The war correspondent who accompanied the Russian Army which crossed the Danube in the summer of 1877, and who had the good fortune to be a welcome person, found his path of duty made exceedingly easy for him. And whether he was a welcome person or not depended almost entirely on himself. His newspaper might be held in obloquy, but the authorities ignored the hostility of the paper with something that closely resembled magnanimity, and the correspondent was not held responsible for the tone of his journal, but only for the matter in it which he himself contributed. It is rather a mild way of putting it to say that the Standard, for instance, was not friendly to Russia throughout the period in question; but Mr. Boyle, its representative, was quite frankly accepted, and has testified to the courtesy and comradeship of the Russian officers. He had to go, and everybody ought to rejoice that this fate befell him, because it was the occasion of his brilliant and amusing book, The Diary of an Expelled Correspondent; the teterrima causa assigned was a passage in one of his letters. The Daily Telegraph could not have struck the reader as being more bitter against the Russians than was its contemporary of Shoe Lane; but the gentleman designated to represent it when he presented himself at Kischeneff was refused his legitimation. This, however, was for reasons purely personal to the candidate, against whom there was some ill-will in the Russian headquarters, and not, as I understood, because of the tone of the journal by which he was accredited.

His distinguishing badge once strapped round his upper arm—he had repudiated with a shriek of horror the dreadful brass plate such as street-corner messengers now wear that was first served out to him—the well-seen correspondent stood, or moved, chartered to do pretty much anything he pleased. It may seem a paradox; but the Russians are simply the most democratic people in Europe, and for a Russian to be bornÉ would be a contradiction in terms. Every officer was the correspondent’s comrade. Prince Schahofskoy, the ill-conditioned general who made such a mess of the July Plevna attack, was the only exception I ever knew. If the samovar was in service, the officer shared his tea with the correspondent; in the middle of a battle, if the officer had a couple of sandwiches he would offer one of them to the correspondent. From the highest to the lowest, in regard to military information, the Russians were incredibly frank; the correspondent never required to ask questions as to situation, dispositions, or intentions—information in regard to those matters was volunteered to him. The only secret they ever had—and I must own they kept it well—was in regard to the point at which the crossing of the Danube was to be made. Skobeleff “had not the faintest idea,” although a couple of hours previously he had been reconnoitring the approaches. Prince Tzeretleff “really had not the remotest conception.” Still, even in regard to the crossing of the Danube, the friendly Russians were not inexorable. I could not be told the locality of the crossing, but I should be escorted betimes to the headquarters of the general commanding the division which was to take the lead in the operations. It was rather an amusing experience. The guide sent to escort me was in the uniform of a private soldier—a tall handsome man, riding a fine gray horse. He spoke English fluently and without a trace of accent. As we rode along together and talked, the tone of this private soldier’s conversation bewildered me. He knew his Europe as if it had been his native parish. He had what Americans call “the inside track” in regard to English affairs, social, political, and financial. He spoke of country-houses of which he had been the guest, and commented on the merits of a piece of statuary in the drawing-room at Sandringham. At last I asked his name. He was of one of Russia’s oldest princely families, and belonged to the diplomatic corps, but when the war began had volunteered for military service, and, not being qualified to be an officer, had fallen into line as a private soldier. As we rode along I asked him where we were bound for, not imagining that a destination to which we were actually travelling could be any longer a secret. But he looked upon it still in this light, no doubt in accordance with his instructions, and of course I had no more to say for the time being. By and by we reached a point whence radiated four cross-roads. It became obvious to me that my guide was himself at fault. I took no heed while he led me first along one road a little way, then along another, each time returning puzzled to the cross-roads. At last he had to confess, “It seems to me that I’ve lost my way.” “Sorry I cannot be of any service,” was my remark, “since I do not know where it is you want to go to. I have been all over this region and know where each of these roads leads.” My prince-private-soldier-diplomatist burst into a laugh, and then mentioned our destination. “Then this way,” said I, “about an hour’s ride.”

