On March i I rode out with General Tserpitsky to his "positions." The scene was not one that would look well in a photograph. If a landscape painter were to paint it, people would think that his intention was to picture immensity, not to represent a battlefield. There were bright sunlight and warm spring weather, but it was not so warm that one could dispense with an overcoat while riding. There as no sign of life save a distant scattered line of soldiers advancing over the vast expanse. The silence and the great distances suggested to me, somehow or other, Sunday, the great sea, eternity. The shrapnel was bursting far away to the right, where Miloff was losing village after village, and falling back step after step and verst after verst before the terrible men who had taken Port Arthur. Against old Tserpitsky, however, with his twenty-four batteries of field-pieces and four batteries of heavy guns, Oku did nothing, and I went home that night thinking that the Japanese had put their hand to a work they could not carry through. My home was in the very exiguous Chinese house of a Red Cross doctor, and, just before we turned in, the doctor received orders to hold himself in readiness at four o'clock next morning to accompany two divisions which were to leave for Tsinmintun, which a large force of Japanese had, it was reported, seized. This news cast a gloom over all of us; for, if the Japanese had a large force on the west of the Liao, they might easily succeed in turning our right flank and in cutting the railway in our rear.
We lit our cigars and went out into the night to discuss this new development of the situation. The stars were clouded, the earth was dark, but, far away on the edge of the plain, search-lights were swinging their long arms backwards and forwards, unweariedly, in an acute angle, and, despite the darkness, shells were still bursting. Occasionally the heavy boom of a single cannon, followed at a short interval by its echo, reached our ears. Later on there came from the south-west a continuous crackling rifle-fire, which lasted, with few interruptions, all night. We afterwards learned that this rifle-fire marked several unsuccessful but desperate night attacks which the Japanese had essayed against Wangkiawopeng and Likiawopeng, and one unsuccessful counter-attack made by the Russians.
When I awoke in the morning, my kind host, Dr. Pusep, had vanished, and with him all his assistants and furniture. There remained to me, however, a small but very valuable friend in the person of Andrew Mikhailovitch RikachefT, the correspondent of the St. Petersburg paper Nasha Jeezn. Andrew occupied a somewhat anomalous position in the Russian camp, for his paper, which had been imprudent enough to declare that the war should be brought to an end, had been suspended for three months, so that he did not quite know whether to regard himself as a correspondent or not. In spite of this discouragement, however, he worked with extraordinary zeal, while his patriotism and singular fearlessness endeared him to the soldiers.
As soon as we had succeeded in getting a cup of tea, Andrew Mikhai'lovitch and I rode out to Davanganpu, the terminus of the branch railway. It was filled with wounded and with dusty, broken, and dispirited troops, who freely confessed — in Russian — that they had retreated because they could not keep back the Japanese. According to one soldier, the enemy kept coming on, coming on, like ants, four or five times in succession. At last the officer said, "Children, we cannot stay here any longer. We must go back."
The Decauxville railway that ran south-west from Davanganpu was overtaxed owing to the multitudes of wounded. In one hospital alone, a hospital which normally could only accommodate a few hundred men, there were more than a thousand patients.
We then rode over to Meturan, the headquarters of General Kaulbars. Here we found everything packed up, and everybody ready to move. Rikacheff and I got transferred to the 8th Corps, as that corps seemed to have most of the fun, but the trouble was where to find its headquarters. There was no difficulty, however, about locating the Japs, for their shells were bursting in showers at Dzeurpo, a few miles to the west. At last, by dint of diligent questioning, we got the name of the village in which Miloff would probably be found, and galloped towards it, passing, on the way, great bodies of troops slowly advancing in loose formation. We found the village all right, but we did not find Miloff, for he had gone away some