After a fortnight or so of these massacres, when the thirst for blood began to be appeased, and the authorities ceased to spur the people on to deeds of violence, they began to collect together and bring into the town the few Chinese who remained alive, half-dead with hunger and mad with terror. These poor wretches, scarcely able to move for exhaustion, and those of the Chinese townspeople who for one reason or another had been allowed to survive—some few dozen persons—were all that remained of the many thousand Chinese who had dwelt in Blagovèstshensk and the neighbourhood. It was not difficult to foresee what character the war would assume when our soldiers and Cossacks passed over into Chinese territory. Scarcely had they crossed the Amur on August 3rd and taken possession of Saghalien (from which place the inhabitants had fled betimes to the interior of the country), when they set everything on fire. During the two following nights the flames illuminated the river for a long distance; and in place of a prosperous community which supplied Blagovèstshenk with foodstuffs at very moderate rates, nothing was to be seen on the Chinese bank but blackened posts and crumbling ruins. The entry of our army into Manchuria was not merely signalised by flaming dwellings; nothing and nobody was spared. Women, children, and the aged were pitilessly slaughtered, young girls violated and then slain. Such were the deeds of our “heroes,” as General Grodekov in his despatches called these warriors, for whose “brave deeds” he “could not find words to express his admiration”! But even some of his officers themselves told with a shudder of the bloodthirsty instincts developed by these “heroes” in a war against unarmed men, women, and children on Chinese soil. A rich and thickly-populated land was reduced in a few months to a barren desert, where charred ruins were visible here and there, and corpses were left to the wolves and vultures. When indignation is expressed at these atrocities it is customary to meet with the excuse, “Read the accounts of the cruelties practised by Germans, French, and English in China. If more civilised races behave so, what can be expected from us less cultivated Russians?” It is hard to answer this. The white races did indeed prove during that terrible war with “barbaric China,” as they contemptuously say, the full worth of their boasted civilisation. On the threshold of the twentieth century average Europeans showed themselves scarcely less barbarous than the hordes of Tamerlane and Tchengis-Khan.