There can be no doubt but that this band of robbers was in the service of the Japanese, otherwise we should not have found them down there in the rear
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
of the Japanese army. Besides, we captured from them a Japanese flag bearing a Chinese inscription meaning " the right camp of the left wing," a " camp " in the Chinese army consisting of five hundred soldiers. They were all hardy, well-formed men in the prime of life, and they rode good Chinese horses, but did not carry any swords or lances. Their Japanese instructors had evidently taken great pains to drill them, and on this occasion they were a credit to their teachers.
Somewhat further south our central column got into a far stiffer fight. Near the confluence of the Hun with the Liao there is a small walled village called Shoutoze, and in this village several hundred Japanese infantry-men held out with characteristic obstinacy for all the rest of the afternoon, thus delaying us by half a day, and incidentally saving Yinkow.
The Verkhnyudinsky Cossacks were ordered to dismount and advance against them, and they did so with great courage, their officers going in front. The first report we got was that the Cossacks were driven back and two of their officers wounded, one of these wounded officers being afterwards carried inside the village by the Japanese. But next morning we saw the leathern-coated men from Verkhnyudinsky advancing with the rest of us, and heard that they had taken the village on the previous evening, all the Japanese being killed or dispersed. Unfortunately, two brave young officers of the Verkhnyudinsky Regiment lost their lives on this occasion, one Nekrasoff, a "sotnik" or centurion of great bravery, who had previously been wounded twice during the present war, and the other Ferdinand Burtin, the French officer of whom I have already spoken.
Burtin had gone forward on foot to attack a village with the "sotnia" to which he was attached, but was shot in the leg and. fell to the ground, when he had come within a hundred yards of the enemy. If he had remained quite still he would have been safe, but he raised himself to a sitting posture and waved his sword as a sign for his men to come in, whereupon he immediately got one bullet through the head and another through the chest, and died soon afterwards, without saying anything. The official paper of the army afterwards came out with a long eulogistic account of him. Lieutenant Burtin was not a personage, he was only an ordinary French officer, but he fully maintained the French officer's high reputation for bravery, skill and courtesy, and deeply the Cossacks of the Transbaikal " voisko" mourn the loss of the gallant foreigner who could not tell them how he sympathised with them, but whose actions spoke louder than words. He was buried before dawn next morning, January it, General Mishchenko and all his staff being present, and the same day we crossed the Taitze and advanced on old Newchwang. Not all of us went that way, however. The Primorsky Dragoons cantered off toward Ta-shih-chiao in order to blow up some of the railway, and thus prevent the Japanese from bringing troops into Yinkow by rail. To hear these officers talking lightly of riding over to Haicheng and Yinkow made us almost inclined to imagine that we were back in January 1904, and that the fall of Port Arthur and the defeats at Vafangow, at Liaoyang and on the Shaho were merely dreams. I, for one, was inclined to rub my eyes when I saw again in the distance the familiar hills of Ta-shih-chiao.
On the previous day a mixed detachment, composed of half a "sotnia" of the Chitinsky Cossacks, half a " sotnia " of the Verkhnyudinsky Cossacks, and half a "sotnia" of the Uralsky Cossacks, had been despatched eastwards with a good supply of nitroglycerine in order to cut the railway north of Haicheng. They accomplished this task with the greatest ease and expedition, but in such a way that the line could be repaired again in a few hours. When they reached the railway there were only a few of the enemy there, and these retired without firing a shot, whereupon the Cossacks proceeded to look for a bridge underneath which they might plant their explosives. Unfortunately they could not find any bridge, so they had to content themselves with blowing up part of the line — damage which the Japanese probably made good in a very short time.