After the crossing of the Danube in the last days of June the Russian army spread out into the adjacent Bulgarian country like a fan. KrÜdener went west to subdue Nicopolis, and later to come to grief at Plevna. Gourko rode away over the Balkans, through the Hankioj Pass, on that adventurous expedition which sanguine people expected to end at Adrianople. The Twelfth Corps forged away slowly in the easterly direction, toward the Danubian fortress of Rustchuk, the keypoint of the Turkish quadrilateral in Bulgaria, and its advance I accompanied over the low rolling country, towards the Jantra, and later athwart the more broken terrain between the Jantra and the Lom. It was a sort of holiday stroll for Driesen’s cavalry division, which leisurely pioneered the way for the force that later came to be known as “the Army of the Cesarewitch.” We were received with offerings of corn, oil, and wine by the Conscript Fathers of Biela, and tarried in that pleasant rus in urbe for a couple of days. Then after a while we dawdled on, past the copses of Monastir and the grain-clad slopes of Obertenik, until well on into July we pitched camp on a long swell falling down to the Danube at Pirgos, with Rustchuk away in front of us, some ten miles off. We were far enough forward, pending the coming up of supports; so we threw out pickets to the front and flanks, and made ourselves as comfortable as might be in the bright sunshine tempered by cool breezes blowing down from the Balkans.

Baron Driesen was an active man, and made work for himself. He was always leading reconnaissances into the country along and across the Lom, in the course of which he had the occasional amusement of a skirmish. I used to accompany him on those expeditions, just to keep myself and my horses in exercise; they were quite unimportant from my professional point of view, and a dozen of them would not have been worth the cost of a five-line telegram. My comrade Villiers preferred to go sketching in the glens with dear old General Arnoldi, one of the brigade commanders, the simplest, quaintest, most lovable of old gentlemen, and I should think the worst cavalry brigade commander to be found even in the Russian Army. The other brigade chief, StaËl von Holstein, read and wrote all day in the shade under the wide fly of his pretty striped tent, coming over to us in the evening to smoke a cigarette, drink a tumbler of tea, and relieve our ennui with his pleasant gossip about men, women, and things.

It was not my affair, but I confess I did not greatly relish the position we occupied. The division, with its batteries of horse artillery, was out here all by itself, with no infantry within several miles, both its flanks bare, overlapped by the Turks on its right, its left utterly in the air, and its line of retreat by no means safe. But while the Russians treated those conditions with a fine indifference, the Turks did not display any enterprise. A few weeks later they woke up, it is true; and then the Russians had to fall back out of the unsafe angle, with considerable losses, and not without confusion; but by that time I was elsewhere, and in watching the abortive efforts to drive Osman Pasha out of Plevna had ceased to feel a vivid interest in the fortunes of the Army of the Lom.

I must go a little more into detail as to the position of Driesen’s cavalry division in those July days of 1877, and as to the country in its vicinity, because I wish to describe a risky little experience that happened to me then, to follow the narrative of which this minuteness is requisite.

I have already mentioned that our camp was on a long swell running inland at about right angles from the Danube. Before us, as we looked out from the front of the camp in the direction of Rustchuk, there ran parallel to our position a long valley—deep, but with smooth bottom and sides—on which were fields of grain that had been cut and set up into stooks. Over against us, on the farther side of this valley, rose a ridge very similar in formation to our own, but having its crest clothed with woods, and on its slope facing us were clumps of trees interspersed among the corn-fields. The valley between the two ridges was for the time neutral ground. The Turks held the wooded ridge confronting us, and our fore-post line ran along in our front about half-way down the slope of our ridge as it trended down into the intervening valley.

One bright warm afternoon our friends the enemy brought forward a couple of batteries of field-guns, and from a position in front of the wood which crested their ridge opened fire against our camp. The range was a long one, but the Turks had Krupp guns, and their shells came lobbing across the valley and occasionally pitched among the tents. The Russians, who have a great propensity to lazy idleness when the weather is warm, apparently could not be bothered to reply to this fire for quite a while; but at length, about four o’clock, I saw their gunners busy among the field-guns that were ranged in position along the front of the camp.

Just then I met Baron Driesen, who told me that he had remained quiet thus long because of a little scheme he had adopted to surprise and perhaps to cut off the Turkish guns opposite us there. Some two hours earlier, when he first noticed the guns being brought up into position, he had sent off Holstein with the light cavalry regiment of his brigade—the “Gray Hussars” we used to call them, from the colour of their horses—away to our right, with orders, if practicable, to cross the valley higher up out of sight of the Turks, and, getting on to the slope of their ridge, work northward through the clumps of trees, till, if they had the luck to get so far, within charging distance of the left flank of the Turkish batteries, when the Russian troopers were to do their best to capture the guns.

