BATTLES
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 settled down 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 green _kowliang_ in 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, the _kowliang_,
the giant green millet, hid everything. From a hill you could see the
infantry disappear into the _kowliang_; 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 met one 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 the
_kowliang_. 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 way back 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
the dead. 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 the
_kowliang_, 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 another _entr’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;
the _kowliang_ had 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 went out 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 Idiot_ and _The Brothers Karamazov_. I
remember devouring them both. I had only read _Crime and Punishment_ up
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 moved about
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 was suddenly 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. The _kowliang_
was 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 was
half-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
or _kowliang_ scattered into fragments by the explosion of a shell. But
when at three o’clock we left the position we saw it was not _kowliang_
nor 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 farther north, 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 an hour 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, and the 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 a _salvo_, 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 the _K’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 the _K’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 been taken, 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 the _Morning
Post_ that 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 the _Standard_, 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.