“An Arab with a stranger for a guest.”
“An Arab with a stranger for a guest.”
“An Arab with a stranger for a guest.”
“An Arab with a stranger for a guest.”
My host had lived in this isolated land-lighthouse for four and a half years. He and the other soldiers talked of places, and one of them said the Red Sea lay between Japan and China, near Colombo. Another said that the English had taken Thibet. They made me a bed with some hay and a blanket, and I slept in the field. Then came a start at dawn and a ride to Haichen, where there was bustle and confusion, and a battle expected; and there, for the first time, I saw the ghastly sight of maimed soldiers being carried in with their fresh bandages, their recent wounds, their waxen faces, and their vague, wondering eyes. After that, a night in the village disturbed by a panic, and shouts that the Japanese were upon us, followed by the discovery that it was a false alarm, and the further discovery that the expected battle would not happen. We rode back to Liaoyang, after which I was laid up with sunstroke and again cured by Dr. Westwater.
At the end of the first week of August, I started once more to find the Cavalry Brigade to which I had been attached. This time I took with me Dimitri, a dark-eyed Caucasian with a black beard and a nose like a beak, dressed in a long brown skirt with silver trimmings, and armed with a scimitar and several revolvers. Dimitri had lived in the saddle all his life, and when I complained of my pony stumbling, he said: “It’s not the pony; the truth is, little father, that just a little you don’t know how to ride.”
I found the Brigade. It was commanded by a new General, called Sichkhov. He was sitting in the small and dirty room of a Chinese cottage; a telegraph was ticking in the room next door, and everywhere flies were buzzing. “Have you brought us any food?” said the General. “We have nothing here, no bread, no sugar.”
The General and the staff lived in the cottage in which there were two rooms. The rest of us lived in a garden. At the bottom of the garden there was a piece of trellis-work, over which a pumpkin twined and climbed. Under it was my valise. This was my bedroom. This was in the village of Davantientung. I stayed there six days. We used to get up very early at four or five. I would say “Good morning” to the doctor. He would draw back his hand and say: “I beg your pardon, I have not washed.” The ceremony of washing was performed like this: you took off your shirt, and a Cossack poured water from a pewter cup over your head and your hands, and you could use as much soap as you pleased. At noon we had our midday meal, then we drank tea and slept; later we went for a walk, perhaps, and had supper in the evening, and then bed. But torrents of rain fell, and this idyllic garden soon became a swamp. I moved to another neighbouring Brigade, commanded by Colonel Gurko, and while I was there I dined with one of his batteries, a horse battery of Trans-Baikalian Cossacks. They asked me to stay with them for good, and I did so. The night after I had dined with the battery, the doctor took me to a church where there was a Chinese Catholic priest. His presbytery was scrupulously clean, and the church was full of paper roses. In the presbytery sat an old bronzed Chinaman reading his breviary. He talked French, with a somewhat limited vocabulary, but with a pure French intonation, and he gave us a glass offine champagne. The day after this we were ordered to go to Davantientung, the village I had just left. There we occupied a large Chinese house with a dirty yard in front of it. Here a new epoch began for me—life with a battery. The Commander of the battery, Colonel Philemonov, was away in hospital. His place was taken by a fat, Falstaffian, good-natured man, with a heart of gold, called Malinovsky, who knew next to nothing about gunnery. The gunnery work was performed by a junior Lieutenant, Kislitsky. There were other younger officers, a doctor, and a veterinary surgeon. Weall lived in one room of the Chinese house; our beds were stretched side by side along theK’ang—the natural platform of every Chinese house. We got up at sunrise, and had dinner at noon. Dinner consisted of huge chunks of meat, cut up and mixed with potatoes, and served in a pail. This dish the cook used to callBœuf Strogonoff, and it was the only dish he knew. Sometimes the officers struck and demanded something else, but the dish always ended by beingBœuf Strogonoff.
After dinner, we used to sleep on theK’ang, talk and sleep, and then go for a walk, talk, sleep once more, and go to bed. The weather was very hot; when it rained, which it did torrentially once every ten days, it was hotter. Every house you saw was made of yellow-baked mud; on each side of you were endless immense stretches of giant millet fields, of an intense blinding green. There was an irresistible languor in the air.
In the yard outside, the horses munched green beans in the mud. Inside thefangtseall the flies of the world seemed to have congregated. In spite of the heat, one took shelter under anything, even a fur rug. To eat and sleep was all one thought about; but sleep was difficult and the food was monotonous and scanty. Insects of all kinds crawled from the dried walls on to one’s head. Outside the window, two or three Chinese used to argue in a high-pitched voice about the price of something. There was perhaps a fragment of a newspaper four months old which one had read and re-read. The military situation had been discussed until there was nothing more to be said. Nowhere was there any ease for the body or rest for the eye—an endless monotony of green and yellow; a land where the rain brought no freshness and the trees afforded no shade. The brain refused to read; it circled round and round in some fretful occupation such as half inventing an acrostic.
When Bron Herbert read the account I wrote of life during this period of the war, he wrote and told me that it had vividly brought back to him his experiences of camp life in South Africa.
“No fellow,” he wrote, “who hasn’t been through it can know what it’s like. The way that everyonesaysexactly the same things that they would say if they were in London, and all the time they’redoingmost absurdly different things. The way that one drifts clean out of one’s little circle, of which onehas formed an integral part and in which one has been absorbingly interested, and instantaneously finds oneself in another quite new one in which one becomes in a few seconds a vastly important component part and equally absorbed. The way in which one really spends nine-tenths of one’s time sitting in some beastly place without shade, brushing flies off one’s face, and somehow one isn’t bored with it. The way in which all things which are most boring at home become most interesting out there. The way in which everything is rather a blur, nothing very distinct but all one’s sensations funny ones, quite new and different; only the isolated little incidents stand out clear like oases. There’s no general impression left. It’s like tops of mountains sticking up through a fog.”
These are the kind of incidents I remember. One night a man arrived at Davantientung from Moscow. We put him up. When he woke up in the morning he said: “I was dreaming that I was going to the Art Theatre in Moscow. I had got tickets; they were doing a new play by Tchekov. I wake up and find myself here.”
