At twenty-one the father secured Mikhail an appointment as an officer in the czar's body-guard, and he went to St. Petersburg for five years. He was a general favorite. His men idolized him; his comrades loved him devotedly. He aroused jealousy only among those who did not know him personally, and women invariably spoiled him.

When Kaufmann started on his hazardous and brilliant campaign along the Oxus to Khiva, Skobeleff begged to be allowed to join him. The easy life of the capital had palled on him. He wanted action, and for the next ten years he saw little else.

Kaufmann's object was the subjugation of the Turkomans chiefly through the capture of their citadel at Khiva. For the latter half of the march the column was obliged to cut its communications, and subsist on the country. Skobeleff, then a major, had command of the rear-guard. One night a band of Turkomans savagely attacked his two companies, and for a moment threatened to annihilate them. Armed only with his sword, and at the head of his men, Skobeleff not only routed the Turkomans, but pursued them to a walled inclosure far up in the mountains, where he arrived so precipitately on their heels that no resistance was given to his impetuous advance. Whereupon he broke into the inclosure and raided some sheep and cattle, which furnished the army with unexpected fresh meat for several days.

For this Kaufmann brevetted him colonel, though for the time Skobeleff was obliged to content himself with only two companies. Yet with these two companies he accomplished in a single brilliant manoeuver what Kaufmann and his whole army of ten thousand men were planning to waste weeks or even months in doing.

The column had reached the environs of Khiva, where Kaufmann was proceeding, in an accepted, workmanlike manner, to set about the reduction of the citadel. He was training his cannon on the ramparts and preparing for an assault in form when suddenly on the fortress wall above the closed gate which Kaufmann was threatening there stood displayed against the sky-line the tall figure of Colonel Skobeleff. With his handful of Cossacks about 175-the heroic "madcap" had rid

den quietly around to the rear gate of Khiva, had carried it with a quick and desperate assault, had then taken the town by surprise, and was now beckoning to Kaufmann to limber up his batteries and countermand the detachments told off for the assault of the place already won.

Kaufmann rested for some months in Khiva, waiting for reinforcements to be sent him. One column which he expected failed to appear, and it became imperative to know its fate, for they were surrounded on one side by the desert, on three sides by mountains, and on all sides by savage Turkomans. Skobeleff volunteered to get the information.

Disguised as a Turkoman, accompanied by three friendly Turkomans, and laughing and singing as though off for a holiday, the young adventurer passed into the desert on his perilous journey. Two weeks later he reappeared, alone, on foot, half dead. He had lost his horses and his companions, but he had learned what he went for.

News of the Khivan exploits caused the Russian staff at St. Petersburg to appoint Skobeleff a major-general. He was barely twenty-nine years old, the youngest majorgeneral in any of the world's armies at that time.

The following year Kaufmann intrusted Skobeleff with the command of a comparatively small force which was to operate against the khanate of Khokand. That country, with a population of two million, he conquered and annexed in three months. The campaign was so fiercely pressed that when the vanquished khan surrendered, his first words to Skobeleff were, "Before we begin to talk, let me sleep, for I have not had a night's rest or a sound sleep in more than a month."

For two years Skobeleff was the governor of Khokand. Youthful, thorough, vigorous, and ambitious, he ruled the country with a despotic, though kindly, hand. He never visited St. Petersburg, where he had no friends in high circles. In fact, he knew no one except in the army. There he had no personal enemies; yet he encountered the envy and criticism that every spectacularly successful young man must meet. Finally these distant and unknown. enemies reached the ear of the emperor, and poisoned his mind against Skobeleff. The governor of Khokand was recalled

in disgrace, charged with having committed certain ruthless acts of cruelty and with having appropriated two million. rubles from the state fund.

As he arrived in St. Petersburg penniless, and as he apparently never had any money, the graft charges were doubtless fabrications. Nor is there any reliable testimony that he was ever cruel. In fact, the exact opposite seems to have been his character. Among a people noted for inhuman treatment of underlings, he was loved by soldiers and peasants. He was the first commander to introduce correct modes of sanitation in the Russian army, and he was one of the few who never permitted his soldiers to be flogged as a punishment.

Hastening to St. Petersburg with vouchers and witnesses to disprove the charges against him, Skobeleff found the official world cold and uncivil. In central Asia he had been a hero, the dominant man among millions. At the capital of the empire he was treated like a suspected criminal. Yet his pride sustained him, and he showed no signs of hurt, but insisted on an immediate hearing before the official auditors. He was soon acquitted of the charge of peculation, and the charge of cruelty was never pressed.

He then asked for an audience with the emperor. It was refused. He even humbled himself to beg in writing for the audience. It was of no avail. He was not only stripped of his civil appointment, but he was left without a military command, though he retained his commission. Crushed, he retired to his father's estate near Moscow.

There, at the beginning of the RussoTurkish War, in 1877, Skobeleff was moping, his career evidently blighted, a frank, intrepid, primeval nature thwarted by the machinations of flunkys.

