen galloping over the steppes. The Cossacks cannot fail to be interesting, for they are the only reminder we have left of the time when the population of Europe was fluid and nomad.