When the first wave of men reached their fallen comrades, it too seemed to lie down-the Turkish fire was extraordinarily deadly; but the next wave got through and lined up close to the fortress; the third wave again got blotted out; but the fourth pressed on and joined the first line; at once Skobelef galloped up the glacis again and himself led the assault amid the frantic cheers of the men now racing to the redoubt. In his haste Skobelef fell into the ditch and had to be helped free of his horse; but though he was badly shaken and bruised and the officers begged him to go back, he wouldn't listen to them, and as we entered the fort, we saw the Turks stampeding down the other side.
A glance at the wall made the Turkish rifle practice clear to me: in order not to expose themselves, the Turkish soldiers had simply placed their rifles on the embrasures and fired away. About five hundred yards down the hill the bullets rained about four feet from the ground. This was the death-zone; a few hundred yards further down the bullets went into the air, three hundred yards higher up they whistled harmlessly overhead. When galloping up the slope Skobelef had noticed that the danger-zone was very narrow and at once seized the whole position and dealt with it victoriously.
But he had reckoned without his leaders. As soon as he had distributed the Russian soldiers in the fort, he sent for reinforcements; but none came, no word of answer even to his entreaties. He had won Plevna-the commanding position of the redoubt now would have been clear to a child, but he had lost heavily and had not men enough to sustain an attack in force. The night began to draw down; it was after three o'clock before we got settled in the fort and darkness came slowly, but it came; time and again Skobelef sent for reinforcements; at length he received the information that none could be spared.
We were told afterwards that the Tzar himself had urged the general to send the reinforcements but was assured that none could be spared, though it was sun-clear that out of two hundred thousand troops on the field it would have been easy to detach twenty thousand, and a quarter of that force sent to Skobelef would have won Plevna that day in August.
When Skobelef was convinced that no help would be sent, he seemed stunned with the disappointment; then rage possessed him, his whole face quivered, tears rolled down his cheeks unheeded while he raved in contempt of his superiors: 'The grand dukes hate me,' he cried, 'and the general staff because I win victories, but who is to hinder them coming in force themselves and getting the credit-who cares for the credit so long as the work's done- oh damn them, damn them and their mean jealousy; they can't spare even five thousand men, the liars and curs!'
That night a couple of his officers sat with him and we all drank and discussed probabilities. As it turned out, Skobelef read his adversary Osman more correctly than any of us.
'When we don't shell them in the morning,' he said, 'Osman must come to the conclusion that we are weak and he'll feel us out with an early attack; then we shall have to prepare to get out; but if I had five thousand men and fifty field guns-just what I asked for-I could win Plevna by noon: Osman would have to surrender. The silly envy of our commanders will cost Russia half a million lives and prolong the war six months!' Skobelef taught me that putting yourself in your adversary's place was the essence of generalship. I remember when we were alone he turned to me.
'Don't report anything of all this,' he said. 'No Russian would expose Russian shame; it is as if our mother were in fault, and I don't want the d… d Germans to sneer. Ah, if I could only get a chance against them, I'd show them that our Russian soldiers are the best in the world, incomparable-' and he went on to give instance after instance of their hardihood and contempt of death.
It fell out almost exactly as Skobelef had foreseen; but later. It was long after noon when the Turkish soldiers attacked; we had difficulty in holding our own; an hour later Osman threw thirty thousand men more at us and we had to retreat; in an hour the retreat was a stampede and for hours driblets of broken men came limping, staggering and cursing into their previous quarters.
Next day Skobelef kept to his rooms. I noticed at once that his reputation had grown immensely: his own officers all knew what he had accomplished and when officers from other commands came to him, they all showed themselves aware of his supreme ability. The fine thing about him was that all the respect and indeed adulation had not the slightest effect on him; when we met afterwards he always treated me with a certain kindly intimacy.
Of course nothing could save Plevna: army corps after army corps joined the Russian force, the Turkish communications were cut, Plevna was surrounded: months later Osman surrendered and was nobly received by Skobelef, whom everybody hailed now as the hero of Plevna. Osman riding at the head of his garrison of nearly 100,000 men was a fine sight: he was small and pale and had one arm in a sling from a recent wound, and as he passed at the head of his staff through the Russian ranks, the Russians, led by Skobelef himself, cheered and cheered him again in the noblest way. War is almost worth waging when it brings such honourable distinction to the beaten.
But though I learned a good deal in the war, I'm not here to compete with the professional historian. I want to picture Skobelef, who was, with Roberts, the best general I ever met; and the contrast between the two makes them both more interesting. Neither of them was highly intelligent. In the Boer War, Roberts went to church every Sunday and observed all ordinary customs. He was a sincere Christian and followed the lead of his wife in all social affairs.
At first he took Kitchener at his face value, and even when at Paardeberg he was forced to realise his nonentity as a soldier, he kept his knowledge to himself for so long that he gave some support to the Kitchener myth.
Skobelef, on the other hand, was altogether free of every form of snobbism; indeed, he had a certain sympathy with contempt of discipline and all social observances; some part of 'the return to truth' of the nihilists had got into his blood; he hated all insincerities and in so far seemed to me a bigger man than Roberts. In insight and speed of stroke they were very much alike.
In the days of inaction that followed the taking and abandonment of the fort, I won Skobelef to tell me of his early life. With huge amusement he confessed that at fourteen or fifteen he was after every pretty girl he came near. One day an uncle found him trying to embrace a young servant in the house; she had just pushed the boy away when the uncle came on the scene. He said quietly, 'You ought to be proud to be kissed, my girl, by the young baron.'
'I had no more difficulty,' Skobelef said simply, 'the news spread through the house like wildfire, and I had no more refusals.'
Nothing ever brought the true meaning of serfdom more clearly before me than this little incident. It was as illuminating as a phrase of Kropotkin later, when in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist he tells of the 'Oriental practices' in the corps of pages and the countless immoralities and devilish cruelties that reigned during serfdom. Some facts tell volumes. When a soldier or servant was punished by flogging, if he died under the knout, the full tale of lashes was inflicted on his insentient corpse. And marriage among the serfs was often arranged by the master without any regard for love or individual preference.
'Did you go often with your pretty maid?' I asked.
'Continually,' Skobelef laughed, 'and when it wasn't that one, it was one of the others. I had them all, every girl and woman in the place from thirteen to fifty, but I liked the older ones best,' he added meditatively. 'If I had not had to go to school, I'd have killed myself with them; as it was I weakened myself so that now, at about forty, I'm practically impotent. Since I was five and twenty it takes some extraordinary circumstance, such as a drinking bout, to bring me up to the scratch!'
'Good God!' I cried. 'What a dreadful fate!' Till then I had no idea that the patrimony of sex-pleasure was so limited. 'You must have been angry with yourself and regretted your early indulgences terribly?' I probed.
'No,' he replied, 'No! I've had a pretty good time on the whole; and if I took double mouthfuls as a boy, as the French say, I have now many sweet memories. Oh, in Petersburg as a young man I had golden hours; there I met veritable passion, desire to match my own, and an understanding of life, a resolve to do great things and not be hampered by conventions-I remember my love let me have her, one day, in her dressing room, when everyone was ready to go driving; and they called and called her- Ah, life's victorious moments are all we get!'
The whole confession was out of my very heart, only I was resolved to be wiser and make the pleasure last longer.
Two little scenes of this campaign made an impression on me. It was after the capture of a town called Lovtcha, I think: Skobelef and his staff came upon a lot of wounded Turks who had been dumped on the wayside by their comrades days before, men dying and dead, the wounded curled up in a hundred attitudes. Skobelef told the
