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[288] 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.[289] 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[290] 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[291] 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[292] 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[293] 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[294] 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[295] 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 s............