Then we pushed on towards Padyaza, a few miles to the north of Houta, but, long before we had reached that point, we learned from the dull rumbling and pounding and the continual flash of the shells that a terrible battle was raging there. Before us, a grey monotony of desolation, the level plain stretched away to the horizon under a pallid sky, which seemed to be the reflection of the wearied earth. O great, sad plains of Mukden, torn by shells and wheels and horses' hoofs, stained with blood and littered with shrapnel, ye seem a land that God has cursed and condemned to remain for ever sterile!
Scattered over this plain like islands were clumps of trees which marked the position of villages. Behind the villages which were close to us lay Russian batteries which went boom! boom! boom! steadily and exasperatingly. Their shells burst in clusters on the tree-fringed horizon, and at five or six points great sheets of flame and white smoke indicated where villages burned. A long column of Russians began to advance over the plain, in the midst of which shimose shells now began to explode in ominous black clouds. Half a dozen times in succession they burst in almost the same place. That place was in front of the column and on its line of march. The column turned at an acute angle and avoided the dangerous spot. It was evidently bound for Padyaza on the north-west. Everything seemed bound for Padyaza, where the smoke arose out of the earth as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened. Everybody watched Padyaza. Now and then batteries would rush past with all the clatter of fire-engines. Sometimes they stopped and unlimbered, but always they sent their shells towards Padyaza, beyond which there was something formidable massing. It is a vital point. It dominates the railway. If Nogi breaks through here, all is lost.
Rikacheff and I hurry forward. We join a line of soldiers lying on the open ground in front of Padyaza. The dusty officers receive us civilly, but no longer with their old cordiality. I, at least, am but a foreigner come with an opera-glass in my hand to watch, with a critical air, the last agony of the Russian army, to see the end of this formidable drama.
We are in an exposed position, and bullets are coming thick. A horse close by is hit. I feel somehow as if I
were facing a gale of wind. A Japanese machine-gun spouts out a stream of lead which can be easily traced by the puffs of dust it raises from the clayey prominences in the field. It swings backward and forward in an acute angle, like a search-light. Rikacheff lends his horse to a soldier, who has been told to go back for more ammunition. A column of smoke bursts from Padyaza, and the broken remnant of a Russian regiment retreats from it. A few khaki-clad figures flit underneath the trees, and the captain, who has his binoculars to his eyes, tells his men to open fire on the village which, a moment before, was Russian.
As the Japanese fire now became very hot, Rikacheff and I retired, and were soon followed by the Russian firing-line. The number of wounded was very great, so great that many of them could not be attended to. In one case I saw two soldiers, not Red Cross men, carrying back in their arms a wounded comrade, to whom even first aid had not been rendered owing to want of bandages. I gave them the little packet of lint I always carried with me, and Rikacheff helped them to bind the wound, which was a shocking one. Afterwards, by means of their rifles and of a little tente dabri which one of them carried, folded, athwart his shoulder, they managed to improvise a stretcher. There was a continual stream of slightly wounded men staggering or limping past unassisted, and I must say that few of them were bearing up well. They had the air of people that had got hurt in a row that didn't concern them. Most of them were moaning piteously. As they passed me, one of them drew his hand across his wounded forehead, and on finding the hand covered with blood, he said, as if grieved and astonished:
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
" Kroff idyot" (It is bleeding). Another, wounded in the left hand, talked to himself and sighed. A pathetic figure was an untidy, bent, middle-aged man trudging towards the hospital, the butt of his gun sticking out underneath his coat.