Then, at the end of July, a ride back to Haichen, a distance of thirty miles, carried out in two stages, and a night spent on the grass at a railway siding where soldiers who guarded the line lived. The soldiers entertained me and gave me soup and bread, and tea, some cucumber, and some sugar. I thought of Byron’s example of something solemn:
“An Arab with a stranger for a guest.”
My host had lived in this isolated land-lighthouse for four and a half years. He and the other soldiers talked of places, and one of them said the Red Sea lay between Japan and China, near Colombo. Another said that the English had taken Thibet. They made me a bed with some hay and a blanket, and I slept in the field. Then came a start at dawn and a ride to Haichen, where there was bustle and confusion, and a battle expected; and there, for the first time, I saw the ghastly sight of maimed soldiers being carried in with their fresh bandages, their recent wounds, their waxen faces, and their vague, wondering eyes. After that, a night in the village disturbed by a panic, and shouts that the Japanese were upon us, followed by the discovery that it was a false alarm, and the further discovery that the expected battle would not happen. We rode back to Liaoyang, after which I was laid up with sunstroke and again cured by Dr. Westwater.
At the end of the first week of August, I started once more to find the Cavalry Brigade to which I had been attached. This time I took with me Dimitri, a dark-eyed Caucasian with a black beard and a nose like a beak, dressed in a long brown skirt with silver trimmings, and armed with a scimitar and several revolvers. Dimitri had lived in the saddle all his life, and when I complained of my pony stumbling, he said: “It’s not the pony; the truth is, little father, that just a little you don’t know how to ride.”
I found the Brigade. It was commanded by a new General, called Sichkhov. He was sitting in the small and dirty room of a Chinese cottage; a telegraph was ticking in the room next door, and everywhere flies were buzzing. “Have you brought us any food?” said the General. “We have nothing here, no bread, no sugar.”
The General and the staff lived in the cottage in which there were two rooms. The rest of us lived in a garden. At the bottom of the garden there was a piece of trellis-work, over which a pumpkin twined and climbed. Under it was my valise. This was my bedroom. This was in the village of Davantientung. I stayed there six days. We used to get up very early at four or five. I would say “Good morning” to the doctor. He would draw back his hand and say: “I beg your pardon, I have not washed.” The ceremony of washing was performed like this: you took off your shirt, and a Cossack poured water from a pewter cup over your head and your hands, and you could use as much soap as you pleased. At noon we had our midday meal, then we drank tea and slept; later we went for a walk, perhaps, and had supper in the evening, and then bed. But torrents of rain fell, and this idyllic garden soon became a swamp. I moved to another neighbouring Brigade, commanded by Colonel Gurko, and while I was there I dined with one of his batteries, a horse battery of Trans-Baikalian Cossacks. They asked me to stay with them for good, and I did so. The night after I had dined with the battery, the doctor took me to a church where there was a Chinese Catholic priest. His presbytery was scrupulously clean, and the church was full of paper roses. In the presbytery sat an old bronzed Chinaman reading his breviary. He talked French, with a somewhat limited vocabulary, but with a pure French intonation, and he gave us a glass of fine champagne. The day after this we were ordered to go to Davantientung, the village I had just left. There we occupied a large Chinese house with a dirty yard in front of it. Here a new epoch began for me—life with a battery. The Commander of the battery, Colonel Philemonov, was away in hospital. His place was taken by a fat, Falstaffian, good-natured man, with a heart of gold, called Malinovsky, who knew next to nothing about gunnery. The gunnery work was performed by a junior Lieutenant, Kislitsky. There were other younger officers, a doctor, and a veterinary surgeon. We all lived in one room of the Chinese house; our beds were stretched side by side along the K’ang—the natural platform of every Chinese house. We got up at sunrise, and had dinner at noon. Dinner consisted of huge chunks of meat, cut up and mixed with potatoes, and served in a pail. This dish the cook used to call Bœuf Strogonoff, and it was the only dish he knew. Sometimes the officers struck and demanded something else, but the dish always ended by being Bœuf Strogonoff.
After dinner, we used to sleep on the K’ang, talk and sleep, and then go for a walk, talk, sleep once more, and go to bed. The weather was very hot; when it rained, which it did torrentially once every ten days, it was hotter. Every house you saw was made of yellow-baked mud; on each side of you were endless immense stretches of giant millet fields, of an intense blinding green. There was an irresistible languor in the air.
In the yard outside, the horses munched green beans in the mud. Inside the fangtse all the flies of the world seemed to have congregated. In spite of the heat, one took shelter under anything, even a fur rug. To eat and sleep was all one thought about; but sleep was difficult and the food was monotonous and scanty. Insects of all kinds crawled from the dried walls on to one’s head. Outside the window, two or three Chinese used to argue in a high-pitched voice about the price of something. There was perhaps a fragment of a newspaper four months old which one had read and re-read. The military situation had been discussed until there was nothing more to be said. Nowhere was there any ease for the body or rest for the eye—an endless monotony of green and yellow; a land where the rain brought no freshness and the trees afforded no shade. The brain refused to read; it circled round and round in some fretful occupation such as half inventing an acrostic.
When Bron Herbert read the account I wrote of life during this period of the war, he wrote and told me that it had vividly brought back to him his experiences of camp life in South Africa.