A sergeant and two men shortly marched me off in the direction of the headquarters, while a third led my horse. It was a long tramp, and I was not allowed to choose my own pace. At length, on the plateau before the camp, the divisional flag was seen. The artillery firing was over, and Baron Driesen and his staff were standing behind the still hot guns. My appearance was greeted with a simultaneous roar of laughter, in which I tried to join, I confess rather ruefully. “Well,” said Drieson drily, “can you believe now that Turkish Tcherkesses can ride gray horses as well as can Russian Hussars?” But as we walked back together to drink tea in his tent, there was genuine feeling in the quiet heartiness with which he congratulated me on my escape from this outpost adventure. THE DIVINE FIGURE FROM THE NORTH The Romanoffs have always been a soldierly race. Peter the Great did a good deal of miscellaneous fighting in Finland and elsewhere, and commanded at the battle of Pultowa. Alexander I. marched across Europe to participate on French soil in the desperate fighting of Napoleon’s most brilliant campaign in the early months of 1814. Nicolas, lad as he was in years, was already a veteran in war when Mortier and Marmont threw up the sponge on the heights of Montmartre, and the Imperial father and son rode along the Champs Elysées at the head of the triumphal entry into Paris of the allied armies. Alexander II. crossed the Danube in 1877, with the march of invasion of Turkey, that ended only at the gates of Constantinople. Peter commanded in fact as well as in name; he was perhaps a better shipwright than a general. Alexander I. was at least the nominal head of the Russian contingent in the great composite host of which Schwarzenberg was actually the Commander-in-Chief. But, in a strict military sense, Alexander II. had no definite position of any kind in the field. Head of the armies of Russia as he was, in virtue of his position as Czar, he was nevertheless not the Commander-in-Chief, even nominally, of the great hosts which his behest had drawn from the enthusiastic masses of his devoted subjects. That onerous duty and dignity he had assigned to his brother, the Grand Duke Nicolas. The Emperor, in a military sense, made the campaign simply as an august spectator, for whom as monarch and as Russian the operations presented an engrossing interest, and whose presence in the field further inspired the nation with added fervour. Solomon’s adage that in the multitude of counsellors there is wisdom does not apply to war. “Councils of war never fight” has passed into a proverb; if the proverb did not hold as regards the Russo-Turkish war, it must be owned that the battles directed by the councils were not always judicious. The American historian of that war, commenting on the lack of unity in the command of the Russo-Roumanian armies which attempted unsuccessfully to carry Osman’s lines around Plevna, in