With the Cossacks; being the story of an Irishman who rode with the Cossacks throughout the Russo-Japanese war

Front matter

ASIA

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

LIBRARIES

Part II With The Army

I. I Join Mishchenko .

II. Before Mishchenko's Raid

III. A Christmas with the Cossacks

IV. Mishchenko's Raid .

V. How I Left Mishchenko

VI. The Battle of Sandypu .

VII. Mukden Before the Battle .

VIII. The Battle of Mukden .

IX. March i and March 2 .

X. A Vast Vodka Debauch .

CONTENTS

XI. General Kuropatkin's Train XII. March 5, 6 and 7 .

XIII. The Retreat from Mukden

XIV. Our Capture .

XV. Face to Face with Kuroki

XVI. Back to Liaoyang .

XVII. From Liaoyang to Dalny XVIII. From Dalny to Japan as a Prisoner of War

SiBEglM RiFies nnST SIBEKIAN t the beginning cf CORPS at the Vie battle l>yinning of^ ' iJrc B/\me,

ILLUSTRATIONS

Misckenkos and his Cossacks .... Pronthpiece Dragoons Drinking at a Wayside Well Francis McCullagh and his Cossack, Philipoff Mischenkds Raid .....

A Japanese Prisoner ....

The South Gate of Mukden The Retreat from Mukden Russian Priests Blessing Rennenkampfs Cossacks before the Russian Advance on Pen-shi-Hu, October 1 904

Facing page

34 112

PART I PORT ARTHUR

Chapter I

When the Russo-Japanese War broke out I was on the staff of the Novi Krat* newspaper of Port Arthur. To explain how I, a British subject, came to find myself in that singular position I shall go back a little in point of time. In 1903 I was employed on the staff of a Japanese paper, and having previously been editor of a French paper in Siam, I thought that it would not be a bad idea to complete my education in Far Eastern politics by going over to the Russian side.

Accordingly I began to take lessons in the Russian language with Father Sergius Glebofif, Chaplain of the Russian Legation in Tokio, and in August 1903 I resigned my position on Xho. Japan Times of Tokio in order to go to Port Arthur, where we should, I expected, have war within about a month, that is on October 8, by which time the Russians had promised to evacuate Manchuria.

I must say that I found it hard to tear myself away from Japan, not only because I liked the country and its people, but also because to go to Port Arthur was to take a leap in the dark, for I did not know if I could get employment there.

True, I had arranged to send a circular letter several

* " Novi Krai " is the Russian for " New Land."

times a week to a number of Far Eastern papers, but it turned out that the money I got at irregular intervals from this source was not quite sufficient to pay for my washing. Luckily I had not been long in Port Arthur before I joined the NoviKratzxA was appointed correspondent of the New York Herald, a paper which I had represented in Siam some five or six years earlier.

I went to Port Arthur in a Japanese vessel, the Tairen Maru, and Dalny was the first Russian port we touched at. I got my first view of Dalny early one morning, when, on getting up, I found that we were approaching a quay of solid masonry, provided with all modern appliances for loading and unloading cargo, and with railway trains waiting close by to carry off that cargo, not only to Siberia, but to Europe. The length and amplitude of the quays, and the magnificent blocks of concrete used in their construction, impressed me profoundly when I went ashore. The men who were responsible for that work had evidently built, not for an age, but for all time. There was no necessity for making the quays so large and elaborate, but there was something Roman, something characteristic of the empire-builder, about this lavish waste of money ; and, in view of the threatening attitude of the Japanese, the serene confidence which this vast expenditure indicated was particularly impressive. If somebody had prophesied to me at that moment that inside of eighteen months I should be a prisoner of the Japanese in a conquered Dalny, I should have been little disposed to believe him.

Dalny itself was a brand-new European town, with nothing Chinese about it save a few streets of Chinese hovels, which were only to remain temporarily ; for the Australians themselves are not more resolved now to keep the Yellow Race out of Australia than the Russians then were to keep the Yellow Race out of Dalny.

