“A galloping Cossack with a red pennon fluttering from his lance was our first intimation that Russia was at war. From the bridge of a steamer on the river Irtish we could watch him. His stout little pony easily kept abreast of our boat, and his method of operating was clearly visible. He would accost a group of his brethren garnering their harvest--for this is Cossack territory--there would be some gesticulation, horses would be seized and mounted, and within five minutes the harvest-fields of the great Siberian steppe would be denuded of their manhood. Such action was repeated with almost monotonous precision during that long summer day, and it was thanks to this organisation that on our arrival at Semipalatinsk, a steppe town some 600 miles from railhead, we found no less than 30,000 fully armed and equipped Cossacks. This within four days of the outbreak of hostilities.”
Side by side with this may be read the testimony of Professor Pares of the Liverpool University, whose intimate knowledge of the country and its language admirably qualified him for the work of a correspondent with the Tsar’s headquarters. Dr. Pares is just as emphatic as the correspondent just quoted on the subject of the enthusiasm and unanimity pervading all classes of the community with whom he came in contact. He pays a passing tribute to the high efficiency of Russia’s hospital arrangements, to the fine and self-sacrificing labours of all from the highest to the lowest, and to the serenity and confidence manifested on every side. He saw the Grand-duchess Olga, sister of the Emperor, working as a Sister of Mercy, “under all the ordinary discipline and conditions,” and heard how hard she had had to labour after the early battles of the campaign, when hospitals designed for the accommodation of 200 patients were compelled to accommodate at least 300 each. “One feels it is a great wave rolling forward with one spirit driving it.”
Dr. Pares was present when the Tsar in person visited Vilna, riding through the streets quite unguarded. Vilna has for the most part a Polish population, and from all sides the Tsar was greeted with an enthusiasm that must have deeply touched and moved him. In the hospitals the Professor conversed with many of the wounded belonging to both sides. On the part of most of the Austrians, he says, he found a general disposition to believe that they had been thoroughly overmatched on the battle-field. A Russian lad of nineteen or twenty, who had been sent back home, not on account of wounds but because of physical overstrain, remarked almost with tears, “They are firing on my brother and not on me. That is not right--I ought to be where they all are.”