figured belt, his stitched shoes, his fair curls, his young face, this swift step,... I avert from thee, O never-sufficientlyto-be-gazed-on child, the terrible devil. I avert the fierce whirlwind. I drive away the one-eyed wood-sprite.... And then, my child, at night and at midnight, throughout the hours and at the half-hours, on the highroad and in byways, sleeping and waking, be thou hidden and concealed by virtue of this, my powerful spell, from hostile influences and from unclean spirits, preserved from sudden death and from misfortune and from woe.... And should the hour of thy death come, remember, O my child! our great love for thee, our unsparing bread-and-salt, and, turning towards thy well-loved home, bend thy brow to the ground with seven times seven salutations, bid farewell to thy kith and kin and drop into a sweet and dreamless slumber."
Another spell says: — M Mayest thou never be hurt, O my child! by guns or by arquebuses, or by arrows or by wrestlers, or by boxers. May the champions not challenge thee nor strike thee with warlike weapons; may they not pierce thee with lance or spear, or cut thee with halbert or hatchet, or crush thee with battle-axe, or stab thee with knife. May the aged deceive thee not; may the young men do thee no injury; but mayst thou be to them as a hawk, and may they be unto thee as thrushes."
* " Podiveelsya sam eez Piter General na papnya etogo
We passed several other naked corpses, one of which was headless and still warm — for when I fell over it my face touched it. I had at first thought that it was the body of a living man, and it was only when I attempted to give it a drink that I discovered it to be headless. For a long time after this I feared that my nervous system had been permanently injured by the shock I received on this occasion. I could not bear to even think of this incident for, whenever I did, it gripped my brain like an insane obsession.
It was evident, then, that the Chinese were close by, and my heart sank like lead, for nothing so appalled me as the prospect of being beheaded and stripped stark naked, for I felt that, in that case, my own mother could not recognise me. I would lose my race, my individuality. I would lose that cachet, that special character which everybody imagines to mark him off from the common herd. I would simply become a lump of excrement dunged by War. Soul and body would, it seemed to me, be alike annihilated. Any one who has ever seen that monstrous spectacle, a headless corpse, can understand the horror which I felt, and the longing with which I longed at that moment for a consecrated grave on some green hillside in Ireland. I dare say that all of my companions had the same longing, for I heard a dismounted Cossack say that he would not mind getting killed if only he were buried near a great river.
kak v' rekrutskoe prisutstvie preevelee ego razdyetavo."... (" Why, the General at Piter was surprised himself to see how strong my lad was, when they brought the boy naked into the Hall of Examination ").
Owing to a strange physical weakness that came over me at this time and also to the fear that I should be the first to fall in case an attack was made on us from the front, I tried to work my way into the centre of our column, but, as everybody else was trying to do exactly the same thing, I was unsuccessful.
Nobody knew where we were going or who commanded us or what troops we were composed of. " Ya nye magu znat " (" I don't know ") was the stereotyped answer of the soldiers to whom I addressed myself for information. We were marching through the valley of the Shadow. Between us and Tiehling lay a chasm like that which divides the living from the dead. I felt that I had ceased to be a human being, and had become a thing, a piece of wreckage, tossed hither and thither in the crowd.