Another time a translation of H. G. Wells’sFood of the Godsappeared in a Russian journal, and two officers fought for it, and rolled on the floor till the magazine was torn to bits; and they neither of them wanted it really.
The doctor of the battery and one of the young officers would argue about the war, about the absurdity of war; that if you go to war it is silly to look after the wounded. The gospel of frightfulness was advocated and rejected. Endless discussions followed.
One evening, the Cossacks bathed their horses in a lake hard by and swam about naked, like Centaurs. It was a wonderful lake, full of pink lotus flowers, which in the twilight, with the rays of the new moon shining on the floating tangled mass of green leaf (the leaves by this time were grey and shimmering) and the broad pink petals of the flowers, made a harmony that seemed to call for the brush of some delicate French impressionist painter. But no painter could have reproduced the silvery magic of those greys and greens, the fantastic spectacle made by the moonlight, the twilight, the shining water, the dusky leaves, and the delicate lotus petals. Those days at Davantientung were long days. I suppose I was not really there a long time, but it seemed an eternity. I wentback to Liaoyang in the middle of August, to post a letter, and then found my way back to the battery by a miracle, for they had moved, and I arrived at the very door of their new quarters. Then the long dream of the swelteringentr’actecame to an end. We suddenly got orders to move at two o’clock in the morning. We marched to a large village, and in the afternoon we moved on to another place where, just as I had taken the saddle off my pony, and was lying down in a Chinese temple, I heard a stir. The Japanese were reported to be less than a mile from us, and had entered the end of the village we had just left, while the dragoons were going out of the other end of it. We marched till midnight and then rested, and at dawn we started by a circuitous route for Liaoyang, which we reached about three o’clock in the afternoon.
We established ourselves in a small village about two miles from the town of Liaoyang. Everything was calm. This was on 29th August, and a battle was expected on the next day. Kuropatkin was rumoured to have said that he would offer a tall candle to Our Lady at Moscow if the Japanese fought at Liaoyang. A little to the south of us was a large hill called So-shan-tse; to the east a circle of hills; to the north, the town of Liaoyang. A captive balloon soared slowly up in the twilight. It did not astonish the Chinese.
We lay down to sleep. Nobody thought there would be a battle the next day. Colonel Philemonov had arrived at the battery the evening we left Davantientung. I had not seen him before, and the battery up to then had been commanded nominally, and in a social sense by Malinovski, but in a military sense by Kislitski. The first time I set eyes on Colonel Philemonov was in the grey dawn in a Chinese house at the first place we stopped at after Davantientung. He was sitting at a window in a grey tunic. Being shortsighted, I mistook him for one of the other officers, and I went boldly up to him and was about to slap him on the back when he slowly turned his grey-bearded face towards me and looked up inquiringly with a grunt. I fled. I knew him by reputation. He was said to be the best artillery officer in the Siberian Army, and had formed the three Transbaikalian horse batteries. He had returned no better from the hospital, and was suffering from a terrible internal disease; but nothing overcame his indomitable pluck.
We had scarcely laid ourselves down to rest when we received orders to move to a village in the east. The horses were saddled, and we marched to a village on the hills east of So-shan-tse, about two miles off. There we once more settleddown in a Chinese house, and I fell into a heavy sleep. I was roused from this by the noise of rifle fire. There were faint pink streaks in the eastern sky. The village was on an elevation, but around us were still higher hills. You could hear guns and rifles. The battle had begun. We moved out of the village to a hill about a hundred yards to the north-west of it; here there was an open space of slopes and knolls, not high enough to command a view of the surrounding country. Two regiments of infantry were standing at ease on the hills, and as General Stackelberg, the Commander of the First Army, and his Staff rode through the village, at the foot of our knoll, the men saluted him, shouting the usual formula. He was wearing a white tunic, and I think most of the men thought he was the Commander-in-Chief.
Officers stood on rocks, surveying the position through their glasses. The scene looked like a battle-picture: the threatening grey sky, splashed with watery fire; the infantry going into action, and the men cheering the General, as he rode along with his smart Staff in his spotless white tunic and gold shoulder straps. To complete the picture, a shell burst in a compound in front of us, where some dragoons had halted. Presently, we moved off to the west, and the battery was placed at the extreme edge of the plain of millet, west of the tall hill of So-shan-tse. Colonel Philemonov and Kislitski climbed up this hill and directed the fire from the top, on the right side of it, transmitting his orders by a ladder of men placed at intervals down the hill. The whole battle occupied an area of about 20 square miles. I climbed to the top of the hill. It was a grey day, and all you could see was a vast plain of millet. The battery was firing on a Japanese battery to the south-west, at a range of about 5000 yards. I could see the flash of the Japanese guns through my field-glasses when they fired. Every now and then you could make out in a village, or a portion of the plain where there was a clearing in the millet, little figures like Noah’s Ark men, which one knew to be troops. Colonel Philemonov lay on the side of the hill, and with him were Kislitski and the doctor. The Colonel was too ill to do much himself, and, during the greater part of the day, it was Kislitski who gave the range. The Colonel was wrapped in a Caucasian cloak, and every now and then he checked or slightly modified Kislitski’s orders. Kislitski was the most brilliant officer I met during the war.He was cultivated and thoughtful; he knew his business and loved it. It was an art to him, and he must have had the supreme satisfaction of the artist when he exercises his powers and knows that his work is good. He was absolutely fearless, and never thought of himself or of his career. He was responsible for the battery’s splendidly accurate firing in nearly every engagement. He got little credit for it, but he did not need it; his wages were fully paid to him while he was at work. Moreover, anything that accrued to the Colonel was fully deserved, because he had created the battery; the officers were his pupils; and his personal influence pervaded it. He was always there, and ready, if anything went badly, to surmount his physical suffering and deal with the crisis.
