Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/186

 162 their unshod horses, most of them undersized, and all clumsily accoutred, these Russian soldiers covered huge distances, and unflinchingly endured the greatest fatigues and the most extreme privations. Clement Adams and Chancellor show them camping out in the snow, lighting a tiny fire, content with such poor nourishment as a handful of flour mixed with boiling water, and lying down to sleep with no covering but their cloaks, and without even a stone for a pillow. The second of these two English travellers wonders how many of the warriors of his own country, prouder than most men of their valour, would have been able to hold out, even for a month, against these troops, and comes to the conclusion that if these men realized their own strength nobody in the world would be able to stand against them.

But endurance is not everything in war. Ivan's undrilled and undisciplined soldiers did not possess the very elements of their art. The only tactics they knew consisted in surprising the enemy, overwhelming him with a force two or three times larger than his own, and deafening him with their yells and the discordant clangour of their trumpets and cymbals. Brave in their own way—as brave as they were temperate—they were seldom known to sue for mercy, even if they were worn out and on the brink of giving way. But they broke up very easily. They were useless in the service of any skilled strategy, and they were just as useless for siege operations, such as those which awaited Ivan under the walls of Kazan. In cases of defence their superiority was evident. Once shut up and cut off from all chance of taking to their heels in flight, they were extraordinarily tenacious, bore cold and hunger without a murmur, died in their thousands on the earthworks and wooden defences they perpetually repaired, and never gave in till the very last extremity. Hence the constant use in the Muscovite armies of portable defences, shields made of planks, with holes bored for the musket-barrels—these were called khoulaï gorody ('towns on the march')—and hence, also, the precocious development of a very powerful artillery service.

The first cannon the country had ever possessed were of foreign make, but even in Ivan III.'s time, foreign workmen were casting them in Russia. A gun produced by this home factory, and bearing the date of the year 1485, is still preserved in the St. Petersburg arsenal. Under Ivan IV., the war material thus collected included all the European improvements in ballistics—serpentines (here called zmeï), falconets (sokolniki), and mortars of various calibres, amongst which were classed the haufnizy (from the German word haufnitz), the haubitzen of a more modern type, and the volkomiétki