BRUSSILOFF.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1416, 14 June 1917, Page 2

BRUSSILOFF.

RUSSIA’S GREAT GENERAL

My host was polite to the extreme point of inviting me to spread my bedding on top of the stove, which, in the Western equivalent, was to usher me into the state bedroom. "He is, then you say, a young man?” he inquired (writes Percival Gibbon in the “Daily Chronicle”). “Youngish,” I replied. “Not a boy, you know; a ripe man, who is still short of decay. Fiftyish, I suppose; and alive as a newly-hooked eel. Grey hair and grey moustache and all that—but I’m getting grey myself, and that means nothing. Yes, I suppose you’d call him a youngish kind of a man!” . He was looking up at me where I lay in the place of high honour, and a very uncomfortable place it was. His great hands were on the edge of the. oven-top, splayed like vast claws; he was terribly like some big and docile animal. “Yes?” He made a note of querv still. I wished he would go to his hay and let me sleep. “Well?” “What was it like to speak to him?” “Oh!” The truth -was, I had been puzzled. I had seen him twice in his staff office at a South Russian town that stands so nobly above its river

’ against the sky. It was a plain room of the artillery barracks there, with' - curtainless windows overlooking the roofs and the sky-blue, star-spangldd domes of the great Russian church. There was a desk in the room, and a trestle table below the windows, upon which maps were pinned. Behind the desk, precise as a banker, sat Brusiloff. - I tried to tell him the truth. You know, I said, the difference between these great men and us is not a thing one sees at once. It is in the soul —not in the face or the voice. There is an aide-de-camp who opens the door and calls your name. If you are a foreigner like me, he disconcerts you by calling it wrong. The • door is open, and you haven’t time, in passing, through, to tell him what you think of him. It is one step from the dreary white-washed room where you have been waiting, composing the speech you are going to make, to the presence of the General! The officer roars “Sir Jibbon” —you step forward, and the next thing you are aware of is a small man, with a sort of shine to him, a glitter as it were, reaching a hand to you across a shining and orderly deck and saying, “Enchante, Sir Jibbon!” His steady eyes glowed. “But — there was a shine, a glitter?” I sighed. . “Yes, there was a shine. He had an order at his neck and two or three more on, his breast. Then, his aiguillettes, the cords that loop from his collar to his armpit, were gold —not just yellow or white as they are with ordinary staff officers. And his buttons shone like gold, and there was a ring on one of his fingers. All that shone, as I have said. But” —I was very tired, but truth is truth (even artistic truth) — “that wasn’t exactly what I meant. I didn't mean just the medals he wore. He himself by virtue of the - thing he was, struck one as a glitter.” “Yes?” His upward eyes were reverent and credulous, prepared to believe anything. “Oh, Lord! Don’t you understand anything? Think! I’d been weeks up at the front, lumbering around among men like myself, just common or garden officers doing what they could without greatly understanding anything. They were men in charge of tiny details of the war, infantry, cavalry and artillery subalterns, for the most part, whose chief business was to act the benevolent uncle towards a half hundred soldiers, schooling them and sharpening them towards the moment when they’d have to leave their comfortable dug-outs and go for the enemy across the bul-let-swept open and punch him with the bayonet. They didn’t know when the moment would come; they hadn’t an idea of how the attacks at Verdun affected them, or of 'whether that cursed Queen’s Pawn of a Roumania was going to play a part in the game. I ate with them, slept with them, lived with them; I knew what they knew and no more. Upon any particular sector of the front line, no matter how many bullets I dodged, I knew less of the general ' shape of the war than the average Jew at Vladivostok who read his paper regularly. The co-ordination

of strategy among the Allies was as big a mystery to me as the transmigration of souls.” “Trans —what does that mean?” “Never mind what it means; you’re an example of it; and it’s a dark and frightful mystery. The point is, I and most of the rest of the world knew nothing about that or about the general meaning and purpose of the war; and with one step past the aide-de-camp I was grasping the hand of a man who knew all there was to knew. I was in the presence of a brain which harbored tiie knowledge at which we can’t guess—why the Russians don’t tramp back through Poland now that they have rifles for the men, why the English don’t thrust to the Rhine, and why the Italians don’t reach out and take Trieste. A man, in short, in the confidence of the Providence, which will shape the future —a seer, a prophet. You and I wonder whether the war will finish on the frontier or in Berlin with the Kaiser decorating a gallows and the Kronprinz a pillory! We wonder —but HE knows.” The reverent and patient eyes glowed in the little light of the foul lamp. “He knows —yes!” “And he doesn’t say! Is there anything more infuriating than a man with the gift of prophecy who is also dumb? That is your Brusiloff! He’ll talk; he’s accustomed to talking to fellows like me, who’ll print what he says. I asked him when the war would end —I always ask a General that —and he answered that it might end in a year and a half, and then, again, it might not. I asked him \rfien, if ever, he was going to push the Austrians back. He said he might do it soon, or, if not soon, some other time. A man like a pincushion, giving back only that which you yourself insert. Wellington wouldn’t have acted like that; he’d have given himself away and discovered it afterwards, and then kicked you out. Napoleon would have told you what he thought it proper to have published. But this man has a surface like an armoured deck; he’s open to any projectiles in the form of questions, and your questions just bounce back at you. I said that he shone, did I? Well,, he does; he shines because he’s smooth.”

It was a waste of rhetoric. Those worshipful eyes never blinked or wavered. “And his face?” “His face? Well, I told you he was youngish, didn’t I? He sits rather still behind his orderly desk, and I have a notion he’s a trifle de-.:.f, be cause he leans forward at you with his head a little on one side, as though he had to make an effort to hear through his best ear. One sees him as a still and listening countenance, smallish, a little beaky with his aquiline and prominent nose, and something irresponsive and sardonic, with his stone-grey and wary eyes. He smiles politely enough—but without mirth or cordiality. He offered nothing and accords little enough to his visitors; his face contains his meaning like a strong box. One wonders why one troubled to go into the room, except to view the glitter of the orders on his grey khaki uniform; in other respects, one could as effectually have interviewed him over the telephone. It isn’t Brussiloff one sees; it is only Brussiloff’s fortified front.”