Mexico Missouri message., 1904-06-02
KouRoPATKIN IN REAL WAR.
Russian General Facing Foemen
Worthy of His Steel.

Worthy OF His steel.
II ought to be a source of consider
able qualification to Gen. Kouropatldn
to have the opportunity of encounter
ing a completely equipped and highly
intelligent enemy. A warrior Of his
voracity could hardly have died re-
plete if the scanty fare of his previous
campaigns had not been supplemented
by this brawny piece de resistance.
For thirty.eight years Kouropatkin
fought Bokharians, Algerians, Khokan-
dams, Turks, Khivans, Samaritan
dams, Khirgbizes, Tashkendians and
variegated mid-Asiatics. His foemen
were worthy of the arsenal of stars,
swords and crosses which they won
for him from the czar. They were
wolves. But that is just what they
were. Even the Turks, because of the
infirmity of their government, resem-
bled a pack of wise animals rather
than the army of an organized nation.
When Kouropatkin went to st. Peters
burg in 1898 as minister of war he
must have felt that he had been not
so much a conqueror of men as hun.
ter Of inferior breeds.
To-day, as he watches Kuroki come
toward him over the Manchurian hills
with a commissariat department and
chess game plan of campaign, his
heart should bound with the prospect
of making his first Offering in the
Temple of the Real Thing.
How many strange scenes, drawn
from strange and widely separated
parts of the habitable world, must
float now through Kouropatkin's
mind!
He must see himself as he was in
1874, young enough to have the wan
dering feeling in the feet" and there
fore wandering to Algeria in the
French army under Loverdo. How far
| away. how unreal those Algerians
must seem with whom he fought on
the desert sands and over whom he
rode into the Legion of Honor!
And then the Turks especially the
| dead Turk under whose body he lay,
wounded and unconscious, all one
cold night! They must come back to
him together with his chief Skobe-
lefI, standing shoulder to shoulder
with him in hand to hand encounters
with bashi-bazouks and dripping
equally with blood while Archibald
Forbes asked them questions and tel
egraphed to his newspapers his IA
nous description Of their gore en-
bossed uniforms.
! Turks and Algerians, however,
must be but feeble images to Kouro-
| patlSin compared with those mild
| Asiatic BOkharians, Kho-
kandians and the rest-whom 1t was
his life mission to subdue. "The Rus
slams will not be able to conquer the
Turcomans," said Lord Salisbury.
THE Turcoman barrier win last for
our lifetime at least" 1t was Skobe-
len and then Kouropatdn who rid
died this prophecy. The Turcomans
yielded to marches as magnificent as
that of Lord Roberts on KandRhar
and to massacres as promiscuous as
those OF Caesar In Gaul. Does KOuro-
patkin remember Cock Tepe now and
the 10000 men, women and children
delivered to the flesh and blood lust
of the Russian soldiery in one OF
those thorough dissuasiye lessons
which, in the book of Russian colon.
ial assimilation, precede the insidious
suasion of administrative gontlenessi
Certainly there could hardly be
found for any Individual man In any
previous period Of the worlds history
more varied retrospect than thai
which comes now 70 the Russian gen
eral. who. a continent away from
home, Is taking what is perhaps his
last stand against the enemies Of hi
sovereign and = nshting instead o
hunting.