WITH THE RUSSIANS.

Otago Witness, Volume 23, Issue 2684, 23 August 1905, Page 70

WITH THE RUSSIANS.

(T.P.'s Weekly.) I read everything I find about the war, as, I daresay, do most of my readers. This book before me is, therefore, one of a do/en that I have read or glanc&d at ; it is the b&ok which has pleased me most and given me the most instruction. Frankly, one of the reasons is that, though it is written by a war correspondent, there is very little in it about the actual battles. Descriptions of battles I find first pu/zling and finally boring, and, as a rule now, I skip them. The author of this book, nevertheless, gives me what I regard as fai moro valuable and interesting than the senseless or unintelligible descriptions of deployings, a.r.d advances, and retrerts, ai;d turning inovemen+& ; bo gives me the war and warfare as represented in the individual soldier and in the illuminating episode, and in that way one gets, perhaps, a better idea of what war is rea'ly like than in these long-drawn-out descriptions of engagements and tactical movements. I. Lot me give another reason why this book has made a special appeal to me. It is tLat it gives so pleasant a pietuie of tb© Russian soldier and the Russian offictir. Mr Baring lived with the Russim aravy in all kinds of fortunes, good and bad, in all kinds of circumstances and conditions, in peace and m war, -waiting for a battle, -wlien men gave way to the infectious gaiety that always precedes the great moments of life, and after battles, when the streams of the dying and the wounded poured down from the battlefield in a horrible tide; and with such abundant opportunities of experience the testimony of Mr Baring is entitled to great weight. The qinalities of the Russian soldier which I deduce from his words are — first, great courage; secondly, tremendous endurance ; thirdly, wonderful pa,tience ; and finally, inexhaustible good nature. These are very fin© qualities in any army, and some of them at least are wanting even in good aimies. 11. First let us hear Mr Baring on the Russian officer: During my stay in Manchuria (ho writes) I met almost every kind of officer: guardsmen who had exchanged into cavalry regiments; men whb had baen there for yeais ; officers from provincial Russian towns, from Siberian towns, from the Caucasus, from Moscow, from Perm, from Omsk, from the German frontier; men who had travelled all over the world and spoke every language; others who had lived all their life in Siberia, or the TransBaikal regions, or Manchuria. I foimd that the good qualities which distinguish the best of them were the same; the same, in fact, which are instantly lecog nisable in all classes of all countries, consisting of the absence of swagger, conceit, and self-consciousness, winch makes a boy liked at Eton. The Russian officers have been greatly abused ; they are represented as incompetent drunkards, brutal, stupid, and uncon«cientious. Military instruction., as far as I can judge, they do seem ,to lack, i . . As to the question of incompetence, it seems to me that the system is more at fault than the officers. There is a. general want of organisation, cohesion, and discipline* in the whole army ; and tine fault conies more from abo^e than^ from be-low. As to the question of drunkenness, ths only fact which teems to' me important on the matter is that at the actual front there was no drunkenness. There was nothing to drink except tea. Amd occasional ex tremely limited doles of vodka.. Russians, the author admits, when they do drink, drink harder than Englishmen; but then when they came : tb these towns they were not yet at the front. Liaoy-ang and Mukden occupied to the military operations the same position as Capetown to.. Pretoria during our own war. Therefore, when officers aa-rived there for a short respite from the privations and hardships of life at tkn front, tfosy felt entitled to enjoy themselves. The important fact is that they were not drunk in the field ; they were not drunk when they should have been in thn discharge of their duties ; and if they liked drink or not, it did not prevent them from being brave men and dying with alacrity. I never heard any foreign witness during tike war, however critical, cast any aspersions on their 1 courage. 111. One delightful trait the Russian officer* and men liad in ocanmon — that was their extraordinary hospitality and their good nature to the foreigner. Over and over again Mr Baring dwells upon tlhis trait. "Whenever," he writes in one passage, "one paesed toy an officer's quarters he invariably invited one to come' and partake of something, and,, however little he had for himself, he gave you of his best : It was quite extraordinary to see what a fuss they made about a gue&t. The first example I had of this was in the tram from Kharbin to Mukden, when I was in General Holodovsky's carriage. I did! not know him beyond a mere formal introduction at the railway station, and he at once sent tea, biscuits, and a candle to read by. Every morning he sent his servant to see that I had everything I wanted, and one evening at Mukden, when I toM him that my foot was hurting me, he at once set out, before I could 1 stop him, to get a doctor from 1 the Red' Cross. ... At the front, officers at once put the small luxuries they had at your disposal. They were not satisfied with your taking