The Japanese attack moved slowly like a wave from the south to the south-west, until in the evening, about seven o’clock, they were firing west of the railway line. Three guns of the battery were taken and placed at the top of a small elevation which lay at the foot and west of So-shan-tse, and fired due west towards the red setting sun, over the greenkowliangin which the Japanese infantry were advancing and breaking like a wave on a rock. All day long the Japanese had been firing at us, but the shells fell to the right of us in the millet, and on the evening of the first day we had no casualties of any kind. Towards sunset it began to rain. I was sitting on the edge of a road with a young officer of the battery, a Transbaikalian called Hliebnikov, who had been shouting orders all day in command of a section. He was hoarse from shouting, and deaf from the noise. I was deaf too. We could neither of us hear what the other said, and we shared a frugal meal out of a tin of potted meat. A soldier near us had his pipe shot out of his mouth by a bullet. I shouted to him that it was rather a dangerous place. He shouted back that he was too hungry to care. By sunset the Japanese attack had been driven back. From the spectator’s point of view, thekowliang, the giant green millet, hid everything. From a hill you could see the infantry disappear into thekowliang; you could hear the firing, and the battle seemed to be going on underground. In the evening you saw the result in the stream of wounded and mangled men who were carried from the field to the ambulances.
A terrible procession was wending its way to Liaoyang—some of the men on foot, others carried on stretchers. I metone man walking quietly. He had a bandage soaked red round the lower part of his face; his tongue and lips had been shot away. Nightfall found us sitting on a small knoll at the base of So-shan-tse hill; it had rained heavily. There was no prospect of shelter for the night. Colonel Philemonov was sitting wrapped up in his Caucasian cloak, tired and white; he was in pain. A Cossack had been sent to a village to find a house for us, and to make tea. He did not come back, and Kislitski and I went to look for him. We came to a house in the village of Moe-tung and found a number of soldiers warming themselves round the fire. The Cossack said there was no accommodation, as the rooms on the left were occupied by the Japanese prisoners, those on the right by the Russian dead. There was a shed in the yard—and he pointed to it—full of refuse. This Cossack was an old soldier and he knew his man. Kislitski was extraordinarily fastidious about cleanliness and food. He would rather starve than eat food which he disliked, and stand up in the rain sooner than sleep in a hovel. Kislitski went away in disgust. I stayed and warmed myself by the fire. Soon five or six officers of an infantry regiment arrived, hungry and drenched. The Cossack met them and told them the whole house had been engaged by the Commander and officers of the 2nd Transbaikalian Battery, who would presently arrive, and the officers went away disgusted.
I went back to the battery on the knoll, and it was settled we should remain where we were. After a while the doctor and Hliebnikov asked me to take them to the house to see what could be done. We went back and discovered lights burning in a room we had not been shown before, and there the Cossack and his friends were enjoying a plentiful supper of cheese, sausages, hot tea, and a bottle of vodka. There we lay down to sleep, but not for long; we were wakened by bullets at one in the morning. The Japanese were attacking the village. I saddled my pony and made for my battery, but lost the way. I met a wounded soldier in thekowliang. He couldn’t walk. I lifted him on to my pony, and we found a Red Cross Station in a Chinese temple, and the man was rebandaged. We moved slowly, and on the way this man said to me: “Tell me, little father, what made the Japanese so angry with us?” (“Po chemu tak rasserdilis?”). I slept in the yard of the temple on some stones. Firing began again at dawn, and I soon found my wayback to the battery. The guns were where they had been the day before, but they pointed west. The Colonel and Kislitski were no longer on the big hill, but on the top of the smaller one, at the foot and to the west of it. The Japanese had partially regained in the night the ground they had lost in the day. They had got the range of our battery. One man was wounded soon after I arrived. I crossed the road and climbed the small hill. What a short time that takes to write, but what a long time it took to do! An eternity. I went half-way across, came back, and then started again. I thought every shell must hit me. When I climbed the hill and found the Colonel and Kislitski I felt more comfortable. The Japanese were firing at us from a battery about two miles off. Shells sometimes burst on the road and in front of us. It was the first time I had been under shrapnel fire. The first time I had been under any kind of fire for any prolonged period. The Japanese were firing both shrapnel and shell now. I remember time passed quickly, as if someone had been turning the wheel of things at a prodigious unaccustomed rate. I heard that Hliebnikov had been wounded in the night and sent to the hospital. I stayed on the knoll till one o’clock. Then there was a pause. I left the knoll and sought a safer place near the horses; then I went to see what was happening elsewhere. A long stream of wounded men was flowing to the Red Cross Stations and from there to Liaoyang. The noise was louder than ever. I started to go back to the battery, and met one of the officers, who told me it had been moved. I foolishly believed him. I learnt afterwards this was not true; they stayed in their position till nine. At the end of the second day the Japanese were driven back two miles to the west. On the east they took a trench, which was never retaken. Then came the news of Kuroki’s turning movement. On the following morning Liaoyang, with its triple line of defences, was left to defend itself, while the rest of the army crossed the river. It was neither a victory nor a defeat for either side.
The battle was over but not the fighting, for all through the night of the 31st the Japanese attacked the forts. A Cossack officer, who was in one of them told me that the sight was terrible; that line after line of Japanese came smiling up to the trenches and were mown down till the trenches were full of bodies, and then more came on over the bodies of thedead. One of the officers who was in the fort went mad from horror.
I rode back towards the town in the evening; on the way I met Brooke, who had been with General Stackelberg. We turned back to watch some regiments going into action towards the east, and then we rode back to Liaoyang with streams of ambulances, stretchers, and wounded men walking on foot. The terrible noise continued.
I thought of all the heroes of the past, from the Trojan War onward, and of the words which those who have not fought their country’s battles, but made their country’s songs, have said about these men and their deeds, and I asked myself, Is that all true? Is it true that these things become like the shining pattern on a glorious banner, the captain jewels of a great crown, which is the richest heirloom of nations? Or is all this an illusion? Is war an abominable return to barbarism, the emancipation of the beast in man, the riot of all that is bad, brutal, and hideous; the suspension and destruction of civilisation by its very means and engines; and are those songs and those words which stir our blood merely the dreams of those who have been resolutely secluded from the horrible reality? And then I thought of the sublime courage of Colonel Philemonov, and of the thousands of unknown men who had fought that day in thekowliang, without the remotest notion of the why and wherefore, and I thought that war is to man what motherhood is to woman—a burden, a source of untold suffering, and yet a glory.
