Ch. 18: The Man Who Was

The Earth gave up her dead that tide,
Into our camp he came,
And said his say, and went his way,
And left our hearts aflame.

Keep tally--on the gun-butt score
The vengeance we must take,
When God shall bring full reckoning,
For our dead comrade's sake.
BALLAD.

Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person
till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only
when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western
peoples instead of the most westerly of easterns that he becomes a
racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows which
side of his nature is going to turn up next.

Dirkovitch was a Russian--a Russian of the Russians--who appeared to get
his bread by serving the Czar as an officer in a Cossack regiment, and
corresponding for a Russian newspaper with a name that was never twice
alike. He was a handsome young Oriental, fond of wandering through
unexplored portions of the earth, and he arrived in India from nowhere
in particular. At least no living man could ascertain whether it was by
way of Balkh, Badakshan, Chitral, Beluchistan, or Nepaul, or anywhere
else. The Indian Government, being in an unusually affable mood, gave
orders that he was to be civilly treated and shown everything that was
to be seen. So he drifted, talking bad English and worse French, from
one city to another, till he foregathered with Her Majesty's White
Hussars in the city of Peshawur, which stands at the mouth of that
narrow swordcut in the hills that men call the Khyber Pass. He was
undoubtedly an officer, and he was decorated after the manner of the
Russians with little enamelled crosses, and he could talk, and (though
this has nothing to do with his merits) he had been given up as a
hopeless task, or cask, by the Black Tyrone, who individually and
collectively, with hot whisky and honey, mulled brandy, and mixed
spirits of every kind, had striven in all hospitality to make him drunk.
And when the Black Tyrone, who are exclusively Irish, fail to disturb
the peace of head of a foreigner--that foreigner is certain to be a
superior man.

The White Hussars were as conscientious in choosing their wine as in
charging the enemy. All that they possessed, including some wondrous
brandy, was placed at the absolute disposition of Dirkovitch, and he
enjoyed himself hugely--even more than among the Black Tyrones.

But he remained distressingly European through it all. The White Hussars
were 'My dear true friends,' 'Fellow-soldiers glorious,' and 'Brothers
inseparable.' He would unburden himself by the hour on the glorious
future that awaited the combined arms of England and Russia when their
hearts and their territories