I am an old cavalry-man, and was naturally always eager to be with the mounted arm on any duty assigned to it; and I rather made a grievance of it to the Baron that he had not let me know of the despatch of Holstein and his Grays, that I might have gone along with them. Driesen was the best-tempered man in the world. “Why,” said he, “standing here, you’ve got the whole panorama under your eye, and if they have the luck to get up and do anything you can see their work a great deal better, and, what is more, a great deal more safely, than if you were over there with them, blinded by dust and smoke.” But, nevertheless, I was only half-content.

The Russian guns opened presently, and then there was an hour or two of reprisal at long bowls, and nothing else. The Russians lost a horse or two, and one unfortunate fellow was cut in two back in the camp, but the futile powder-burning was getting very tedious. All at once, however, I noticed some horsemen showing little glimpses of themselves out of a long clump of trees a few hundred yards below, and on the left of the Turkish batteries.

“Look, Baron!” cried I, “there are Holstein’s cavalry fellows, sure enough. They’ve worked round beautifully—quite artistically—and now they are gathering in that clump, getting ready for their dash at the guns!”

Driesen was not an enthusiastic man, and he rather drawled in his speech. “You may be right,” he said, “but I, for my part, have a shrewd suspicion these horsemen are Turkish Tcherkesses, prowling about there just to cover that left flank of the batteries which I gave Holstein as his objective.”

“Why,” I exclaimed, “look at the gray horses. There can be no mistake!”

“Mon Dieu!” retorted the Baron, “can’t a Turkish Tcherkess ride a gray horse as well as a Russian Hussar?”

“Well,” said I—for Driesen’s apathy made me the more stubborn in my own opinion—“I’m positive they are our fellows; and I am going across the valley to watch closely how they make their rush.”

“Don’t be a fool!” said the Baron genially. “Even if they are our fellows, you are much better here; and if you cross, and they are not, why then——” and he shrugged his broad shoulders.

But I was obstinate; Driesen was sufficiently conversant with our language to quote the proverb about “a wilful man”; and so away I rode to the front out beyond the Russian guns, down the slope, and through the outpost line, crouching behind the corn-stooks about half-way down. I cantered briskly across the bottom of the valley, which I found to be a deeper trough than I had imagined; and then at a slower pace began to ascend the slope of the Turkish ridge, heading for the clump of trees about which I had seen the horsemen.

I had got nearly half-way up. I could hear the shrill scream of the shells speeding from ridge to ridge high over my head, as I plodded on upward, leaning well forward over my saddle, with a grip of my horse’s mane in one hand. Just as I entered a corn-field, crack, crack, whizz, whizz, came a couple of bullets close by me from behind a corn-stook just in front of me. I halted involuntarily dazed with surprise, and took a hurried survey of the situation. It was not difficult to comprehend it at a glance. Moving in an easy careless way I had ridden right up against the Turkish outpost line, which, just as was the Russian line on the opposite side of the valley, was drawn athwart the slope behind the cut grain. So close was I that I could actually see the Paynim rascals grinning at my attitude of scare.

Shot followed shot, and each one served to quicken my realisation of the fact that it was extremely injudicious to remain there longer than was quite convenient. So I wheeled sharply in my tracks and galloped headlong down the steep slope, stretched along my horse’s neck. I did not wait to exchange any civilities of leave-taking with the humorous gentlemen squatting behind the corn-stooks.

In a twinkling, long before I had reached the bottom, the Russian outpost line had opened fire on the Turkish outliers who were persecuting me, and this friendly act drew off from me the attention of the latter. Quite a general, although desultory, musketry skirmish ensued, the bullets of both sides whistling over my head, down in the bottom of the valley as I was by this time. But though I had ceased to be a target I did not feel in the least comfortable. I could not get home among the Russians while they kept up this abominable shooting of theirs—that was too clear—unless I was prepared to take an equal risk to that from which I had just been mercifully preserved. If you are shot it makes no perceptible difference to you whether it is friend or foe who performs the deed. The Turkish side, again, was renewing its inhospitable demonstrations; and it was not at all nice to remain quiescent down in the bottom of the valley, since every now and then a malignant Turk, disregarding his natural enemies the Russians over against him up there, would take a shot by way of variety at the inoffensive neutral prowling down below in the middle distance.

