Soon afterwards I got separated from my horse, but at midnight, while we were resting for a moment near a burning village, I saw him again, and, with a sudden return of worldly prudence, determined to keep my eye on him, if only for the sake of the valuable collection of photographs which I carried in my saddle-bags. But, as soon as we started, he seemed to vanish, and I never afterwards laid eyes on him or on the wounded man whom he carried. They were not captured, they could not have escaped; it is impossible to say what became of them.
Other wounded men lying on the ground continued to make their presence known to us by cries calculated to wring the heart of a stone.
It was peculiarly affecting to notice the frequent use they made of the word " brother," and of the other affectionate terms of address in which the Russian language is as rich as the Japanese language is rich in honorifics. These affectionate terms of address strongly reminded me of the poetical expressions of the Gaelic-speaking Irish. So did the continual invocation of saints, and especially of the Holy Mother of God. One badly- wounded man prayed to the Holy Virgin of the Iversky Gate, another to Our Lady of Kazan, a third to the Smolensk Matushka. One dying soldier called out with a loud voice, " O! Nicolai Chudotvorets (Wonder- Worker), Saint of God! " and, immediately after, his life went out suddenly like the lamp before an ikon.
Many, who were delirious, called out the names of friends whom they thought they recognised in the crowd of men that flowed past like an invisible, gloomy river. Ivan Tikhonovitch! Andrei Petrovitch! One called out the name of a woman.
"Bratszi, Pomogeete mnye" (" Brothers, help me!"), wailed one poor fellow. An officer supported him till a cannon came rumbling along, and then managed, after a long argument with the artilleryman, to put him on the driver's seat, alongside a number of other wounded men who were clinging on, I don't know how.
We disposed in this way of many wounded who were almost insane with terror at the prospect of being mutilated by the Chinese. Several times I put myself to much inconvenience attending to men lying inert and speechless across the road, only to discover, when they turned their faces towards me, that they exhaled a smell of " vodka "strong enough to make me stagger backwards. They were not wounded at all. They were only drunk.
Yet, harassing as were these wails of the wounded, they were not so frightful as the silence of the dead, over whose stiffened corpses one or other of us sometimes fell. Squalid, unsightly corpses these; and yet at this moment, O poor soldiers! mothers in distant Russia are praying for ye before the shrines of the saints, are making long pilgrimages to monasteries containing miraculous ikons, are even, in the distraction of their grief, weaving spells as heathenish in tenor and as Oriental in expression as those which many a poor Japanese mother is making use of this bitter night.*
* Some of the spells are given by Sakharof in his " Pyesni Russkago Naroda." One runs as follows: — " From the red dawn have I wept all day long — I, his mother — alone in my upper chamber, looking out on the desolate plain..., There sat I in sorrow and in sadness, till the glow of the evening, till the heavy dews. But at last I grew weary of sobbing, so I pondered on what magic spells I should employ to charm away that bitter, deadly grief.... I charm my never-sufficiently-to-be-gazed-on child over my nuptial cup, over running water, over my marriage handkerchief, over my marriage candle. I wipe my child's pure face with my marriage handkerchief, I clean his red lips, his bright eyes, his thoughtful brow, his ruddy cheeks. With my marriage candle I light up his long ■ kaftan,' his black bonnet, his
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One corpse, that of a blonde-haired lad of eighteen or nineteen years of age, was quite naked, having been already stripped by the Chinese. It looked like a fallen statue of Hercules, and reminded me of the words which Nekrassov puts into the mouth of a Russian mother lamenting her dead soldier son, words which express with a pathos which goes to one's heart like a dagger the poor woman's pride in her big boy, whose magnificent proportions had, she said, so struck the General when he saw the lad stripped for the physical examination. #