After the battle of Liaoyang there followed anotherentr’acte. I lost my battery and they were sent north to rest. I arrived at Mukden on 2nd September, and from there I went on a short expedition to General Miskchenko’s Corps with M’Cullagh, one of the correspondents. Nothing of great interest happened while I was there, except that one day we took part in a reconnaissance. Later, I paid a visit to a corps on the extreme right, near Sin-min-tin, about twenty-six miles from Mukden. I spent a week there in a village with a Colonel who commanded a Cavalry Brigade. These were delicious days. The landscape was rich and woody; thekowlianghad been reaped; there was an autumnal haze over the landscape and a subtle chill in the air; the leaves were not yet brown, and there were no signs of decay; but the dawns were chilly and the evenings short. One of the officers wentout shooting pheasants with his retriever every afternoon. Wild duck used to fly over the village in the evening, sometimes wild geese as well, and there were wild duck in abundance on a reedy lake near the village. Someone here had two long books of Dostoievsky:The IdiotandThe Brothers Karamazov. I remember devouring them both. I had only readCrime and Punishmentup till then, and these two books were a revelation. I got back to Mukden at the beginning of October, and at the railway station I met an officer belonging to the battery, who told me they had just arrived from the north. I found them near the station, and there I met all my old friends. They had been right up to Kuan-chen-tse and then to Harbin and back. The Colonel was still an invalid and in bed. We moved from a cold field, where we were under canvas, into a temple, or rather a house inhabited by a Buddhist priest, and enjoyed two days of perfect calm. The building consisted of three quadrangles surrounded by a high stone wall. The first of the quadrangles was like a farmyard. There was a lot of straw lying about, some broken ploughshares, buckets, wooden bowls, spades, hoes, and other furniture of toil. A few hens hurried about searching for grain here and there; a dog was sleeping in the sun. At the farther end of the yard a cat seemed to have set aside a space for its private use. This farmyard was separated from the next quadrangle by the house of the priest, which occupied the whole of the second enclosure; that is to say, the living-rooms extended right round the quadrangle, leaving an open space in the centre. The part of the house which separated the second quadrangle from the next consisted solely of a roof supported by pillars, making an open verandah, through which, from the second enclosure, you could see into the third. The third enclosure was a garden with a square grass plot and some cypress trees. At the farthest end of the garden was the temple itself—a small pagoda, full of carved and painted idols.
When we arrived here the priest welcomed us and established us in rooms in the second quadrangle. The Cossacks encamped in a field on the other side of the farmyard, but the treasure-chest was put in the farmyard itself, and a sentry stood near it with a drawn sword. A child moved about the place. He was elegantly dressed. His little eyes twinkled like onyxes, and his hands were beautifully shaped. This child movedabout the farmyard with the dignity of an emperor and the serenity of a great pontiff. Gravely and without a smile he watched the Cossacks unharnessing their horses, lighting a fire, and arranging the officers’ kit. He walked up to the sentry, who was standing near the treasure-chest, a big, grey-eyed Cossack, with a great tuft of fair hair, and the expression of a faithful retriever, and said: “Ping!” in a tone of indescribable contempt. “Ping” in Chinese means soldier-man, and if one wishes to express contempt for a man there is no word in the whole of the Chinese language which does it so effectually. The Cossack smiled on the child and called him by every kind of endearing diminutive, but he took no notice and retired into the inner part of the house. The next day curiosity got the better of him, and one of the Cossacks—his name was Lieskov, and he looked after my mule—made friends with him by playing with the dog. The dog was dirty and distrustful and not used to being played with. He was too thin to be eaten. But Lieskov tamed this dog and taught him how to play, and the big Cossack used to roll on the ground, while the dog pretended to bite him. I remember coming home that same afternoon from a short stroll with one of the officers, and we found Lieskov fast asleep in the yard across the steps of the door, and the Chinese child and the dog were sitting next to him. We woke up Lieskov, and the officer asked him why he had gone to sleep. “I was playing with the dog,” he said, “and I played so hard that I was exhausted and fell asleep.”
There was something infinitely quiet and beautiful in that temple, with its enclosures of trees and grass, bathed in the October sunshine. The time we spent there seemed very long and very short, like a pleasant dream. The weather was so soft and fine, the sunshine so bright, that had not the nights been chilly we should never have dreamt it was autumn. It seemed rather as if the spring had been unburied and had returned to earth by mistake. I remember one of the officers saying: “Thank Heavens we were in the deepest reserve.” We seemed to be sheltered from the world in an island of dreamy lotus-eating; and the only noise that reached us was the sound of the tinkling gongs of the temple. We lived a life of absolute indolence, getting up with the sun, eating, playing cards, strolling about on the plains, whence the millet had been reaped, eating again, and going to bed about nine. Then the calm wassuddenly broken, and we received orders to start for the front and join the First European Corps, which formed part of the reserve.
We started for the front on the afternoon of the 6th of October, and we did not reach any place where fighting was going on till the 12th. Those intervening days were spent in marches and halts in Chinese villages. At one of our halting-places I was billeted with Kislitski, who always lived apart, as he could not bear the public life and the public food of a mess. He sat up all one night making a mysterious implement of wood, something to do with rectifying the angle of sight of the guns, and singing to himself passages from Lermontov’s poem, “The Demon,” as he worked.
On the evening of the 11th we arrived at a Chinese village, where to the south of us there was a range of hills which continued like a herring-bone right on to Yantai. In these hills a desperate battle was going on. The battle was drawing nearer to us, and we were drawing nearer to the battle. Firing went on all night. The next day, at six o’clock in the morning, artillery fire began, and from a small hill in front of our position I got a splendid view of the fighting. Thekowliangwas reaped, and one could see to the east successive ranges of brown undulating hills, and to the west a plain black with little dots of infantry. In the extreme distance, to the south-west of the hill on which I stood, were the hills of Yantai. On a higher hill in front of that on which I was standing the infantry was taking up its position, and the Japanese shrapnel was falling on it. The infantry retired and moved to the south-west, and it looked at first as if there was going to be a general retreat.
The firing went on without interruption until ten minutes to seven in the evening. In the night it rained heavily; the noise of thunder was as loud as the noise of the guns. News of terrific fighting kept on arriving—a battery was lost and a regiment cut up, and the wounded began to stream past our camp. Rifle fire went on all night.