In my perplexity I resolved to follow up the trough of the valley till I should reach a section of the Russian front where quietude might be reigning, and where, therefore, I would have the chance to get back inside the friendly lines and out of my embarrassing predicament.

But as I moved along I carried strife and the fire along with me. The Russians, out in front of whom I had originally ridden down into the valley, had known at least that I had come from their camp, and had let me alone as being a friend. But as I moved out of their ken I found myself the pariah of both sides, the Ishmaelite against whom was every man’s hand. Neither side had any good feeling toward me, and both took occasional shots at me, which came a great deal too near to be pleasant. Then, having fired at me, nothing would content them but that they should set about firing at each other, and so I was like a fox with a firebrand tied to its tail, spreading conflagration whithersoever I went. By and by I came on a bend in the valley, and this gave me hope; but as I moved along I thought I should never get to where the two hostile outpost lines ceased to confront each other. And then all of a sudden the valley began to disappear altogether and merge into the uplands, a change in the ground which bade fair to deprive me of what little cover the valley had been affording.

Suddenly, from an adjacent clump on the Turkish side of the shallowing valley, three horsemen came dashing down on me at a gallop. The alternatives were so clear that he who ran might read, and I was moving at a walk. Either the Turks would make a prisoner of me (if, indeed, they did not kill me on the spot), or I must, if I would make an effort to escape this fate, take my chance of the Russian fire as I galloped for the shelter of the Russian outpost line.

“Of two evils choose the less,” says the wise proverb. I had made up my mind, much more quickly than I can write the words down, to ride in upon the Russians; and so I gave my horse the spur and fled from my Turkish pursuers. It was pretty clear that the Russians had no sort of comprehension of the situation, but they judged that the simplest course, pending an explanation, was to try to kill somebody; so they opened fire with zeal.

For me it was like charging a square. I actually all but rode over a man who was confronting me kneeling, with his (presumably empty) rifle held like a pike; and when I was pulled up abruptly inside the Russian straggling line by a strong jerk on my horse’s bit that threw him back on his haunches, I found myself surrounded by the chevaux de frise of bayonet-points projecting from rifles held by angry, vociferating, and unintelligible persons of Sclavonic extraction.

I never knew very much practicable Russian, and at that time three words were the sum of my acquaintance with that euphonious tongue. None of the three was at all applicable to the conditions of the moment, but I emitted them all in succession, making the best of my scanty stock-in-trade. They availed me nothing. Neither the officer nor any of his men knew a word of English, French, or German. In vain I looked for the Polish Jew who forms an occasional item in most Russian regiments, and who has always a smattering of abominable low German. Failing to make my captors understand anything concerning me, I was dismounted with considerable vigour, and promptly taken prisoner, one armed man on either side of me, and a third in a strategic position in the rear. As for my Turkish pursuers, two of them had turned when within a few yards of the Russian post; the third left his horse dead on the ground and himself limped back wounded.

For the only time save one, while I was with the Russian Army, did I now produce my formal “pass”—my captors refused to give any heed to the badge on my arm, and probably had no conception what it meant. Now the “pass” consisted of a photograph of the correspondent, with a dab of red wax on his chest, on which was impressed the headquarter seal, while on the back were written certain cabalistic figures, which, I had been given to understand, instructed all and sundry to whom “these presents” might come to recognise the bearer and assist him by all means in their power. It happened that I had removed my beard since the photograph was taken which constituted my authentication; my captors failed to recognise any resemblance between my shaven countenance and the hairy face of the photograph, and there was thus an added element of suspicion. At length it was resolved to send me up to the camp, to be dealt with there by superior authority.

A sergeant and two men shortly marched me off in the direction of the headquarters, while a third led my horse. It was a long tramp, and I was not allowed to choose my own pace. At length, on the plateau before the camp, the divisional flag was seen. The artillery firing was over, and Baron Driesen and his staff were standing behind the still hot guns.

My appearance was greeted with a simultaneous roar of laughter, in which I tried to join, I confess rather ruefully.

“Well,” said Drieson drily, “can you believe now that Turkish Tcherkesses can ride gray horses as well as can Russian Hussars?”

But as we walked back together to drink tea in his tent, there was genuine feeling in the quiet heartiness with which he congratulated me on my escape from this outpost adventure.