The weather is becoming better. The ships are going very slowly, keeping near Kamranh Bay with lights covered. As usual, I stayed a long while on the bridge. The rainy season will begin here soon, as well as typhoons. How will the smaller vessels, like torpedo-boats, get on?
April 10th.—After lunch I am going to the Tamboff; she is shortly going to Saigon. I shall post this letter by her. One of the staff-officers should have gone to the Tamboff, but they are nearly all lying ill. I myself feel well, thank God!
Yesterday the Oslyabya buried another sailor.
There was mass to-day. It is Palm Sunday. How time has flown! All night the ships remained at sea. The night passed quietly. The Isumrud fouled her screws with a chain. Divers were sent down.
A steamer flying the Norwegian flag passed by. She was examined, but nothing suspicious was found. She was coming from Japan, and not going there.
I took my last letter and gave it to the captain of the Tamboff. I handed him a franc for the stamp, but he was offended and would not take it. I tried to obtain cigarettes, but was unsuccessful. The wardroom wanted to buy vodky from her, but that too was a failure. The Norwegian steamer which we examined this morning gave us the latest papers. They are all English.
The discretion of the English press is extraordinary. They consider Japan their ally, so they purposely say nothing about her fleet. About ours they print all the news they in one way or another possess. It is not the English newspapers alone that act thus. To do them justice, the Japanese carefully conceal everything, and no one ever rightly knows how many ships they have lost. Not only ships, but up to the present no one knows how many troops Japan can place in the field. It was thought about 300,000, and already they have placed nearly a million men.
The foreign press (English and French) puts our losses from the beginning of the war at about 400,000 men. If that is the case, how many are left to Linievitch? A mere trifle, about 200,000. Could anything more disgraceful than this war be imagined?
April 11th.—From time to time merchant vessels pass near the fleet. Our cruisers and torpedo-boats go and examine them. A French steamer came quite close, and a man in her expressed a wish to hand something to the admiral in person. I know now that he only announced the date the third fleet passed Colombo, and said that nothing fresh had happened in Manchuria.