The next morning punctually at half-past six the guns began once more. The battle had got still nearer. The shells were falling closer and closer. I turned round and saw through my field-glasses that our camp was astir. I ran back and was met by my Buriat servant, who was leading my pony. Shells began to fall on the hill where I had been standing. It washalf-past eight in the morning, and we were just ready and expecting to start when we were told to remain where we were. The shelling stopped. A little before one o’clock a regiment of the First Corps which was in front of us were told to retreat. It was said that the enemy was beginning to turn our right flank. The battery were ordered to fire on a Japanese battery to the south-west, to cover the retreat of a Russian field battery.
The battery went into action at twenty minutes to three. The guns were masked behind the houses of the village, and Colonel Philemonov climbed up a high tree, so as to get a better view. Knowing how ill he was and that he might have a paroxysm of pain at any moment, my blood ran cold. He could not see well enough from the tree, and he moved up the slope of the hill. He began to give out the range, but after two rounds had been fired he fell almost unconscious to the ground, and Kislitski took over.
The Japanese were firing Shimosé shells. We saw a torn mass of a tree orkowliangscattered into fragments by the explosion of a shell. But when at three o’clock we left the position we saw it was notkowliangnor a tree that had been blown up, but a man. We took up our position on another and higher hill, and the battery fired west, at the farthest possible range, on the Japanese infantry, which we could see moving in that direction against the horizon. This lasted till sunset. At dusk we marched into a village. The infantry was lying in trenches ready for the night attack. Some of the men had been killed by shells, and at the edge of a trench I saw two human hands. The next morning the noise of firing began at four o’clock. We moved into a road and waited for the dawn. It was dark. The firing seemed to be close by. The Cossacks made a fire and cooked bits of meat on a stick. At dawn, news came that the assault of the enemy had been repulsed and that we were to join later on in an attack. The Colonel went to look for a suitable position. I went with him. From the top of a high hill we could see through a glass the Japanese infantry climbing a hill immediately south of our former camp. The Japanese climbed the hill, lay down, and fired on the Russian infantry to the east of them. The Russians were screened from our sight by another hill. The battery fired at first from the foot of the hill, and the enemy answered back from the east and the west. We had to move to a position on a hill farthernorth, whence we fired on a battery three miles off. The battery went into action at eight. Colonel Philemonov, Kislitski, and I lay on the turf at the top of the hill. Kislitski gave the range. The Colonel had begun to do it himself, but had fallen back exhausted. “I love my business,” he said to me, “and now that I get a chance of doing it, I can’t. All the same, they know I’m here.” About an hour after the battery had begun to fire, the Japanese infantry came round through the valley and occupied a hill to the north-west of us, and opened fire first on our infantry, which was beneath us and in front of us, and then on the battery. The sergeant came and reported that men were being wounded and horses had been killed: an officer called Takmakov, who had just joined the battery, was wounded. The Japanese infantry were 1200 yards from us. Three of the guns were then reversed and fired on the infantry. This went on till noon. You could see the Japanese without a glass. With a glass one could have recognised a friend. At noon the infantry retired, and we were left unprotected, and had to retreat at full speed under shrapnel and infantry fire. My pony was not anywhere near. I had to run. The Colonel saw this and shouted to the men to give me a horse, and a Cossack brought me a riderless horse, which was difficult to climb on to, as it had a high Cossack saddle and all a Cossack’s belongings on it.
We crossed the river Sha-ho, and just as everyone was expecting a general retreat to Mukden, we were told to recross the river. It began to rain. As we crossed the river, one of the horses had the front of its face torn off by shrapnel. We took up a position on the other side of the river; the first few shots of the enemy fell with alarming precision on the battery, but the Japanese altered the range, and their shells fell wide. Twenty minutes later the enemy’s fire ceased all along the line. Afterwards we knew that the reason why it ceased was because the Japanese had run short of ammunition. Kislitski and I walked towards the south to see what was going on. We climbed to the top of an isolated cottage, but could see nothing. Then we came back, and the battery set out for a village south-west by a circuitous route across the river. Nobody knew the way. We marched and marched until it grew dark. The Colonel was in great pain. Some Cossacks and Chinese were sent to find the village. We halted for anhour by a wet ploughed field. At last they came back and led us to the village. We expected to find the transport there. I was hoping to find dry clothing and hot food, as we were drenched to the skin and half-dead with hunger and fatigue. When we arrived at the village I was alone with one of the officers; we dismounted at a bivouac, and the officer went on ahead, expecting me to follow him. I thought he was to come back for me. I waited an hour; nobody came; so I started to look for our quarters. The village was straggling and mazy. I went into house after house, and only found strange faces. At last I got a Cossack to guide me, and, after half an hour spent in fruitless search, we found the house and the officers, but no transport, no food, and no dry clothing. I gave way to temper, and was publicly congratulated by the battery for doing so. They said that it was the first time I had manifested discontent in public.
I spent the night in the Colonel’s quarters, and we discussed Russian literature: Dostoievsky, Gogol, and Dickens. He was surprised at a foreigner being able to appreciate the humour of Gogol. I was surprised at a foreigner, I told him, being able to appreciate the humour of Dickens.
At dawn we received orders to hold ourselves ready. Half an hour later we were told to join the First Siberian Corps, which had been sent south to attack.
We marched to a village called Nan-chin-tsa, not far from a hill which the Russians called Poutilov’s Hill, and which the English called Lonely Tree Hill. It had been taken in the night by the Japanese. Through a glass you could see men walking on it, but nobody knew if they were Russians or Japanese. Two Cossacks were sent to find out. Wounded men were returning one by one, and in bigger batches, from every part of the field. It was a brilliant sunshiny day, and the wounded seemed to rise in a swarm from the earth. It was a ghastly sight, even worse than at Liaoyang. The bandages were fresh, and the blood was soaking through the shirts of the men. The Cossacks came back and reported that the hill was occupied by the Japanese. We marched back another verst (two-thirds of a mile) and found the corps bivouacking in the plain. All along the road we met wounded and mutilated men, some carried on stretchers and some walking, their wounds fresh and streaming. We marched another verst south again, andthe guns were placed behind the village of Fun-chu-Ling, two miles north of the hill to which General Poutilov gave his name. On the way we met General Poutilov himself and the infantry going into action. Colonel Philemonov and I climbed up on to the thatched roof of a small house, whence he gave the range. Kislitski was not there. In front of us was a road; our house was at the extreme right corner of the village; to the right of us was a field planted with lettuce and green vegetables. Infantry were marching along the road on their way into action. A company halted in the field and began eating the lettuce. The Colonel shouted: “You had better make haste finishing the green stuff there, children, as I am going to open fire.” They hurriedly made off, as if they were to be the target, except one who, greedier than the rest, lingered a little behind the others, throwing furtive glances at the Colonel lest he should suddenly fire on them. The guns were in a field behind us, and immediately under the house where we were perched, two Chinamen, who had been working in the fields, had made themselves a dug-out, and towards tea-time they appeared from the earth, made tea, and then crept back again. The battery opened fire, and two other batteries shelled the hill, one from the east and one from the west. The enemy answered with shrapnel, but not one of these shells touched us; they all fell beyond us.
