'On the night of September 8-9, Lieutenant Endrjievsky, of the 26th East Siberian Rifle Regiment, on his own responsibility, and without even reporting it to his commanding officer, took 100 men of the Scouts and performed various pointless gallant acts. This only shows: (1) That there are officers who do not consider the lives of the soldiers entrusted to them to be of the least value, and do not consider themselves responsible for them; to such gentlemen the sacrifice of a number of men for a quite useless undertaking means nothing; this proves their youth. (2) That in some units strict discipline is not maintained; for anyone to be able to take a company away from a bivouac without the knowledge of the commanding officer is very extraordinary.
'This officer is deprived of his appointment for taking his company out without permission, and for losing 5 men killed and 19 wounded to no purpose; he will not be recommended for any rewards, and will be transferred to the 27th East Siberian Rifle Regiment for duty. Colonel Semenoff, commanding the 26th East Siberian Rifle Regiment, will be good enough to look to the internal discipline of his regiment.'
This order excited intense indignation, all that was most honourable and most sensible in the garrison was outraged. Thus was a gallant young officer, who had risked his life to try and assist us to hold Temple Redoubt a little longer, held up to ridicule. Individual initiative was absolutely frozen up by this treatment, and no one attempted to carry out what, after all, is one of the most dangerous of operations, for all knew what the slightest piece of bad luck would mean for them. Had its author at all considered the after-effect of this order, he would probably not have issued it.
PANORAMA OF NORTH-EAST FRONT.
Tumulus Battery. 3. Fortification No. 3. 5. Chinese Wall.
Bombproof of the Officer Commanding the Section. 4. Rocky Ridge. 6. Fort, Erh-lung-shan.
It has been said that Stössel was liked by his subordinates, but he was feared, not loved, and he in his turn cared so much for the men under him that he did not consider it necessary to ride round the positions. And yet when telegraphing to the Tsar his thanks for his promotion in the Order of St. George, etc., he said that he had that 'day, on the positions, made the Tsar's telegram known to all.' He never went nearer the front than the barracks of the 10th Regiment, the safest spot in the whole Fortress!
On September 9 I, as usual, accompanied the Commandant on his inspection of the positions. As we went round, the men, taking advantage of the lull, were resting, having, wherever they could, burrowed under ground. The Chinese Wall had been repaired, and was held all along its length by infantry. Life at the front, though possibly exciting, was now neither amusing nor pleasant. The air all round reeked with the mingled stench of decomposing bodies, garlic and disinfectants, for on all sides hung pieces of linen steeped in carbolic acid. At first the men could not eat, but they gradually became acclimatized. Dogs had long ago fled.
On the 15th I spent some time on the splendidly appointed hospital ship Mongolia, and was much struck with the perfection of the arrangements, and the contrast between the comfort and cleanliness on board and the squalor and filth at the front. I met one of the nurses who had served with the Red Cross in the late war in South Africa. I asked her which she thought was worse, this war or the other.
'There, in comparison to what is going on here, things seem trifles: the wounds there were generally small; here they are dreadful.'