and duration.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

MY FIRST EXPERIENCE OF ACTUAL WAR, AND MY THOUGHTS THEREON.

We set out by the light of the moon. Our party consisted of a small
force of Russian light cavalry. The officer in command was evidently
well acquainted with our route, for he rode smartly ahead without
hesitation or sign of uncertainty for several hours.

At first Nicholas and I conversed in low tones as we cantered side by
side over hill and dale, but as the night advanced we became less
communicative, and finally dropped into silence. As I looked upon
village and hamlet, bathed in the subdued light, resting in quietness
and peace, I thought sadly of the evils that war would surely bring upon
many an innocent and helpless woman and child.

It was invariably in this course that my thoughts about war flowed. I
was, indeed, quite alive to the national evils of war, and I will not
admit that any man-of-peace feels more sensitively than I do the fact
that, in war, a nation's best, youngest, and most hopeful blood is
spilled, while its longest lives and most ardent spirits are ruthlessly,
uselessly sacrificed--its budding youths, its strapping men, its
freshest and most muscular, to say nothing of mental, manhood. Still,
while contemplating war and its consequences, I have always been much
more powerfully impressed with the frightful consequences to women and
children, than anything else. To think of our wives, our little ones,
our tender maidens, our loving matrons, and our poor helpless babes,
being exposed to murder, rapine, torture, and all the numerous and
unnameable horrors of war, for the sake of some false, some fanciful,
some utterly ridiculous and contemptible idea, such as the connection of
one or two provinces of a land with this nation or with that, or the
"integrity of a foreign empire," has always filled me with sensations of
indignation approaching to madness, not unmingled, I must add, with
astonishment.

That savages will fight among themselves is self-evident; that Christian
nations shall defend themselves from the assaults of savages is also
obvious; but that two Christian nations should go to war for anything,
on any ground whatever, is to my mind inexplicable and utterly
indefensible.

Still, they do it. From which circumstance I am forced to conclude that
the Christianity as well as the civilisation and common-sense of one or
the other of such nations is, for the time, in abeyance.

Of cou