The main body of our column — that is, the right column — had no sooner reached these carts than we noticed an enormous cloud of black smoke rise from an adjoining village and hang suspended in the still air, a portentous omen to us and a warning to all the Japanese for scores of miles around. I had been previously disposed to scoff when I heard the Russians declare that every flash of light or column of smoke which they saw in the distance was a "signal;" but there could be no doubt about the nature of this conflagration, for an officer of the Tersko-Kubansky regiment who entered the village found that the burning house was surrounded by empty tins of kerosene, the contents of which had evidently been poured over the building.
It was on this day that I saw the last of my friend Burtin, the French officer, who was killed the next day. He had ridden over from the central column to my column, that is, the left column, along with a young sotnik of the name of Turbin, who was accompanied by about a dozen Verkhnyudinsky Cossacks, and I can still see him bent forward, Arab-like, on his Cossack saddle, the refined, eager face of the enthusiast scanning the horizon, and oblivious to everything in the near vicinity.
When night came on we could see fire after fire being kindled in the east, one further away than the other, the remotest probably burning within easy distance of Yentai. They were certainly signals, and as from a hillock I watched the u ghastly war-flame " speed eastwards, I could not help recalling Clytemnestra's description of the watch-fires which brought to Argos the news of the fall of Troy, and at the same time thinking how much inferior after all is the vivid imagery of the most warlike poetry to the bald truth of the " real thing."
On the morning of December 28 (O.S.) we got ready before dawn — although, of course, there was not much to get ready, for we travelled as lightly as possible, and our horses were always kept saddled — and assembled to hear the order of the day in a vast sandy valley, one of those bits of the great Gobi desert that break out here and there like a rash on the smooth face of the interminable ploughed land.
The scene was peculiarly striking. The sandy waste and the dunes, red with the kindling fires of the east, on which the figures of horsemen stood motionless as Arabs at prayer, and sharply outlined against the glowing sky, reminded me of pictures I had seen of Morocco and the Sahara. The crimson light of dawn streamed over the bare hillsides, and if one ascended a cliff and looked down on the troops gathered in the glen below, he could not but be struck by the rich oriental colouring of the scene. Only Salvator Rosa could do justice to such a sight.
When I gazed on this interesting spectacle from a hillside and with the rising sun at my back, the extraordinary mixture of colours came out very effectively; but when I descended the hill and looked at the Cossacks with my face turned towards the sun there was no colour, only one uniform dark grey, and no details of the figures before me, only silhouettes.
It was clear to us all this day that something big was afoot. The signals of the night before had probably prepared the men for something, and you could not fail to notice that they were prepared by the vigilant glances they threw around them and the care with which they scouted. I happened to be riding on this occasion with the advance guard, not because I wanted to see the first shot fired, but because I had mistakenly supposed when it started that it was the main body.
As our strong fresh horses bounded beneath us over the illimitable plain I began for the first time to understand the delight which the soldier takes in war. I had not been able to understand it previously, having been mostly occupied during battle in mournfully sitting on a bare hillside watching the Japanese shells creep closer and closer, and scribbling in my notebook instructions regarding the disposal of my horse and camera. That sort of warfare drives fear into the marrow of one's bones, but on horseback, his lungs filled with ozone, and his eyes bright with health, I think that even the coward gets an infusion of courage sufficient to make him laugh in the teeth of death, or at all events to bear himself like a man until the ordeal is past.