Page:The Russian Review Volume 1.djvu/110

92 in the wilderness of the Caucasus and of Russian Turkestan that he learned his art and acquired that intimacy with Nature that is given to those only who, in the words of a modern poet, "have companioned nature in her bed-chamber no less than in her presence-room." It was the East, also, that familiarized him with the savage mind and its dark ways, and quenched his thirst for the exotic. Despite his perfectly Western program and aspirations, Vereshchagin was, at heart, always somewhat of a barbarian, just as was his contemporary, Tolstoy. The ancient geographers drew the border line between Europe and Asia along the Dnieper (Boristhenus), and it is still true that the western subtleties and sinuosities are essentially strange to the Russian, and that in many respects he is the child of Asia, the vast, the mysterious.

Vereshchagin's mission here below was to tell the world the unadorned truth about the bloody game of kings. No one was ever in a better position to know what war is, for he took part, as a volunteer, in nearly all the military campaigns of the last quarter of the past century. The whole of his life passed under the sign of war, and it was like a soldier that he died: his grave is in the waves of the distant sea where so many compatriots of the painter met their fate during the Russo-Japanese War. It is by observing the fighting man that Vereshchagin believed one could gain an insight into the mysteries of human life and death. And it was not in his nature to content himself with the role of a spectator at a safe distance. "I have been through everything," writes he, "in my determination to see everything connected with warfare. I have taken part in almost every kind of operation. I have charged with infantry, and I have led soldiers in the assault; I have taken part in cavalry skirmishes, and when I was wounded on the Danube I was in action, with sailors who were blowing up a Turkish monitor." Vereshchagin trod the battlefields of two worlds; he saw the doings of the Russian army in Turkestan and witnessed some of the "high deeds" of the British soldiers in India; he scanned the faces of slain soldiers of many races; he saw that great via dolorosa from Plevna to the Danube, which the Turkish prisoners, driven northward to Russia, had paved with their frozen and wounded bodies. He certainly knew the hideous business of warfare under all its aspects, and that is why he succeeded in stripping it of the romantic glamor and halo with which official patriotism had adorned it. "War," he writes, "means hunger, thirst, sickness, the pain of wounds, privations of all kinds,