Considered as a great port, Dalny's one defect was that it had practically no inhabitants. It was like a city of the dead.

The only people one met were soldiers or functionaries, A stonemason would walk slowly down the street, and the echo of his footsteps would have died away in the distance before any one else would come along. Then a tCossack would gallop} past on a hairy, unkempt Chinese pony.

Sometimes an " izvoshcheek " (carriage), with an officer in it, would tear past at a great rate. Then silence would again prevail.

Can the reader picture to himself a suburb of some European or American town which has been suddenly run up during the prevalence of a building craze, and which has almost, but not quite, left the hands of the builder? Many families are living in rows of unplastered houses, with blinds on the windows and glaringly new tiles on the roof. Other houses are completed, but are still unoccupied, and the floors are encumbered with mortar, nails and pieces of brick. Still other houses are surrounded by scaffolding, and only half completed ; and, in their vicinity, planks, heaps of mortar, piles of brick, stone and slates are lying about in all directions. Imagine what such a suburb looks like at some unearthly hour in the morning, say at 4 a.m., in the summer-time, and you have a good idea of what Dalny looked like when I visited it at noon one day in September 1903. I must admit.

however, that the day in question happened to be a Russian holiday, and that work had, in consequence, been suspended. Everybody was in the little brand-new church, which I entered and found crowded to suffocation with people — mostly soldiers — who were all standing up and all crossing themselves at frequent intervals, while black-bearded Russian priests, perspiring in gorgeous vestments, celebrated the Mass. The only busy place in the town was the railway station, from which a company of soldiers marched singing.

Dalny's only place of amusement seemed to be a public garden situated at a distance of some versts from the town, and planted with trees that were all very young and did not look as if they would ever get much older. The greatest attraction in this garden was a small zoological section which contained deer, monkeys, and two bears. On the occasion of my visit two tall Russians were apparently deriving great amusement from the work of giving these bears lumps of sugar, and two very small Japanese in faded European dress were looking on with simulated interest from a respectful distance and cackling obsequiously.

With regard to scenery, I found Dalny to be about the bleakest place I had ever set eyes on. High, bare, quartzite hills, yellowish in colour and with hardly a blade of grass to hide their repulsive nakedness, lay at the back of the town and stretched away towards Port Arthur.

The appearance of these hills was not improved by the fact that the Russians had evidently begun quarrying for stones on almost every one of them, and had abandoned nine out of every ten of the quarries, after having made ugly yellow gashes on the flanks of the mountains and strewn the hill-sides with clay and with unsightly blocks of quartzite. At Port Arthur the case was exactly the same.

We left Dalny for Port Arthur at about three o'clock in the morning, and I got up at daybreak and remained on deck until we had reached our destination, for I had a presentiment that this coast would become famous. The rocky shore was to the last degree bleak and inhospitable, the only signs of life I saw being the poles of a military telegraph wire which here and there stood out against the sky ; and, in one place, a Chinese fishing village at the foot of the cliffs.

Long before we had reached Port Arthur we saw in the heavens a striking object which indicated that we were in the vicinity of Russia's "inaccessible stronghold " and of the fleet which Admiral Alexeieff had been gradually concentrating there for years past. That object as a colossal pillar of black smoke, ending at the top in a mushroom-shaped cloud, which could be seen towering over the mountain tops in the remote distance. It rose from the Russian battleships assembled at Port Arthur. There the King of the North had his chariots and his horsemen and his many ships.

Skirting the huge bulk of Liao-Tau-Shan, which rose, black, bleak and menacing, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, we cast anchor at about eleven o'clock in the morning opposite the entrance to the inner harbour.

Above us towered Golden Hill, with its summit all cut away in order to make room for the huge guns, of which six or seven were clearly visible to the naked eye. On the left-hand side of the summit was a flagstaff for signalling purposes. Behind the flagstaff was a low stone house, and in front of it was a platform of cement, on which, on February 9 of the following year, I was to see Admiral Alexeieff and his staff watching the naval battle raging below.

