“Oh!” they answered, “we came by quite a different way along the lines. But, nichevo, it doesn’t matter. We shall get there somehow.” We stopped for luncheon at an encampment of the Red Cross. I was entertained by the doctors and the hospital nurses. They expressed the most bitter and violently revolutionary sentiments. After luncheon we went on, asking the way of the Chinese in each village, our destination for the evening being the large town of Oushitai. At every village we asked, the Chinese answered by telling us how many lis (a li is 1⅓ of a mile) Oushitai was distant, and the accuracy with which they determined the distance was, as far as I could judge, amazing. We arrived at Oushitai at moonrise. We went into a yard where there was tea, and straw to lie on, and provisions, but the Cossacks refused to stay there because there were “soldiers” there. The Cossacks, being Cossacks and not “soldiers,” often consider it beneath their dignity to mix with soldiers. So we had to find another yard, where we drank tea and slept until dawn the next morning, when we started once more. We halted at midday in a small Chinese village for our midday meal. It was a small, rather tumble-down village, with a large clump of trees near it. A Chinaman came out of a house, and seeing the red correspondent’s badge on my arm, asked me if I was a doctor. To save the bother of explanation I said I was a doctor. Then he conveyed the information in pidgin-Russian that his son was ill, and requested me to cure him. I went into the house and he showed me a brown and naked infant with a fat stomach. I made him put out his tongue. It was white. I asked what he had been eating lately. The Chinaman said raw Indian corn. I prescribed cessation of diet and complete repose. The Chinaman appeared to me to be much satisfied, and asked me if I would like to hear a concert. I said very much. Then he bade me sit down on the khan—the natural divan of every Chinese house—and to look (“smotrì, smotrì” he said). Presently another Chinaman came into the room and, taking from the wall a large and twisted clarion (like the wreathed horn old Triton blew), he blew on it one deafening blast and hung it up on the wall again. There was a short pause, I waited in expectation, and the Chinaman turned to me and said: “The concert is now over.”
I then went to have luncheon with the Cossacks under the trees. The luncheon consisted of hard rusks (hard as bricks), made of black bread, swimming in an earthen bowl of boiling water on the top of which tea was sprinkled. When we had finished luncheon, and just as we were about to resume our journey, the Chinaman in whose house I had been entertained rushed up to me and said: “In your country, when you go to a concert, do you not pay for it?” The concert was paid for and then we started once more to ride along the mountainous roads, a flat green country, with few trees, and great pools of water caused by recent rain, through which we had to wade and sometimes to swim. Towards the afternoon the aspect of the country changed; we reached grassy and flowery steppes. It was the beginning of the Mongolian country. We met Mongols sitting sideways on their ponies, and dressed in coats of many colours. I have never felt quite so tired in my life as while that interminable afternoon wore on. The distance from Godziadan to Jen-tzen-tung is eighty miles, and when the sun set, and the Cossacks announced that after arriving at Jen-tzen-tung we should have to ride yet two miles further to find the battery, I inwardly resolved that no force on earth should make me ride another inch that night. We arrived at Jen-tzen-tung at eight o’clock in the evening. There I found my old friend Kizlitzki, of the battery, who, as usual, was living by himself in Chinese quarters of immaculate cleanliness. His servant being the former cook of the battery who used every day to make “Boeuf Stroganoff,” Kizlitzki gave me an excellent dinner and a most comfortable bed. The next morning I rode to the village, two miles distant, where the battery was quartered, and here I found all my old friends: Glinka, the doctor, Hliebnikoff, and others.
The house is a regular Chinese house, or series of one-storeyed houses forming a quadrangle, in which horses, donkeys, and hens disport themselves. We occupy one side of the house. Opposite us the owner lives. In the evening one hears music from the other side. I went to see what it was; a Chinaman lying on his back plays on a one-stringed lute, “und singt ein Lied dabei, das hat eine wundersame gewaltige Melodei.” Something like this:—
The first question everybody asked me was whether peace had been declared or not. There has been some fighting here at the outposts since peace was declared.
September 15th.
This village is exceedingly picturesque. It lies in a clump of willow-trees and hard by there is a large wood which stretches down to a broad and brown river. Next to our quarters there is a small house where an old Chinaman is preparing three young students for their examination in Pekin. One of these Chinamen came this morning and complained that their house had been ruined by the Cossacks. We went to inspect the disaster. It turned out that one of the Cossacks had put his finger through one of the paper windows of the house, making thereby a small hole in it. The old teacher is quite charming. He recited poetry to us. When the Chinese recite poetry they half sing it. I had lately read a translation of a Chinese poem by Li-Tai-Po, which in the translation runs thus:—
“You ask me what my soul does away in the sky;
I inwardly smile but I cannot make answer;
Like the peach blossom carried off by the stream,