Towards morning we all became afflicted by a terrible thirst, and one of the officers earned my everlasting gratitude by allowing me on several occasions to drink from his water-bottle. At length this precious liquid gave out, and I keenly envied the soldiers who were able with their bayonets to cut lumps of ice from the frozen streams. At times, when the firing in front of us ceased, one might have thought that we had escaped, had it not been for a Japanese flash-light on the northern horizon. It was our constant aim all night long to hide from that flash-light, and, whenever we found its glassy, unpitying eye fixed upon us, a visible shudder ran down our whole line.
At first we marched like a mob, but finally, by dint of hard work, the officers succeeded in creating some sort of order. This was not easy, as we consisted of the fragments of seven regiments, and as officers and men had been thrown together haphazard.
I did not realise how demoralised the men were until once, when passing near a burning village, a Japanese patrol fired on us. Once again our whole force shuddered, but this time it was a shudder that might very easily have become a rout. The Japanese only fired a few shots at close quarters, but they probably hung upon our rear till morning, carefully shepherding us into the trap that had been prepared for us.
The soldiers are models of stoical resignation, and their conversation on the march seemed to consist of vague proverbs expressing fatalism. They trudged along with the humble resignation of beasts of burden, and, as I watched them, I could not help thinking of Tolstoi's Karatayef.
Several times throughout the night I tried to say my prayers, but, I am afraid, with ill success, for before I could concentrate my mind sufficiently, I had lost
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my place in the ranks, or stumbled over the trunk of a tree, or down a gully. Sometimes I was surprised to find myself mechanically saying my prayers in English, the language in which I had been taught them by my mother, but in which I had not said them for many years. I had none of those swift visions of my past life with which people about to die are supposed to be favoured. In fact, I had no time for visions. I was too tired and too much occupied in watching where I was putting my feet.
Dawn came almost suddenly while we were sitting down on a hill-side There were now about three thousand of us, but very few mounted men and no cannon or carts. What became of the guns and guncarriages, the latter laden with wounded, I do not know; but as I saw some artillerymen riding artillery horses with the traces trailing on the ground, but no guns behind them, I surmised that cannons and cartloads of wounded had all been alike abandoned during: the night. My own horse I sought for long and anxiously, but in vain. Poor old " Sobersides," who carried me all through the war, what fate has befallen thee?
CHAPTER XIV
The first thing I remember about March 1 1 was being awakened by a soldier, for I had unwittingly fallen asleep. I must have been dreaming, for, half awake, I thought that I had been washed up by the sea, and the roaring of the surges was still in my ears. I found the world, which I hardly hoped to see again, bathed in a faint, cold grey light, in which I strove to recognise some of the friends I had made during the hours of darkness.
It was a difficult task, for they seemed no more to correspond to the portraits which I had formed of them in my mind than mental portraits of authors formed by readers of their books correspond to the reality. I saw a soldier who might have been the " man in the bashleek," because he talked of our having been together throughout the night; but he was only an ordinary, stale-looking elderly private, whoi when he stepped back among his comrades, became instantly undistinguishable from them. I shook hands with the officer who had given me water; but he, too, was quite different to what I had expected him to be.
The colonel, who was on horseback, bade me good morning in French, and thanked his men in Russian, calling them " Molodtsami, rebyata! " (" Brave fellows,
children ") but there was no answering shout " Radee starat'sya" ("Glad to do all we can") from the latter. They had heard these complimentary speeches too often.
Soon after, we entered a broad flat valley with some heights beyond, the character of the country being, as I have already pointed out, quite different from that of the level Mukden district.