The low ground behind the station was flooded. I watched with amusement the antics of a number of Cossacks, who, heedless of the rain, had got together planks and old doors torn off ruined houses, and, using them as rafts, had organised a miniature regatta on the pond thus formed. Exciting races took place; and a friendly dispute over one resulted in a naval battle full of comic incidents. Like schoolboys, they charged each other’s rafts and if capsized continued the struggle in the water. One, diving beneath the surface, would suddenly reappear beneath an enemy’s vessel, tilt it on end, and precipitate the occupants into the muddy flood, to be immediately grappled by them and ducked. In the morning a letter from Captain Labertouche was brought me by a trooper of the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry, who had been forced to swim his horse across a swollen stream in order to reach the station. I chatted for some time with the man—a fine, lithe specimen of the Indian sowar. Anxious to hear every expression of the impression which the Russian troops had made upon our native rank‐and‐file, I asked him his opinion of them. “They are not bad, sahib,” he replied in Hindustani. Then, with an expressive shrug, he added, “But they will never get into India.” The remark was significant, for it showed not only what our men thought of the soldiers of the Czar, but also that the possibility of the Russian invasion is occasionally discussed amongst them, only to be dismissed with contempt. Our Indian contingent, one and all, have conceived a wonderful disdain of most of the troops of the other nationalities with whom they were brought in contact in China. They had the greatest admiration and affection for the gallant little Japanese, but considered their training obsolete. The Russians they regarded with little respect and no dread, and looked upon them as scarcely civilised. The Infanterie Coloniale, of whom they saw a good deal, filled them with the greatest contempt, undeserved though it was, for the whole French army. And I wish that the armchair critics, who condemn our forces and hold up the Germans as models to be slavishly followed in every respect, could have heard the opinion formed of them by these shrewd fighting men, Sikh, Gurkha, and Punjaubi, whose lives have been passed in war.