f it _can_ be
done, here's the man to do it!'

"I think that campaign was the hardest I ever served. Before I was
enlisted, I had often heard it said that the Turks had no winter; but I
had always thought that this was only a 'yarn,' though, indeed, it would
be only a just judgment upon the unbelievers to lose the finest part of
the whole year. But when I went down there I found it true, sure enough.
Instead of a good, honest, cracking frost to freshen everything up, as
our proverb says,

"'Na zimni kholod
Vsiaki molod'--

(in winter's cold every one is young), it was all chill, sneaking rain,
wetting us through and through, and making the hill-sides so slippery
that we could hardly climb them, and turning all the low grounds into a
regular lake of mud, through which it was a terrible job to drag our
cannon. Many a time in after days, when I've heard spruce young cadets
at home, who had never smelt powder in their lives, talking big about
'glorious war' and all that, I've said to myself, 'Aha, my fine fellows!
if you had been where _I_ have, marching for days and days over ankles
in mud, with nothing to eat but stale black bread, so hard that you had
to soak it before you could get it down; and if you'd had to drink water
through which hundreds of horses had just been trampling; and to
scramble up and down steep hills under a roasting sun, with your feet so
swollen and sore that every step was like a knife going into you; and to
lie all night in the rain, longing for the sun to rise that you might
dry yourself a bit,--perhaps _then_ you wouldn't talk quite so loud
about "glorious war!"

"However, we drove the Turks across the Balkans at last, and got down to
Yamboli, a little town at the foot of the mountains, which commands the
high-road to Adrianople. And there the unbelievers made a stand, and
fought right well. I _will_ say that for 'em; for they knew that if
Adrianople were lost, all was over. But God fought for us, and we beat
them; though, indeed, with half our men sick, and our clothes all in
rags, and our arms rusted, and our powder mixed with sand by those
rogues of army-contractors, it was a wonder that we could fight at all.

"Toward afternoon, just as the enemy were beginning to give way, I saw
Pavel Petrovitch (who was a general by this time) looking very hard at a
mortar-battery about a hundred yards to our right; and all at once he
struck his knee fiercely with his hand, and shouted:

"'W