From their unmistakable, pared-away tops it could be seen, even by the most unpractised eye, that most of the other hills in sight were also fortified. Towering over Tiger's Tail Peninsula, I could see the masts and the sinister fighting tops of the Russian warships in the inner harbour; and, inside the entrance on the left-hand side, was the torpedo-boat shed, the sea-front around which looked as if it had been covered thick with the stumps of trees. These were the short masts of a swarm of new torpedo-boats.

"These boats come by rail, in sections, from St. Petersburg," said a Russian passenger to me, " and we put them together here at the rate of two every month, so that every month Japan waits she'll have two additional torpedo-boats to reckon with."

Beside us in the outer roads, lay the Rurik, in comparison with which we looked very humble indeed. Little think'st thou, O Imperial Rurik ! awesome in all thy warlike panoply, that, a twelvemonth hence, that Sunrise flag shall send thee flaming to the bottom of the Japan Sea !

My first impressions of Port Arthur city were not favourable. The sea-front was covered with hillocks of coal flanked by enormous piles of vodka casks ; the day was hot, the air was full of dust, and the reflection of the sun from the buildings and the bare stony hills made walking very disagreeable. The streets were crowded, principally with soldiers and sailors, most of whom wore enough medals to drown them in case they fell into the water ; and the izvoshcheeks that tore past every moment made it sometimes risky to cross them. I was surprised to find this love of rapid motion in a half Oriental people like the Russians, although Gogol might have prepared me for it.

After having rescued my luggage from an onrush of jabbering coolies, I tried to find a room in one of the hotels, or "nomeras" as they are called, but it was difficult work.

These " nomeras," I should explain, were merely Chinese houses, whitewashed and with glass windows let into each of the very small, stuffy and dirty rooms into which the interior was divided. The windows were never opened, and, though they never seemed to admit air, they certainly admitted large quantities of fine dust, so that no matter how often a room was cleaned, it always remained dirty. I went from one of these hotels to another, wearily looking for a room, but in the first three I met with such an indignant " nyet " that I wondered what on earth I had done.

It could not be that there was anything wrong with my manner of asking, as my interpreter was a Russian who had long been resident in Port Arthur, so I simply put it down to ill-breeding.

In the last available " hotel " — a place called " the Efeemoff," from the name of its proprietor — I found a small, dirty, ill-ventilated chamber, for which I paid three and a half roubles a day. This did not include lighting, water, towels, soap, bedclothes, etc. etc., so that I paid as much per day for this wretched xo WITH THE COSSACKS

hole as I would have paid for a room in the Carlton. The chamber was so small that there was hardly space for the bed in it, and the door was secured on the outside by a padlock and hasp, which completed its resemblance to a stable. Most of the other rooms seemed to be occupied by young Jewesses, who were beautiful but had no visible means of support. Their frequent cries of " boyka / boykaf" indicated that a Chinese "boy" was supposed to attend on us, but though on several occasions I listened to his voice, his celestial features I never had the honour of gazing on during all the time of my stay in the " Efeemoff."

I had to go outside for my food, as there was none to be had on the premises, and, as no " samovar " in Port Arthur was heated before ten or eleven o'clock in the morning, I quickly contracted the pernicious habit of late rising.

All the Port Arthur hotels, save one, were kept by Armenians, and all of them sheltered young damsels of the same type as those in the " Efeemoff." Whenever I mildly hinted to Russians that in England it would not be considered respectable for all the hotels in a town to contain such guests, they would jump with amazement at my Puritanism. " Why, you should have seen the place six months ago^ ! " they would invariably cry. "It's a monastery now, compared with what it was then ! "

It was just the usual luck of the Russians, I suppose, that two fine new hotels were completed in New Town just in time to serve as targets for the Japanese.