A little while later, three belated men belonging to a line regiment walked along the road. Our guns fired asalvo, upon which these men, startled out of their lives, crouched down. The Colonel shouted to them from the roof: “Crouch lower or else you will be shot.” They flung themselves on the road and grovelled in the dust. “Lower!” shouted the Colonel. “Can’t you get under the earth?” They wriggled ineffectually, and lay sprawling like brown fish out of water. Then the Colonel said: “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Don’t you know my shells are falling three versts from here? Be off!” At sunset the battery ceased fire. Soon a tremendous rattle told us the infantry attack had begun. An officer described this afterwards as a “comb of fire.” We waited in the dark-red, solemn twilight, and later a ringing cheer told us the hill had been taken. Someone who was with us said it was just like manœuvres. But all was not over, as the Japanese counter-attacked twice. The hill was partly taken, but at what cost we were presently to see.
It grew dark; we sought and found a Chinese house to pass the night in. Men began to arrive from the hill, and from their account it was difficult to tell whether the hill had been taken or not. The Colonel told Hliebnikov to ride to the hill and find out. Hliebnikov said to me: “He is sending me to be shot like a dog.” We were just lying down to rest when a wounded man arrived asking to be bandaged, then another and another.
The doctor of the battery was with us. The nearest Red Cross Station was eight miles off. Soon the house was full of wounded, and more were arriving. They lay on the floor, on theK’angs, on every available place. The room was lit by one candle and a small Chinese oil-lamp. The men had been wounded by bullets and bayonets; they were torn, mangled, soaked in blood. Some of them had broken limbs. Some of them had walked or crawled two miles from the hill, while others, unable to move, had been carried on greatcoats slung on rifles. When one house was full we went to the next, and so on, till all the houses in the street of the village were filled. Two of the officers bandaged the slightly wounded, while the doctor dealt with the severer wounds. The appalling part of the business was, that one had to turn out of the house by force men who were only slightly wounded or simply exhausted. Some of them merely asked to be allowed to rest a moment and drink a cup of tea, and yet they had to be turned ruthlessly from the door, to make room for the ever-increasing mass of maimed and mangled men who were crying out in their pain. As a rule the wounded soldiers bore their wounds with astonishing fortitude, but the wounded I am speaking of were so terribly mangled that many of them were screaming in their agony. Two officers were brought in. “Don’t bother about us, Doctor,” they said; “we shall be all right.” We laid these two officers down on theK’ang. They seemed fairly comfortable; one of them said he felt cold; and the other that the calf of his leg tingled. “Would I mind rubbing it?” I lifted it as gently as I could, but it hurt him terribly; and then I rubbed his leg, which he said gave him relief. “What are you?” he said—“an interpreter, or what?” (I had scarcely got on any clothes; what they were, were Chinese and covered with dirt.) I said I was a correspondent. He was about to give me something, whether it was a tip or a small present as a remembrance I shall never know, for the other officer stopped him and said: “No, no,you’re mistaken.” He then thanked me. Half an hour later he died. One seemed to be plunged into the lowest inferno of human pain. I met a man in the street who had crawled on all-fours the whole way from the hill. The stretchers were all being used. The way in which the doctor dealt with the men was magnificent. He dominated the situation, encouraged everyone, had the right answer, suppressed the unruly, and cheered those who needed cheering up.
Each house was so small, the accommodation in it so scanty, that it took a short time to fill, and we were constantly moving from one house to another. The floor was in every case so densely packed with writhing bodies that one stumbled over them in the darkness. Some of the men were sick from pain; others had faces that had no human semblance at all. Horrible as the sight was, the piteousness of it was greater still. The men were touching in their thankfulness for any little attention, and noble in the manner they bore their sufferings. We had tea and cigarettes for the wounded.
I was holding up a man who had been terribly mangled in the legs by a bayonet. The doctor was bandaging him. He screamed with pain. The doctor said the screaming upset him. I asked the man to try not to scream, and lit a cigarette and put it in his mouth. He stopped immediately and smoked, and remained quite still—until his socks were taken off. The men scarcely ever had socks; their feet were swathed in a white bandage, a kind of linen puttee. This man had socks, and when they were taken off he cried, saying he would never see them again. I promised to keep them for him, and he said: “Thank you, my protector.” A little later he died.
When we gave the soldiers tea or cigarettes, they made the sign of the Cross and thanked Heaven before they thanked us.
One seemed to have before one the symbol of the whole suffering of the human race: men like bewildered children, stricken by some unknown force for some unexplained reason, crying out and sobbing in their anguish, yet accepting and not railing against their destiny, and grateful for the slightest alleviation and help to them in their distress.
We stayed till all the houses were full; at two o’clock in the morning a detachment of the Red Cross arrived, but they had their hands full to overflowing. We went to snatch a little sleep. We had in the meantime heard that the hill had beentaken, and that at dawn the next day we were to proceed thither.
Before dawn I had some food in the Colonel’s room. While I was there, he sent for the doctor. “I hear,” he said, “that you used our bandages for the wounded who came in last night.” The doctor said this was so. “You had no business to do that,” said the Colonel. “I am expecting severe fighting to-day, and if my men are wounded I shall have no bandages for them.” The doctor said nothing. He knew this was true; every bandage had been used. “I strictly forbid you to do anything of the kind again,” said the Colonel. The doctor saluted and went out. He at once rode to the nearest Red Cross Station, and came back with a provision of bandages later in the morning.
