It was my good friend Rikacheff who aroused me, and I remember that he spent a considerable time trying to make me grasp the fact that, so far, I was alive, and that if I intended to remain alive I had better hustle and find my horse, as we were leaving instantly. Oh, those horses! the trouble they gave us! they had never been unsaddled day or night for weeks, so there was no trouble on that score; but they had such a habit of breaking loose, and it was so difficult, with our hands almost frozen, to put the bit into their unwilling mouths. On this occasion the man we had bribed with twenty-five kopecks to look after them had disappeared, and so, of course, had the horses. Before we had found them we had received several kicks from strange irascible animals, whose hindquarters we had unwittingly bumped against in the darkness, but bridling them was a task I should not like to undertake again. When I had got the bit under my horse's lip and all seemed to be well he would suddenly knock me down with a toss of his head, which seemed to say:
" No, no, no! By no manner of means! Why, I haven't finished breakfast yet," and I would have to begin all over again. His usual plan, however, was to keep his teeth tightly clenched, evidently with the idea of convincing me that there was no opening in that quarter and that I had been mistaken in thinking that there was. Finally, however, I succeeded in getting the bit into his mouth, and, having done so, I had to wait full three hours before the General left!
It was, of course, our own artillery that made most of the noise, and not the Japanese artillery, but, nevertheless, our danger was considerable, and I did not quite know whether to admire or to blame Tserpitsky for running such risks. When he sent me a message to come and have breakfast with him I decided, however, only to admire him.
It seemed to me that the Japanese knew we were in this village — perhaps we had been followed thither by some of the soldiers who had fired at us from the walls of the burning village — at any rate, two shells exploded in the front yard of our house, and one shrapnel made a hole in the roof of the room where General Tserpitsky and his adjutant were sitting, filling the room with dust, but doing no further damage. Many bullets also struck the walls of the house, and many more whistled harmlessly overhead.
I spent only about an hour in this house after daybreak, but I could write a book about it owing to the marvellous clearness with which at this period of excessive strain every little detail impressed itself on my mind. I went into the street to wash myself at a frozen horse-trough, and I shall never forgot how deserted that street looked. It was not the desertion of early morning — it was the desertion of death. London town must have looked like that during the Great Plague. At the street corner a horse lay dead. Further off lay a dead man. By-and-by the Russian troops stole past me with the silence and cautiousness of thieves in a bedroom. I should not have been so particular about washing myself at this particular time had it not been for the fact that, not having washed for several days, my eyelashes had become clogged with dust. While I was washing myself three Shimose shells fell in quick succession at the back of the General's house, and as it now seemed certain that the Japanese really knew we were there Tserpitsky decided to leave, and accordingly we went eastward across the plain, galloping at a great rate, amid the billows of impenetrable dust, which sometimes permitted the heads and bodies of the Cossacks to be seen — sometimes the heads alone. We went as far back as Tapau or Dapu.
CHAPTER XII
MARCH 5, 6 AND 7
March 5 fell on a Sunday, and, comparatively speaking, it had something of a Sabbath calm about it, as far at least as I was concerned. I remained all day at Dapu with Tserpitsky, watching a great semicircle of bursting shells at a safe distance. I soon began to feel bored, however. It was like watching a football match at such a distance that you could only see the dust raised by the players. It was a fine day, and the sun shone brightly on long lines of wounded being carried past and on numbers of unexploded Japanese shells scattered over the fields.