I put up this evening at the head-quarters of the Second Army, that is, at the village of Meturan. This village is on the south bank of the Hun, and at the end of the branch railway running east along that river. It was a clean, whitewashed village, in which every house was numbered, and bore on its exterior a list of the people staying inside. In spite of its being a Chinese village, there was an air of severity, cleanliness and order about it which reminded one partly of a barracks and partly of a convent, so that when I saw the flames licking it up a few days after, I felt almost like a man who sees a dignified person knocked down and trampled on.
I might, however, have early seen the seeds of decay beneath this fair exterior. The private soldiers I spoke to told me about an advance that was to take place that night on the left flank. Unaware of the true state of affairs, they thought that the Russians were taking the initiative, but they spoke of the matter without enthusiasm. They were melancholy and dispirited in this strange disagreeable land, which they did not want in the least to fight for. " I'm getting thirty-five kopecks a month," said one unwashed, melancholy young man. " I don't mind getting killed,
but if I lose a leg or arm I cannot work afterward, and I shall only get a pension of three roubles a month for the rest of my life."
Nearly all the soldiers I came across in Meturan were depressed, sad-toned men, who frequently sighed as if they were suffering from some fatal internal malady. Even the songs that I heard the orderlies crooning to themselves were very mournful. One of the saddest of them, which described a conscript's leave-taking of his home, made me think, by way of contrast, of the gay processions I had often seen escort Japanese conscripts to barracks. An oldish-looking man, who looked after my horse, astonished me by saying that he was only thirty-five years of age. He was a reservist, and wanted to go home. They all wanted to go home. Among the few who were cheerful was a little lark of a fellow who had been a waiter in an hotel at Nijni Novgorod. He once whispered to me in a very confidential manner the news that he belonged to some very heterodox sect, of which I have forgotten the name. Another, a boy of seventeen or eighteen, with the gentle manner and the smooth face of a girl, told me that he was a Pole and a Roman Catholic, and that there were two Roman Catholic priests in the whole Russian army.
After telling me a tale of woe that made me feel quite sad, one of the melancholy men said to me: " I suppose, sir, your lot here is also very hard." He looked surprised and incredulous when I told him that I could go home whenever I liked, and that to be sent home in a luxurious train, via St. Petersburg, was one of the direst threats held over the heads of the correspondents by the censor at Mukden.
I must say that I honestly tried to cheer up that young man, and to make him see the romance of war, but I did not succeed. On the contrary, he succeeded in making me very doubtful of the Russian chances of success in the battle which had just begun; for I now remembered that the Cossacks, and every other branch of the army, were just as homesick and discouraged. Many of the officers had no better name for their generals than "prokhvost," while in medical circles the freedom and latitude of the criticisms indulged in shocked me — me, whom a year's stay in the army had led to regard a general as something peculiarly sacred. On one occasion, I remember, I was lamenting, in very guarded language, the comparative inefficiency of the Cossacks during the present campaign, whereupon a doctor remarked, with a dryness of manner that would do credit to a Scotchman: " The Cossacks are only good in the streets of St. Petersburg."
The officers seemed to be almost as dispirited as the men. I found one of them reading a most gloomy religious book on " How to Prepare for Death," and another deep in the perusal of that unhinged genius Dostoievski. A third officer was reading Nekrassov, whose funereal verses are the best antidote to martial enthusiasm that can be found in the whole range of Russian literature.
Meanwhile Kuroki and Kawamura were rolling back the Russian left with such rapidity and violence that General Kuropatkin could be excused for believing that the principal Japanese attack was to come from that quarter.
CHAPTER IX