At dawn we started for Lonely Tree Hill, trotting all the way. The road was covered with bandages; the dead were lying about here and there; but when we arrived at the hill the spectacle was appalling. I was the only foreigner who was allowed to visit the hill that day. As the Colonel rode up the hill we passed the body of a Japanese soldier which lay waxen and stiff on the side of the road, and suddenly began to move. The hill was littered with corpses. Six hundred Japanese dead were buried that day, and I do not know how many Russians. The corpses lay in the dawn, with their white faces and staring eyes like hateful waxwork figures. Even death seemed to be robbed of its majesty and made hideous and bedraggled by the fingers of war. But not entirely. Kislitski, who was with me, pointed to a dead Japanese officer who was lying on his back, and told me to look at his expression. He was lying with his brown eyes wide open and showing his white teeth. But there was nothing grim or ghastly in that smile. It was miraculously beautiful; it was not the smile of inscrutable content which we see on certain statues of sleeping warriors such as that of Gaston de Foix at Milan, or Guidarello Guidarelli at Ravenna, but a smile of radiant joy and surprise, as if he had suddenly met with a friend for whom he had longed, above all things, at a moment when of all others he had needed him, but for whose arrival he had not even dared to hope. Near him a Russian boy was lying, fair and curly-headed, with his head resting on one arm, as if he had fallen asleep like a tired child overcome with insuperable weariness, and had opened his eyes to pray to be left at peace just a little longer.
The trenches and the ground were littered with all the belongings of the Japanese: rifles, ammunition, bayonets, leather cases, field-glasses, scarlet socks, dark-blue greatcoats, yellow caps, maps, painting-brushes, tablets of Indian ink, soap, toothbrushes, envelopes full of little black pills, innumerable notebooks, and picture postcards, received and ready for sending. Some of the Japanese dead wore crosses. One had a piece of green ribbon sewn in a little bag hanging round his neck. One had been shot through a postcard which he wore next to his heart.
I saw a Russian soldier terribly wounded just as he had begun to eat his luncheon in the shelter of the hill. So many men were buried that day that the men were faint and nauseated by the work of burying the dead. The battle was over, and now there were only daily short periods of mutual shelling. We lived all day on the hill, and we slept in a broken-down house at the foot of one end of it. There were no windows in this house, and the doors had to be used for fuel. The nights were piercingly cold. The place was full of insects, and we were covered with lice. I lived for a week on the top of this hill without anything of particular interest happening, and on the 30th of October I left with Colonel Philemonov, who had been ordered to Russia by the doctors. He had been getting worse, and could scarcely move from his bed. In spite of this he would get up from time to time and, muffled in a cloak, go up to the top of the hill.
He was given the St. George’s Cross for the battle of the Sha-ho.
As we rode away he told me how he had lived with his men and regarded them as his children, and that it broke his heart to go away. He was a man of forbidding exterior, with rather a grim manner; he frightened some people, but he was refined and cultivated, with a quiet sense of humour, the embodiment of unaffected courage and calm devotion to duty. The men worshipped him. The officers admired him, but I remember one day when I rejoined the battery the following year a discussion at the Mess, when the doctor said that although he admired Philemonov immensely, he thought a good-natured officer, whom we had all known, who used frankly to go to the base whenever there was a chance of fighting, was superior as a man, a better man, and to my astonishment most of the officers agreed with him.
One curious trait about Philemonov was that he was infinitely indulgent to clever scamps, if they amused him, and rather unfair towards conscientious dullards. He punished, as some poet says somewhere, the just unwise more hardly than the wise unjust, and he liked being bluffed, and although he wasn’t really taken in, he was indulgent, more than indulgent, to a successful piece of bluff. I arrived at Mukden on the 31st of October, and the battery returned on the 4th of November to repair the guns. We lived once more in the temple outside the city walls. The autumn had come and gone. It was winter. There had been no autumn, but a long summer and an Indian summer of warm, hazy days. One day the trees were still green, and the next the leaves had disappeared. The sky became grey, the snow fell, and the wind cut like a knife. The exquisite outlines of the country now appeared in all their beauty. The rare trees with their frail fretwork of branches stood out in dark and intricate patterns against the rosy haze of the wintry sunset, softened with innumerable particles of brown dust, and one realised whence Chinese artists drew their inspiration, and how the “Cunning worker in Pekin” pricked on to porcelain the colours and designs which make Oriental china so beautiful and precious. In the meantime I heard from theMorning Postthat they no longer wanted a correspondent in Manchuria, so I decided to go home. Had I waited a few days longer, I could have remained correspondent for theStandard, but this I did not know till it was too late. I stayed at Mukden till the 1st of December, when I started for London.
During the summer of 1905 I did a certain amount of dramatic criticism for theMorning Post. I wrote notices on some of the foreign plays that were being given in London during that summer. Several foreign companies were with us. Duse had a season at the Waldorf Theatre; Coquelin played inL’Abbé Constantin, rather a tiresome, goody-goody play; Sarah Bernhardt produced Victor Hugo’sAngelo,l’Aiglon,Pelléas et Mélisande(with Mrs. Patrick Campbell),Phèdre, andAdrienne Lecouvreur, not Scribe and Legouvé’s play, but a play of her own.
I saw Duse display the full range of her powers in Alexandre Dumas fils’La Femme de Claude; Goldoni’sLa Locandiera; Dumas’Une Visite de Noces,La Dame aux Camélias,Adrienne Lecouvreur; and D’Annunzio’sGioconda; Sardou’sOdetteandFédora.
The most interesting of these performances was, I think, her Césarine inLa Femme de Claude. Duse was blamed for appearing in a repertory of such plays. She was said to complain of the repertory herself. But it is doubtful whether, apart from all booking-office questions of popularity, she would have appeared to a greater advantage in plays of a more exalted character. Duse was not a tragic actress in the sense one imagines Mrs. Siddons and Rachel were tragic. She could not enlarge a masterpiece of poetry by her interpretation, nor give you a plastic poetic creation like a piece of a Greek frieze, as Sarah Bernhardt could and did inPhèdre. She was not the incarnation of the tragic muse; the gorgeous pall overwhelmed her; when she played Cleopatra, for instance (Shakespeare’s Cleopatra much mutilated), her peculiar power seemed to melt into thin air. I once heard a celebrated French actress, and a French critic, who had both only seen her play Cleopatra, wonderwhat her reputation was based on. What she needed was something between high comedy and tragedy; and this was precisely what she found in certain parts of the modern repertory of Ibsen, D’Annunzio, Sardou, Dumas fils, and Pinero, in which she played during that summer.
