"'It won't be an easy thing to match Pavel Petrovitch; but if it can be done, here is the man to do it!'
"I think that campaign was the hardest I ever served in. Before I was enlisted I had often heard it said that the Turks had no winter; but I had always thought that this was only a 'yarn,' though, indeed, it would be only a just judgment upon the unbelievers to lose the finest part of the whole year. But when down there I found it true, sure enough. Instead of a good, honest, cracking frost to freshen everything up, as our proverb says:
'Na zimni Kholod
Vsiaki molod'—
(in winter's cold every one is young), it was all chill, sneaking rain, wetting us through and through, and making the hill-sides so slippery that we could hardly climb them, and turning all the low grounds into a regular lake of mud, through which it was a terrible job to drag our cannon. Many a time in after days, when I've heard spruce young cadets at home, who had never smelt powder in their lives, talking big about 'glorious war,' and all that, I've said to myself, 'Aha, my fine fellows! if you had been where I have been, marching for days and nights over ankles in mud, with nothing to eat but stale black bread, so hard that you had to soak it before you could get it down; and if you'd had to drink water through which hundreds of horses had just been trampling; and to scramble up and down hills under a roasting sun, with your feet so swollen and sore that every step was like a knife going into you; and to lie all night in the rain, longing for the sun to rise that you might dry yourself a bit—perhaps then you wouldn't talk quite so loud about 'glorious war'!"
"However, we drove the Turks across the Balkans at last, and got down to Yamboli, a little town at the foot of the mountains which commands the high-road to Adrianople. And there the unbelievers made a stand, and fought right well. I will say that of them; for they knew that if Adrianople was lost all was over. But God fought for us, and we beat them; though indeed, with half our men sick, and our clothes all in rags, and our arms rusted, and our powder mixed with sand by those rogues of army-contractors, it was a wonder that we could fight at all.
"Towards afternoon, just as the enemy were beginning to give way, I saw Pavel Petrovitch (who was a general by this time) looking very hard at a mortar-battery about a hundred yards to our right; and all at once he struck his knee forcibly with his hand, and shouted:
"'What do the fellows mean by firing like that? They might as well pelt the Turks with potatoes! I'll soon settle them! Here, Ivan!' Away he went, and I after him; and he burst into the battery like a storm, and roared out:
"'Where's the blockhead who commands this battery?'
"A young officer stepped forward and saluted; and who should this be but the light-haired youth with the blue eyes whom I had noticed that night at Varna.
"'Well, you won't command it to-morrow, my fine fellow, for I'll have you turned out this very day. Do you know that not a single shell that you have thrown away since I've been watching you has exploded at all?'