While ruminating in this dismal manner I got a message from the general, asking me to have breakfast with him. I accepted the invitation with almost indecent alacrity, for Tserpitsky always brought an excellent Russian cook along with him. While I was eating, my host told me that he was going to Fudyatun that morning, and urged me to order his cook to make anything I wanted in case he himself was absent throughout the day. This was the last I saw of this brave and kind-hearted gentleman. I went out next day to see the fighting on the west, and was never able to return to the ioth Corps, which held on, however, to Tapau till ten o'clock on the morning of the fatal ioth. How Tserpitsky himself managed to escape is a mystery to me. He received several wounds, from the effects of which he died, and I am not surprised at it, for Skobeleff himself was not more indifferent to his life.
Before leaving the ioth Corps Rikacheff and I paid another visit to the hard-pressed village of Yangshihtun, against which Nogi was at that
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moment hurling his bravest. The sunlight now flooded the vast, grey plain, which, devoid of even a single blade of grass, seemed the very image of desolation. On the sky-line was a small Buddhist chapel, looking like a Catholic shrine in the Sabine Hills, and beyond it was the Chinese village which we wanted to reach.
Half-way across the plain we could see several long widely-spaced lines of Russian soldiers lying on the ground, with heads raised slightly above the level of their bodies, and rifles projecting in front of them. They were not firing, however, for the firing-line, which they were on their way to reinforce or replace, was beyond the distant village. Very frequently we saw, afar off, small groups of men advancing towards us, slowly, mournfully, and as fearlessly as if they knew themselves to be invulnerable. When they came nearer we saw that each group was carrying a wounded comrade to the rear on a stretcher.
Shells were falling at intervals all over the plain, raising volcanic columns of black smoke, which slowly dissipated as the wind whirled them lazily along. When not thus engaged, the wind amused itself by raising, on its own account, columns of dun-grey dust, almost exactly like the columns of shimose, and whirling them about in the same way.
A soldier gravely told me that there was a wizard inside each of these " dust-spouts," and it did not seem at all improbable, for sometimes these pillars of dust went spinning down the wind like phantoms with long, flying robes.
A semicircle of snow-white, fleecy, shrapnel cloudlets hung over the line of prostrate Russians, like the aureole of stars one sees in pictures of the Blessed Virgin; and, like a youth in crimson garments, the sun now appeared in the east. On seeing that a regiment was slowly following us in extended formation, probably in order to stiffen the force already at the front, we reined in our horses and waited for it to come up. It was a beautiful sight so long as I watched it with my face to the east, for then the hard details of the ground before me were all obliterated, and the spaces between the soldiers were filled by a wondrous misty, golden haze, amid which, hooded and gowned like Franciscans, the men advanced solemnly, like silent files of the Beatified in some mediaeval Italian painting.
But when they had gone by and I gazed after them with the sun at my back, all the hard lines on the brown earth, and all the sordid tokens of toil and stress on the men's persons, came out with ghastly clearness. The blaze of martial glory ceased all at once to dazzle. The golden mist of illusion and romance which surrounds the military profession passed suddenly away, and the hard, clear daylight of reason illuminated inexorably this reluctant march to a miserable death.
Rikacheff, however, was not disillusioned. He seemed on the contrary to become more enthusiastic than ever. Riding in amongst the men, he spoke to them of God and of Russia, coupling these two names together as if they were the names of the two great facts of the Universe. The men were visibly touched and impressed by the zeal of this young man, and many a rough voice was heard thanking him. Circumstances such as these make me see in Russia a latent fanaticism which bodes ill, some day, for
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the countries on her frontiers both in Europe and Asia.