The " vodka" that overflowed from the burst casks had collected a foot deep in a depression of the ground. Men knelt down to drink the muddy liquor. Some scooped it up in the hollows of their hands, as you would scoop up water from a well. Some fell into it bodily. Many were wetted by the jets of liquor from the barrels squirting over them. Buriat Cossacks, Mahommedans from the Caucasus (forbidden by their religion to touch drink), riflemen, dragoons, all sorts and conditions of military people, joined in this mad spree; and, with the dust and the smoke from the burning stores eddying around them, they looked like alcoholic demons struggling in the reek of hell.
The liquor made some of them insane or goodnatured, I don't know which. I saw men working like slaves at handing out tea, meat, etc. to their comrades, laughing hilariously all the time. One very unwashed soldier applied himself enthusiastically to the task of giving away bars of soap! Officers shouted to their men to stop, and, finding that their orders were disobeyed, turned to me and said: " All discipline is gone."
Then they themselves began to loot Government property from the train that stood close by.
Meanwhile I looked on awed and thunderstruck, as one who sees the small but unmistakable beginning of great events — the first miracle of Christ, the crossing of the Rubicon, the march on Versailles.
It is, I said to myself, the commencement of la debacle russe, and I am the only foreign spectator of it. It is the first fatal, unmistakable sign of disintegration and decay in a great military body that has awed Europe and Asia for fifty years.
There were little hillocks of " sukharee " (hard tack) and of fine, newly baked bread, but nobody touched them. They were not valuable enough. It was pleasanter far to destroy costly preserves and scatter them all over the ground than to eat black bread. The love of destruction for its own sake had seized upon the soldiers and threatened to become uncontrollable. Letting troops loot their own stores is like letting partially domesticated tigers taste blood. Unfortunately for the Russians, they had, from the beginning to the end of the war, no stores to loot save their own. And at Tah-si-chiao and Liaoyang they had not much to loot — only a few waggon-loads of preserves. In Mukden, and all around Mukden — at Fushan, Quanshan, Kandalusan, and Suhudyapu — they were turned loose on an enormous accumulation of provisions. The result was that many drunken soldiers fell into the hands of the Hunghuze over by Tsinmintun during the great retreat, and were put to death with horrid tortures; and that, after the Russian evacuation, the railway station at Mukden was strewn with the corpses of Russians who had been murdered and stripped by the Chinese while lying there drunk.
What lent a zest to this looting ot the stores was, I think, the feeling among the soldiers that they were doing with impunity what they could not have done the day before without being shot. These stores were then guarded, and a private soldier hardly dared look at them. The sudden removal of all restraint caused them to lose all control of themselves. They felt as if God had suddenly repealed the Ten Commandments.
I don't know if it would not be better for retreating generals to let all the supplies they cannot carry off fall into the hands of the enemy. In that case only a few soldiers would be scandalised; whereas, when the soldier is let loose on his own stores, everybody in the army hears about it, everybody sees the columns of smoke, and shares the pilfered dainties, hitherto sacred to officers alone.
By the light of these burning stores, the ignorant mujik gets one awful, fleeting glimpse of a new world — a world without police, without rulers, without laws — and the sight is not good for him. There is something peculiarly demoralising in the wholesale, deliberate destruction of millions of roubles worth of valuable property, something calculated to make even a Carthusian giddy. The corner-stone of society is knocked away; all the copy-book maxims about thrift seem the veriest drivel; and it suddenly occurs to one, with all the force of a supernatural revelation, that he has been on the wrong tack all the time, that the " small profits, quick returns," system is absurd, and that for all who are not monarchs or millionaires the one sound political faith, the one true religion in this world, is — anarchism.