swarmed unchallenged, and I have no doubt were in truth plentiful. Newspaper correspondents, once received, were accorded a freedom of movement, and were unchecked for a boldness of comment, with a liberal toleration, and often indeed a frank encouragement, unprecedented in the annals of war. There was something magnificent, although it was not quite war, in the open candor of the advice given to correspondents, a week or so in advance, to betake themselves to specified points where interest was likely to develop itself. Generals or staff-officers seldom hesitated to communicate to the inquiring correspondent the details of their dispositions, or to allow, indeed to encourage him, to visit the forepost line. It is to the credit of correspondents with the Russians, many of whom were necessarily inexperienced in the discernment of what might probably be published as against what ought to be withheld, that the responsibility of self-restraint was so generally recognized. The Russian officer has the splendid valor of his nationality; he is no braggart, but does his fighting as a matter of course, and as part of the day's work, when he is bidden to do it. As for the Russian private, I regard him as the finest material for a soldier that the soldier-producing world, so far as I am acquainted with it, affords. He is an extraordinary weight-carrying marcher, tramping on mile after mile with a good heart, with singular freedom from reliance on sustenance, and with a good stomach for immediate fighting at the end of the longest foodless march. He never grumbles; matters must have come to a bad pass indeed, when he lets loose his tongue in adverse comment on his superiors. Inured to privation from his childhood, he is a hard man to starve, and will live on rations, or chance instalments of rations, at which the British barrack-room cur would turn up his nose. His sincere piety according to his narrow lights, his whole-hearted devotion to the czar — which is ingrained into his mental system, not the result of a process of reasoning — and his constitutional courage, combine to bring it about that he faces the casualties of the battle-field with willing, prompt, and long-sustained bravery. He needs to be led, however; not so much because of the moral encouragement which a gallant leader imparts, but because, his reasoning faculties, for lack of education, being comparatively dormant, he does not know what to do when an unaccustomed or unlooked-for emergency occurs. He is destitute of perception when left to himself. Somebody must do the thinking for him, and impart to him the result of the process in the shape of an order; and then he can be trusted, while physical power lasts, to strive his pithiest to fulfil that order. But if there is nobody in front of him or within sight of him, to undertake the mental part of the work, the Russian soldier gets dazed. Even in his bewilderment, however, he is proof against panic, and we saw him with sore hearts at Plevna, on the 30th of July, standing up to be killed in piteously noble stubbornness of ignorance, rather than retreat without the orders which there were none to give. The Turkish soldier is his master in the intuitive perception of fighting necessities. The former is a born soldier, the latter a brave peasant drilled into a soldier. If the Turk advancing finds himself exposed to a flank attack, he needs no officer to order him to change his front: he grasps the situation for himself; and this is what the Russian soldier has neither intuitive soldierhood nor acquired intelligence to do.
Of the multitudinous "atrocities" on Turkish refugees charged against the Russian soldiery with so great persistent circumstantiality by Turkish authorities and their abettors, I have never found the smallest tittle of evidence, and on soul and conscience believe the allegations thereof to be utterly false. But as I must not speak of mere belief, it behoves me to say that of all events which occurred south of the Balkans I have merely hearsay knowledge. "Atrocities" in plenty were, however, charged against the Russians north of the Balkans, and respecting these I can speak from a wide range of personal experience. The Turks resident in the towns and villages of Bulgaria were peremptorily enjoined by commands from Constantinople to quit their homes and retire before the advancing Russians. In