The reader already knows that there were an old Port Arthur and a new Port Arthur. The old Port Arthur was simply the Chinese village which existed

FROM TOKIO TO PORT ARTHUR ii

when the fortress was garrisoned by Celestial troops. Nearly all the Chinese houses remained, but their interiors had, like the "nomeras," been altered so as to make them serve as shops and European residences.

The shape of the town was, roughly, that of a triangle — the base, which fronted the bay, being about two hundred yards long, and consisting mostly of small houses built in the European style, and the sides meeting a few hundred yards inland. A continuation of one of these sides contained the most important shops and commercial offices in the town, and led eventually to the new Chinese town, several miles distant.

The new Russian town was situated along the bay to the west, and was reached by a road running along the shore of the bay from Old Town. The two towns were about a mile or so apart, and the road between them was always, except in winter, either so dusty or so muddy as to be well nigh impassable.

Towards nightfall Port Arthur was at its worst. It was not lighted at all, and the narrow wooden footway that ran along the streets and raised one above the roadway, on which in summer time the mud was ankle deep, was full of treacherous holes. Some planks were all right as long as somebody was walking on the other end of them. When this was not the case — well, then they were not all right, as I several times learned to my cost.

The shops in Port Arthur generally sold liquor, tinned meats, lamps and other such necessaries of life. Thrifty people bought their goods in Chinese stores, while officers and their wives were always to be found in the large stores such as Kunst and Albers, Sietas

Block, etc., where they were always attended to before a civilian. Business was always very brisk.

The only bank in the city was the Russo- Chinese Bank, which was small and always crowded like an important but inadequate railway station, with officers, soldiers, and shaggy business men. Unless one was a lady or a military officer, he had as a rule to wait there in a foetid atmosphere for at least four hours before being attended to. At the Post-office things were nearly as bad.

The new town of Port Arthur was built in a good position, commanding as it did the bay, and being at the same time well sheltered by high hills from the piercingly cold northern wind that blows well-nigh all the winter. No Chinese were allowed to reside in it, and all the houses had to be built in European style. Quite a considerable number of houses had been built at the time the war broke out, but from an architectural point of view the whole effect was not exactly good. Many houses were built in weak imitation of the German style, that is, with little turrets and odd gables and chimneys. The quarters of the General Staff consisted of a massive block, two storeys high, near which an Officers' Club was being constructed, at an estimated outlay of about ;^20,ooo. The naval barracks at the far end of the bay were completed at the time the war broke out, and were the best buildings of their kind in all the Far East, with the exception perhaps of some of the barracks in India. They are three storeys high, above three hundred feet long, and capable of accommodating very comfortably one thousand sailors. Opposite them, on Tiger's Tail Peninsula, were other barracks much on the same plan and capable of housing about the same number of men. In these barracks the men's food was prepared, and in winter the whole place was heated by steam.

New Town resembled Dalny inasmuch as it contained a great number of half-completed buildings, and was at all times as deserted as a graveyard. The two or three shops that were opened there looked painfully new, and as no customer ever by any chance strayed into them, the shop assistants were generally to be found dozing in a back room. In July 1904 Old Town was to be abandoned and afterwards razed to the ground, but, in spite of this, few of the merchants took any steps to provide themselves with premises elsewhere. Perhaps they had a presentiment that New Town would never receive them.

The most remarkable public work that was going on in Port Arthur at the time the war began was the Sobor or Russian Cathedral. The top of the hill between New Town and Old Town and overlooking the harbour had been sliced off at enormous expense in order to make room for the massive foundations which, looking like the stump of some gigantic feudal castle, formed a striking feature in the landscape. This unfinished work was the first thing my eyes used to fall on in the morning after I had left my house in New Town to walk to the Novi Krai office, and I can still remember it covered with pigmy figures of stonemasons and Chinese labourers going to and fro. The broad roadway that wound gracefully up to it was the only good road in Port Arthur, I suppose because it was the one road that was never used.

When completed, this Cathedral was to have been

H WITH THE COSSACKS

as high as St. Paul's, and, if one can judge from the designs, of great architectural beauty. In fact there would have been in the Far East no Christian church, save perhaps the Russian Cathedral at Tokio, to compare with it ; and the Russians often told me that the powerful electric light which would be placed on the cross at its summit would be visible to mariners far off at sea. Alas ! that light will never shine !

Chapter II

On the second day after my arrival in Port Arthur I went to see Colonel Artemieff, the editor of the Novi Krwi, a Russian tri-weekly paper supposed to be the organ of Admiral Alexeieff, and well known at that time on account of its periodical outbursts against Japan. I found that the colonel had been informed of my arrival, and had published a flattering notice of me in his paper. He told me that he was going to start an English edition of the Novi Krat in a month or so, and that he would like me to edit it. In the meantime he would pay me a retaining fee. As this was a straightforward business offer which left me free to write as I liked about the Russians, I at once accepted it ; and, a few days after, the colonel got me a little sanctum of my own at the office in Pushkin Street, and asked me to come there every day to get practice in Russian by conversing with the members of his staff, to whom he ceremoniously presented me as " our new English editor." The publication of the English paper was, I may remark, the idea of the Viceroy, who was pro- English, and very anxious to come to some arrangement with England instead of with Japan, which he regarded as an upstart Asiatic Power.

The Novi Krai office was somewhat different to the newspaper offices to which I had been accustomed, inasmuch as nearly everybody in it was either an officer or a soldier. The colonel seemed incapable of writing an editorial unless he were in full uniform, with his sword hanging by his side. The printer's devil was a soldier who saluted and stood to attention when he brought the proofs, and the office was filled all day long with Siberian Fusiliers carrying messages from their chiefs, and also carrying rifles and fixed bayonets. One would have thought that the serpent of treason would never enter such a military Eden as this, but, some time after my arrival, our manager was discovered to belong to a revolutionary body, and was accordingly lodged in the "arrestny dom," or house of detention. Another of our men was a student who had for political reasons been exiled from St. Petersburg, a third was the son of a political exile, and a fourth was a young man called Trotsky, who had a somewhat remarkable history. The son of a prefectural Governor in European Russia, he was cursed by a bad temper, which had led him just before my arrival to assault a superior officer, for which offence he was court-martialled and reduced to the ranks. When, in the middle of 1904, I joined General Mishchenko, I met Trotsky in that commander's etat-major, still a private soldier but attached in some way to the staff. He took part in all the fighting, always displaying great bravery, and, just before the battle of the Shaho, he made, with three or four Cossacks, an important reconnaissance, which necessitated his lying hidden for days in the " Kiaoliang" fields, with the result that his health was seriously impaired. He was promised a commission.

however ; but, while celebrating the occasion in a Mukden tavern, he assaulted a colonel, for which offence he was court-martialled and shot.

At first I felt a great repulsion for the Russians and an intense dislike for Port Arthur, This was primarily due to a feeling of acute mental distress, une inquietude de deracin^, which I suffer from every time I change my country, but it was also due to home-sickness for Japan, whose loveliness now seemed by contrast to be something heavenly. This feeling gradually wore off, however, as my circle of friends widened, and I soon began to take a lively interest in the Russians and in their great fortress over which the shadow of war then lay deep.

What contributed a good deal to dissipate my gloom was the fact that I soon got comfortable quarters in the house of Captain Yanchivetsky, an officer of the Fortress Artillery, who lived in New Town. Yanchivetsky, who was a good sculptor in wood and an enthusiastic gardener, spent all his spare time with his wife and little children, and led, in short, the happy domestic life that the average Russian officer leads. I generally walked to Old Town every day, dining there in the evening at the "Saratoff," a small bungalow-shaped building which faced the harbour and which was regarded as the Cafe Royal of the city. The "Saratoff" was almost always crowded with officers drinking amber-coloured tea out of beer glasses, and speaking loudly, and occasionally it was difficult for a mere civilian to get served at all. Sometimes I used to wait hours there, the Russian waiter peevishly shouting, "Sichas!- Sichas!" (Immediately ! Immediately !) every time I called " Tchelovek !"

and then going off and forgetting all about me. I never before saw such dirty table-linen as that of which the " Saratoff " boasted, and its clientele was on a par with its table-linen, for most of the people I met there — and they included some of the leading business men of the place — looked as if they made it a habit of sleeping in their clothes.

As a rule there was more noise than drunkenness in the " Saratoff," but occasionally, owing to some trifling circumstance, such as an air that recalled the Don or the Volga or the singing of the Tsiganes at the " Tachkent " or " Samarcande " in St. Petersburg, from the broken-down string band which performed in the verandah, a wave of intoxication would sweep over the place, and those overwhelmed by it would wake up next day in the Amerikansky Dom or the Yaponsky Dom, or perhaps in the middle of the street.

There were few outdoor amusements in Port Arthur. Sometimes I went with some Russian friends on a picnic to Pigeon Bay or Louisa Bay or the Waterworks, in which latter place a few stunted trees and several blades of grass made the scene look almost home-like.

Sometimes we hired a "sampan " (Chinese boat) and, passing down the formidable lane of battle-ships, had a swim and an al fresco lunch somewhere along the rocky coast. Horse-races were held once or twice a year on the parade-ground, and at these races a good rider named Collins won many prizes, and became in consequence a great favourite with the Russian officers. Collins, who is half English and half Japanese, is now serving a sentence of penal servitude in Japan, where he was arrested soon after the war broke out on a charge of espionage.

Port Arthur was a strange cross between Waldersee's Lager and a mining camp in the Wild West with a strain of the St. Petersburg salon. If it had been garrisoned by English troops it would have been clean, respectable, and deadly dull. Under the Russian regime it was very dirty and very gay. The Viceroy, the generals, the admiral and the higher civil, military and naval officers were continually giving dinners, but the two great social fixtures of each week were the balls at the Morsky and Garizonye Sobranie (Naval and Military Clubs).

The Naval Club was installed in an old Chinese temple near Admiral AlexeiefTs house, and, on special occasions, the balls there were attended by the Viceroy, who never danced however, but generally sat at the head of the hall, talking to Madame Starck in German, for, like her husband the admiral, Madame Starck did not speak Russian very fluently,

After the Saturday night ball at the Military Club there was always a theatrical performance given by amateurs, and at every one of these performances Madame Stoessel insisted on playing the leading female part. Luckily she played well. Scenes from the Russian dramatists, generally Ozerov, Tolstoi, Tchekofif, Griboiedof, Tchirikov, Andreeiv, and Gogol, and from English, French and German dramatists, were usually selected. In January there was a fine exhibition of Russian and French oil paintings which the Viceroy had persuaded somebody, by the offer of a subsidy, to bring all the way from Irkutsk.

The balls were very enjoyable functions, and, owing to the overwhelming preponderance of the military element, very picturesque. The sight of the officers dancing the Mazurka in their variegated uniforms and with jingling spurs, while, outside, the clouds gathered thick on the political horizon, made me frequently repeat to myself that well-worn quotation from Byron in which the lamps shine o'er fair women and brave men. What added, in a way that I cannot quite explain, to the eerie feeling of impending disaster that sometimes took possession of us was the whisper which one heard repeated everywhere among the Russians, that the Viceroy who ruled this turbulent, doomed city owed his position to the fact that he was a natural son of the Tsar Alexander II. by a Roumanian woman, and the admiral's personal appearance lent some support to this theory.

As is generally the case in Russia, the dancing was the best in the world, and the music was such as is seldom heard in the Far East ; but, unfortunately, the tragic events which followed so rapidly make this gay music, when I hear it now, sound in my ears like a funeral march. To quote the Russian poet Vaesemsky :