CHAPTER II

JEN-TZEN-TUNG

_September 13th._

I arrived at the quarters of the battery this morning. It is quartered in a village near the large Chinese town of Jen-tzen-tung on the Mongolian frontier. I started from Godziadan at eight o’clock in the morning on the 11th, when I found two Cossacks waiting for me, with a third pony for me to ride, saddled with my own English saddle, which I had left behind me last year. As we started one of the Cossacks said: “You must be careful with that pony, he throws himself.” I wondered what this meant; whether the pony ran away, or bit, or kicked, or stumbled, or bucked, or fell, my experience of Chinese ponies being that they do all these things. I was not long in finding out; it meant that the pony took a sort of dive forward every now and then, tearing the skin off one’s fingers in the effort to hold it up.

After we had ridden for about two hours, one of the Cossacks asked the other if he knew the way. The other answered that he did not. The first one told him he was a fool. “But,” I interrupted, “as you have just come from Jen-tzen-tung, surely you know the way back.”

“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:—

[Illustration: [Music]]

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, I soar away to a world unknown to you.”

By means of a small piece of wood, a flower, and some water I made the Chinaman understand what poem I was alluding to, and he recited it for us. The Chinese asked me to tell them their fortunes by their hands. I said to one of them, at random, that I saw great riches in his hand, thinking it would please him. The Chinaman said nothing, but later, when this Chinaman, who was a visitor, had gone, the others said to me: “You spoke true words. That man is a ‘Koupeza’ (pidgin-Russian for merchant) and he is enormously rich.” These Chinamen take an acute interest in the result of the peace negotiations, and wish to be informed as to all sorts of details of which we are ignorant. The impression among the officers here is that it is a very good thing that peace has been concluded. “We ought to thank Heaven that our men have not been beaten again,” one of them said, and he added: “It is silly to say that the higher authorities are the only guilty ones; we are all equally guilty.”

_September 16th._

We spend the time riding, reading, bathing, sleeping, and playing patiences.

Jen-tzen-tung is a large and most picturesque town. A constant stream of Mongols flows in and out of it. They wear the most picturesque clothes, silks and velvets of deep orange and luminous sea-green, glowing like jewels. We ride into the town to buy provisions, fish mostly. The wines sold at the shops are all sham and horribly nasty. At the corner of one of the streets there is a professional wizard, dressed in black silk embroidered with silver moons, and wearing the conical cap that wizards always do wear. You ask a question, pay a small sum and shake coins out of a cup three times, and according as the coins make an odd or even figure, the wizard writes down a sign on a piece of paper, and then he tells you the answer to your question. The Chinese consult him before striking a bargain or setting out on a journey. I asked him whether I should get back all right? He answered that I could go home either by the East or the West, and that the West would be better, though I should meet with obstacles.

He refused to prophesy for more than a hundred days ahead.

In the evening, after dinner, we discussed politics and the Duma (that is to say the Duma as originally planned by the decree of August 6th). The doctor said that unless there were to be a constitution in Russia, he would emigrate abroad, as he did not choose that his children should be brought up in a country which was politically inferior to Turkey. He is hopeful about the Duma; he says Witte will be a national hero; and that a constitution is a foregone conclusion. Somebody said the peasants were hopeless. He hotly contested this, and said there was far more political sense among the peasants than among the rest of the population. He has had great experience of the peasants.

_September 19th._

I had a long talk with Kizlitzki this afternoon. He is like a round peg in a square hole in this army. Strict discipline and impeccable order seem to him the first essentials of military life. The others don’t understand this, although they are conscientious; but they like doing things in their own way, which is a happy-go-lucky way, and they think Kizlitzki is rather mad. Kizlitzki told me that at the battle of Ta-shichiae, where he was in command of the battery, when he had made all the necessary arrangements, placed his guns, &c., he received orders to go and speak to a general; before he went, he warned his subordinates to leave everything as it was. When he came back he found that the battery, owing to the fancy of one of the subordinates, had been moved two miles from where he had placed it. So he had to fetch it back and arrange everything over again. The result was that it did not open fire until two in the afternoon, a fact which I had noticed at the time, although I was not with the battery then. He said he had never made such an effort of self-control as not to lose his temper when he saw what had been done. In the French or German, and I trust also in our army, Kizlitzki’s methods would be taken as a matter of course. Here they are considered to be an unnecessary pose. On the other hand he is not in the least a formalist, a lover of red-tape, or a pedant; he merely considers elementary discipline to be necessary.

I had tea with a Chinese Mandarin. I do not know which was the more exquisite, his tea or his manners. In the evening we discussed writers of books. Hliebnikoff said he knew who was the greatest writer in the world, and when some one else asked who, he answered Dostoievski of course. The doctor vehemently disagreed with this. Hliebnikoff went out of the room in disgust. It is astonishing what a quantity of English novels these people have read in translations: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Rider Haggard, Stevenson, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome. The doctor admires Jerome enormously. I think there is a human element in him which especially appeals to Russians.

_September 21st._

A fine, hot, and glorious September day. The evening was one of those things that linger in one’s mind like music. The sky was a very faint mauve, something between mauve and pink, like a hydrangea, or as Dante says:—

“Men che di rose e più che di viole Colore aprendo,”

and, hanging over the delicate willow-trees, silvery in the half-light and faintly rustling, a large and misty moon—a moon made of ghostly fire. The days pass in pleasant monotony; visitors come from other divisions; but we go to bed about nine in the evening and get up very early. It is a delicious life. We often visit the Chinese professor in his peripatetic school. One of the students asked me whether in my country “you write and a big captain comes to look-see, and if all was not well, beats you.” I said that practically this was the procedure of our competitive examinations.

_September 27th._

Autumn has come and it is too cold now for the men to be encamped here out of doors, so we have moved into quarters in the town.

_October 1st._

I left for Gunchuling, _en route_ for Kharbin, with Hliebnikoff and another, and bade goodbye to the friends who had so hospitably entertained me. (Two of them I was never to see again, for they died shortly after I left, one of typhoid and one of dysentery.) We arrived at Oushitai at five in the evening. The country is said to be infested by Hung-Hutzes, and some men were wounded by them yesterday in the environs of this place. At Jen-tzen-tung I met a merchant, whom I had known at Liaoyang, who had been caught by the Hung-Hutzes, but—

“As no one present seemed to know His use or name, they let him go.”

Jen-tzen-tung was on the extreme right flank of the Russian army. The army therefore extended eighty miles from the extreme right flank to the centre, and again another eighty miles from the centre to the extreme left flank. Oushitai was connected with Gunchuling by a kind of tram-railway drawn by horses.

_October 6th._

In this tram we travelled to Gunchuling, and thence I proceeded to Kharbin by train.

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