“No fellow,” he wrote, “who hasn’t been through it can know what it’s like. The way that everyone says exactly the same things that they would say if they were in London, and all the time they’re doing most absurdly different things. The way that one drifts clean out of one’s little circle, of which one has formed an integral part and in which one has been absorbingly interested, and instantaneously finds oneself in another quite new one in which one becomes in a few seconds a vastly important component part and equally absorbed. The way in which one really spends nine-tenths of one’s time sitting in some beastly place without shade, brushing flies off one’s face, and somehow one isn’t bored with it. The way in which all things which are most boring at home become most interesting out there. The way in which everything is rather a blur, nothing very distinct but all one’s sensations funny ones, quite new and different; only the isolated little incidents stand out clear like oases. There’s no general impression left. It’s like tops of mountains sticking up through a fog.”
These are the kind of incidents I remember. One night a man arrived at Davantientung from Moscow. We put him up. When he woke up in the morning he said: “I was dreaming that I was going to the Art Theatre in Moscow. I had got tickets; they were doing a new play by Tchekov. I wake up and find myself here.”
Another time a translation of H. G. Wells’s Food of the Gods appeared in a Russian journal, and two officers fought for it, and rolled on the floor till the magazine was torn to bits; and they neither of them wanted it really.
The doctor of the battery and one of the young officers would argue about the war, about the absurdity of war; that if you go to war it is silly to look after the wounded. The gospel of frightfulness was advocated and rejected. Endless discussions followed.
One evening, the Cossacks bathed their horses in a lake hard by and swam about naked, like Centaurs. It was a wonderful lake, full of pink lotus flowers, which in the twilight, with the rays of the new moon shining on the floating tangled mass of green leaf (the leaves by this time were grey and shimmering) and the broad pink petals of the flowers, made a harmony that seemed to call for the brush of some delicate French impressionist painter. But no painter could have reproduced the silvery magic of those greys and greens, the fantastic spectacle made by the moonlight, the twilight, the shining water, the dusky leaves, and the delicate lotus petals. Those days at Davantientung were long days. I suppose I was not really there a long time, but it seemed an eternity. I went back to Liaoyang in the middle of August, to post a letter, and then found my way back to the battery by a miracle, for they had moved, and I arrived at the very door of their new quarters. Then the long dream of the sweltering entr’acte came to an end. We suddenly got orders to move at two o’clock in the morning. We marched to a large village, and in the afternoon we moved on to another place where, just as I had taken the saddle off my pony, and was lying down in a Chinese temple, I heard a stir. The Japanese were reported to be less than a mile from us, and had entered the end of the village we had just left, while the dragoons were going out of the other end of it. We marched till midnight and then rested, and at dawn we started by a circuitous route for Liaoyang, which we reached about three o’clock in the afternoon.
CHAPTER XV
BATTLES
We established ourselves in a small village about two miles from the town of Liaoyang. Everything was calm. This was on 29th August, and a battle was expected on the next day. Kuropatkin was rumoured to have said that he would offer a tall candle to Our Lady at Moscow if the Japanese fought at Liaoyang. A little to the south of us was a large hill called So-shan-tse; to the east a circle of hills; to the north, the town of Liaoyang. A captive balloon soared slowly up in the twilight. It did not astonish the Chinese.
We lay down to sleep. Nobody thought there would be a battle the next day. Colonel Philemonov had arrived at the battery the evening we left Davantientung. I had not seen him before, and the battery up to then had been commanded nominally, and in a social sense by Malinovski, but in a military sense by Kislitski. The first time I set eyes on Colonel Philemonov was in the grey dawn in a Chinese house at the first place we stopped at after Davantientung. He was sitting at a window in a grey tunic. Being shortsighted, I mistook him for one of the other officers, and I went boldly up to him and was about to slap him on the back when he slowly turned his grey-bearded face towards me and looked up inquiringly with a grunt. I fled. I knew him by reputation. He was said to be the best artillery officer in the Siberian Army, and had formed the three Transbaikalian horse batteries. He had returned no better from the hospital, and was suffering from a terrible internal disease; but nothing overcame his indomitable pluck.