* "With tlie Russians in Manchuria." By **— •»*+. Baxiug. (Methuen and Co.i

one helping or one glass, but insisted on your satisfying yourself lo repletion. It was the same with the soldiers. 'Ifc was impossible to watch them eating without their offering you a share, and often I was glad of the o/Ter,"' adds Mr Baring. IV. Here is another passigs I must quote on this point, because it serves to give a picture of the endurance and good huir.ouv of the Fussian soldier, as well as his kindliness and hospitality .- The more 1 saw of the Russiin soldiers the move my admiration lor them increased. More splendid fighting material it would be impossible to conceive. They would endure a-ny hardships, any fatigue ■whatever, without a murmur. They take everything as it comes, smiling. There is something deliciously naive in the story. I give another. Mr Baring finds himself at a deserted railway station, haltdead with fatigue : It began to rain. I fell on a chair beside the buffet ; an official told me I must nofc sit on the chair — anywhere else, but not there. I lay clown on tihe ground on the platform a little farther up. A soldier had been watching the proceedings. He Avaited till I was asleep ; then he brought his own macting, lifted me 1 up, put it under me, and brought me a sack as a pilkw. I woke up and protested against taking his belongirgs, but bo insisted, and made himself comfortable with a greatcoat and a piece of matting. The next morning he brought me a cup of hot tea at dawn. I offered him a rouble. He refused. I never saw him again , but his "little unremenHbered act" will never be forgotten by me. V. And here is a different point, but it has a close association with that which I am dealing with — namely, the attitude of the Russian soldier towards the Japanese. "There is no sort of bitterness between the combatants," says Mr Baring : and he goes J on to ssy, "On both sides the behavioua' of the troops has 'been, on the whole, I wonderfully good." The soldiers, in fact, talk with the greatest respect and admiration of each other. "A correspondent," says Mr Baring, "who returned to Mukden from Liaoyang since the Japanese occupation told me that the Japanese were full of praise of the Russians." And similarly The Russians used aLways to say ths Japanese were me!odtzi, which meanf! "tLne -fellows," and is the greatest praise you can express in Russian. The best proof of this good feeling ivas shown Avlien a battle was fought, and when the treatment ol the wounded was begun. Here is a story illustrative of this point, the truth of which Mr Baring says he can vouch for himself : A Russian and a Japanese were found, locked in a hand'-to-hancl struggle. The Japanese was taken prisoner, aaid the Russian was severely wounded. The Russian refused, to be taken, to the. ambulance unless the Japanese was taken with him, beea.use the Russian said that it was "his Japanese." They were pul together in the same hospital train, and the Russian refused to be separated from the Japanese, and spent his time looking after him and fanning his head, and telling all visitors that it was "his Japanese." VI. One of the most moving chapters in thebook is that which describes tie fight for "Lonely Tree Hill," as it was called before^ the battle; Poutiloff Hill, as it has been called since, as that was the name N of ;tbe general who led the Russian troops on that occasion. I can best bring liome to the mind of my readers what the battle of Poutiloff Hill means by saying that it wai our Spion Kop, but on a hugely larger scale. The fire was opened upon the fateful hill, and was to continue all through the day until 6 o'clock, when the hill was to be stormed at bayonet point. There are some little incidents in the midst of this awful fight — one of the very bloodiest of any war — which teach one how the most 'trifling and petty things rush athwart fch© most solemn and the most terrific nn&menls of life. Here is one: Infantry kept marching along the wood, on its way to action ; a company halted by the field, and began eating lettuce. Our colonel shouted to them, "You hadbettev make haste finishing that green stuff there, children, as I am going to open fire in a moment." They hurriedly made off as if it was upon them that fire wvh to be opened, save one, who, greedier than the rest, lingered behind the, others, throwing furtive glances the while at the .colonel lest he should suddenly be fired upon. It is always, I believe, like this with soldiers when they are going into battle. They take the keenest interest in ths smallest tiling, they laugh and joke over the merest trifle, they chaff each other — in short, they are just in the hysterical state of nerves which makes everything excite them; and when the human animal is in this state he is quite as ready to laugh, as to cry. What a strange prelude this was to the awful drama which was to come will be seen as I quote the scenes that followed in* the night after the storming party had been at work for some hours -.' It grew dark, and we sought and found a Chinese house wherein to pass the night. Men began to arrive from the till, and from their accounts it was " difficult "to tell whether tiLe hill h*od been taken or not. . . . We had just laid" ourselves diomra to re&t -when, a woundled man arrived asking to be bandaged, then, another, and! another. Many of the soldiers had! received their preliminary attendance on the hill itself at the hands of the army surgeons aad assistants, but the detachment of the Red Cross by which the wounded could be rebandiaged was 12 versts distant.