Dumas’ play,La Femme de Claude, gave her not only an opportunity of showing her astonishing skill, her perfect technique, but it revealed unguessed-of, almost incredible, aspects of her genius. When she played parts such as Sudemann’sMagdaandLa Dame aux Camélias, one used to feel as if one ought not to be there; as if one were peeping through a keyhole at scenes of too intimate and too sacred a nature for the public eye. When Amando hurled money and hissed vituperation at her in the fourth act ofLa Dame aux Camélias, one felt as if the police ought to interfere, and save so noble a creature from outrage. One doubted whether Duse were an artist or even an actress in the true sense of the word, and whether all she gave were not glimpses of the extraordinary nobility of her personality; whether the play were not beside the question; whether she might not just as well appear on the stage in her ordinary clothes and tell us a few confidences—her joys and her sorrows.
But her performance inLa Femme de Claudeproved the contrary. It proved that in the subtle and objective interpretation of a definite character, a character utterly alien to her own nature, she could rival, if not surpass, any artist in the world.
La Femme de Claudewas said by Théodore de Banville to be a symbolic play. Call it that if you will, or call it a melodrama. The subject is simple and dramatic, the action rapid and vigorous. An austere scientific engineer called Claude has married an evil wife, Césarine. She leaves him. He invents a new and powerful gun. She comes back. A foreign spy blackmails her. He threatens to make revelations about her to her husband, unless she obtains for him the secret of the gun. At first she defies this man. She says her husband knows all there is to be known; he then mentions incidents that her husband cannot know, for the bare knowledge of them would make him an accessory in crime. She undertakes to get the secret. She tries to win back her husband, fails, and then shows her teeth. She sets about to seduce her husband’spupil, a young man who is already in love with her. She persuades him to give her the papers and her husband shoots her dead when they are about to elope. At first sight you would have thought that Duse’s genius was too refined and too noble to render the snake-like, feline, insinuating, feverish, treacherous, panther-like, savage nature of Dumas’ she-monster. Sarah Bernhardt is the artist who at once leaps into the mind as being suited to the part, a part that might have been written for her. I have seen Sarah Bernhardt play it and play it superbly. At certain moments she carried you right off your feet.
But Duse played on the nerves till they vibrated like strings, in the same manner as she herself was tremulously vibrating. It was a gradual process of preparation, which began from the first moment she walked on to the stage until she fell forward at the end with outstretched hands when she was shot. Her art was like that of a cunning violinist; the music with its delicately interwoven themes was phrased in subtle progress and with divine economy of effect, till she reached the catastrophe, and then Duse attained to that height where all style disappears, and only the perfection of art, in which all artifice is concealed, remains. The climax needed no effort, no strain; it was the way every note had been struck before, that made it tremendous.
Of course she transfigured Césarine, the heroine; in the modern repertory she always raised the scale of everything she touched, so that you cried out for her to play tragedy, and that was just what she could not do. She did not make Dumas’ heroine a better woman than he intended her to be; but she made her a greater woman than he can ever have hoped she would appear. Duse’s Césarine was wicked to the core; not thoughtlessly non-moral, not invincibly ignorant in her wickedness, but consciously and deliberately destructive; and the manifestation and expression of this unmitigated evil was rendered ten times more impressive by the subtlety of its expression and the delicate refinement which it was clothed with and partially disguised. Duse reminded one of Tacitus’ description of Nero’s wife, Poppæa, who, he says, professed virtue but practised vice; and whose demeanour was irreproachably modest. “Sermo comis nec absurdum ingenium: modestiam præferre et lascivia uti.”
When she met Claude’s young pupil in the first act, she gave,while she deliberately bewitched him, the impression that she was herself the victim of an ingenuous and involuntary passion. In the second act her appeal to her husband would have deceived any jury and most judges. The notes rang out with the authentic indignation of sincerity, with the seemingly unmistakable agony of a victim of unjust circumstance and outrageous fortune; in that long and arduous scene, in that tense duel, fought inch by inch between the desperate woman and the unrelenting man, she was a gallant, a glorious fighter in a losing battle; and at the last, when she saw the game was lost, and she allowed her true nature to show, the spectacle was not that of a savage beast that can do nothing but snarl and howl, but of a gentle animal that suddenly shows ferocious teeth and reveals a hellish hate.
The finest moment of the play came after this, when she sets about her final capture of the young man and makes him deliver her husband’s secret. When she triumphed and said the word “Vieni,” it was as if one were watching some demi-goddess, some Circe, swoop gracefully but with terrible accuracy of aim on to her prey; swift and calm in the deadly certainty of her stroke and of her triumph. Nobody can ever have acted better than Duse did at that moment.
Duse’s performance as Césarine was the finest complete creative work I ever saw her do—finer, in my opinion, than her Magda, because in Magda she was too noble for the part, and rendered none of thecabotineside of the character.
The most charming of Duse’s parts was Mirandolina in Goldoni’s comedy,La Locandiera, in which she gaily twisted all men round her fingers and played on their weaknesses as a harper on his strings. On the same day she gave this exhibition of gaiety, charm, rippling fun, and sly humour, the whole as easy and spontaneous and as fresh as a melody by Mozart, she played Lydie in Alexandre Dumas’ terrible little masterpiece in one act,La Visite de Noces, and showed with unflinching truth not realism but a Tolstoy-like reality how a woman with despair in her soul can calmly and deliberately unravel the skein of man’s weakness, cowardice, and infamy, and then spit out her disgust at it.
In Scribe and Legouvé’s tinsel and lifeless melodrama,Adrienne Lecouvreur, she was wasting her talent, and indeed in her hands the greater part of the play fell flat as far as thereis anything in it to fall flat. But in the death scene she revealed new phases of her genius: