I rode back to our bivouac with the Russian Military Attaché, and quoted to him the words of Goethe after Valmy; we were indeed entering on a new world in the Balkans. My companion put his thoughts into far more concrete form:[4] “C’est la liquidation de l’Autriche” was his comment on the situation. The wish was father to the thought, a frequent source of error in Russian calculations; Servia’s victory was, undoubtedly, a discomfiture for the Ball Platz,[5] but the final liquidation of Austria-Hungary was not yet accomplished. That consummation was reserved for a later date, and for a more universal tragedy.
Our road led across the battlefield. On every side were traces of the struggle, corpses of men, dead and dying horses. Near the railway we found a Turkish gun team of which five of the horses had been killed or wounded by a shell, the sixth horse, a big solemn-looking grey, was standing uninjured by his fallen comrades, an image of dumb distress. A Servian soldier, charged with the collection of loose horses, appeared upon the scene, and, after putting the wounded animals out of their pain, turned to the grey, which had been standing quietly watching the man at work. Obviously, the next step was departure, but here a difficulty arose. The solitary survivor of the gun team was loth to leave, and the look in his honest, wistful eyes was infinitely pathetic. A colloquy ensued between the representative of the Russian Empire and the Servian peasant. Both were Slavs, and, in consequence, horse lovers; both agreed that this horse deserved and desired death; there and then an act of extravagance, almost impossible in any other army, was perpetrated, and the gun team was reunited in some equine Nirvana known only to Slavs and Arabs. “Another victim of the war,” I remarked to my companion, as we continued on our road. He evidently considered this observation as typical of my British lack of imagination, and proceeded to recite a poem describing the fall of snowflakes. Russians can witness human suffering with indifference, but are curiously sentimental in regard to nature, animals and flowers; nearly all Slavs possess a dangerous charm, the charm of men with generous impulses uncontrolled by guiding principles; their speech is splendid and inspiring, their actions uncertain, since they are ever at the mercy of lurking passions and events.