Soon our house was full of the wounded, and more were arriving. Tfosy ky on tie floor, on the k'angs, and in every available place. Light was the difficulty. "VVe bad only one candle and a small Chinese oil lamp, aiA the precession of human agony kept on increasing. The men had b?en badly wounded by bullet an 4 bayonet, torn, mangled, and soaked in blood. .Some had walked or crawled three miles from the hill, while otters, unable tc move, were carried on greatcoats <=lung on rifles. "When one house i ay.is full we went to the next, a,nd so on, i til! nli the abodes up the stiect of the ! village were filled. Two of the officers : bandaged the slightly wounded, whilo the doctor, with untiring energy and ! deftness, dealt with the severely injured 1 . Th- appalling part of this business was tha,t (Mir; had to turn out of the house by force tho^e who were only slightly worn clecl or simply utterly exhausted and 1 faint, to reserve all available space for the severely wounded. And even if you have not Ih-fd severely wounded, yet.. after fighting for hours, it is not an, agreeable prospect to have to walk 15 milt* before there is any chance of getting rest. VII. The gloom and horror of this picture deepens at every moment, and I almost hesitate to go on quoting; but I will do so, so that mv readers may realise what war means : perehiuice some of them aonio day may have to give some vote on which will depend tho ir-sue of peace or war: The Russian soldier, as a rule, bears his wounds with astounding fortitude, but the wounded of whom I am speaking were so terribly mangled that many of them were screaming in their agony. Two officers were brought in. "Don't bothev about us, doctor," they said ; "we shall be all right." The fate of one of these gallant fellows, which cams soon after, brings into relief all the heroism of this cry of unselfishness in the agony of suffering: s They seemed fairly comfortable ; one of them said he felt cold ; and the other that the calf of his leg tingled. "Would I mind rubbing it?"' I lifted it as gently as I could, but it hurt him terribly, and I then rubbed his leg. which, lie said gave him groat relief. "What are you?" he said; "an interpreter, or • what?" (I had scarcely got any clothes'; what they were were Chinese, and covered with dirt.) I said I was a correspondent. He was about to give me something, whether "it was" a tip or a small present as a remembrance, I shall never know, for the other officer stopped him and said, "No, you're mistaken." lie then thanked me very much. Half an hour later he 1 died. vin. "One seemed to be plunged into the lowest circle of the inferno of pain," writes Mr Baring, and then he goes on to give little incident after incident which helps to make one realise something of the horror of the scenes that -followed this awful battle. Here is one such incident : I was holding up one man who had been terribly mangled in the legs by a bayonet. The doctor was bandaging him. ' He screamed with pain. The doctor said the screaming upset him. I asked the man to try rot to scream, and lit a cigarette and put it ir his mouth. He immediately stopped, smoked, and remained quiet until his socks were taken off. Here is an incident the more pitiful and touching because of its slight grotesqueness : The men do not generally have socks ; their feet axe swathed in a white kind of bandage. This man had socks, and when they were taken off he cried, saying he should never see them again. I promised to keep them for him, and he said, "Thank you, my protector." A little later he died. Let me just give the one feature that relieves the blackness of this awful picture, and that was the kindness of the Russians to the Japanese wounded and prisoners that fell into their hands. ""AH day long," says Mr Baring, the Cossacks busied themselves with the wounded, carrying them tenderly to safe, warm j^laces — we were under intermittent fire all day — and bringing them food and cigarettes. "Of their own accord," he says, in another passage, the men went in search of the wounded, brought them to the fire, and gave them tea and cigarettes, and carried them themselves to the village, three versts off. "I saw," says Mr Baring, one Cossack sponging the face of a Japanese wounded man, as if he had been a nurse. "I shall be satisfied," says Mr Baring, if there is a single sentence in this book which will have brought home to anyone the unalterable horror, misery, pain, and suffering which is caused by a modern, war — anything which will make people reflect when — or, rather, before — they beat the big drum and appeal to St.. Jingo. I think I may promise Mr Baring that there will be some of those who read these lines on whom his words will not fall in vain.— • T. P.