III

WITH fighting at hand Mikhail Skobeleff was too good a man to overlook. He was not taken into imperial or even into official favor, but he was allowed to go to the front as chief of staff to his father, who was a general of division. This gave him a sort of free-lance commission, and he made himself a welcome guest at many headquarters, from that of Dragomirov, the commander-in-chief, down.

At length the army was assembled on the right bank of the Danube, preparing to cross that mighty river, a virtually disorganized array of a quarter of a million men. How different might have been the history of that war had Skobeleff been in command from start to finish!

Dragomirov was timid. He did not know how to proceed. He had never before crossed a great river with an army. To Skobeleff, at his side, he expressed his uncertainty.

"Cross to-night in boats, and let me lead," said Skobeleff. It was characteristic of him, especially the "let me lead." He invariably wore a white coat in action, "so that my men may make no mistake in knowing where to follow."

However, Dragomirov accepted the advice, and that night Skobeleff's was the first Russian foot to reach the farther bank. The next morning the army was drawn up on the left bank of the Danube to receive the congratulations of the emperor, who rode down the line. Reaching Dragomirov, he embraced him, and pinned on his breast the Cross of St. George. On the breast of Yolchine, who had commanded the first division over, he also pinned a Cross of St. George. Then he reached Skobeleff, and the eyes of the army were centered on the scene, for the disfavor of the hero of Khiva was well known.

That must have been a dramatic picture. Alexander was a very emperor in appearance, over six feet in height, of easy mien, flashing eye, courteous manners, but every inch the autocrat.

Skobeleff was no less a figure. Writing about that time, Archibald Forbes described him as "six feet two inches tall, straight as a pine, the head carried high with a gallant debonair fearlessness, square across the broad shoulders, deep in the chest, slender of waist, clean of flank, the muscular, graceful, supple figure set off to perfection by the white frock-coat and its gold decorations; with his frank, high bearing he looked a genial king."

For a moment Alexander hesitated as the two tall, proud, soldierly men confronted each other. Then the czar frowned, turned resolutely on his heel, and strode away. It was a deliberate affront before the whole army to the man who had led them across the Danube.

one could guess what had become of him, had accomplished the surrender of an entire Turkish army of 36,000 men. Is it to be wondered at that he is the war-god of the Russians?

He was now off in the front of the straggling Russian army, and he hurried down the valley of the Tundja with his face set straight for Adrianople. By forced marches once he went fifty miles in forty hours-he reached Adrianople before the Turks there knew of the loss of the Shipka Pass, captured the town, left a Russian governor, and pushed on at the top of his speed to the Bosporus. He was in front of Constantinople, all ready to assault the city, and beyond doubt would have taken it within a few days, when the armistice. was signed on January 31, 1878.

That armistice and the Treaty of San Stefano, which followed, broke Skobeleff's heart, for he was compelled to watch the wonderful city by the Golden Horn slip from his grasp, and thus again faded into nothing Russia's dream of an open port.

He protested again and again against the work of the diplomatists; "Those old women," he called them. Once he proposed to disobey the orders of his emperor and take Constantinople. He would be willing then, he said, to give himself up to a court-martial and be shot, if only Russia would take Constantinople and keep it. It was not to be.

IV

He lived four years and two months longer. In that time, though he did not hold the title of commander-in-chief, he was recognized as the first soldier in the Russian Empire. In Berlin he was spoken of as the second soldier of Europe, Moltke being the first. In Paris he was known. as the second soldier of Europe, MacMahon being the first. In London he was frequently referred to in the press as the "second soldier in Europe," the inference being that Wolseley was the first. Moltke, then a very old man, always spoke of him with fatherly affection, though the two represented utterly different schools of warfare.

Only in official Russia was he not regarded with favor. He was denied the highest rank, and he made no further effort to placate imperial favor. He went so far as to write a letter to a friend in

Paris, in which he described the emperor as "a brute, a personal coward, and incapable of reigning." The letter was published, yet no official notice of it was taken in Russia. The czar's advisers doubtless were too well informed concerning Skobeleff's popularity.

For he was the idol of 60,000,000 fighting men. He so "typified the Russian character, so fulfilled the Russian ideal, so inspired the common Russian, that the masses of the soldiery not only loved him, but believed him the nobler man for sacrificing them in heaps." Such dog-like devotion could be found only in the Slav character. He wielded the authority not only of a general, but of a religious leader as well. To the Russian imagination he appeared as a fairy prince inviolate in war. They called him "The Poet of the Sword." "Is not a battle the soldier's ball?" he often asked, and therefore went into battle as if dressed for a ball, and then sought the thick of the fighting.

If careless of himself, he was careful of his men. His division was always the best clothed in the army, and it never suffered for lack of food. Moreover, it was the only division in which men were never flogged. Before going into action it was his habit to assemble his non-commissioned officers, and to sit on the ground with them about him in a circle, while he asked each in turn for counsel as to the method of attack.

No wonder his men idolized him. Once one of them was to have a leg amputated, and the surgeon offered chloroform. The soldier refused, asking only for a pipe.

"We must not take that stuff," he said; "it 's for women.'

"Why not? All the other fellows do." "Others may. Let them. But we are Skobeleff's!"

Not alone in St. Petersburg was Skobeleff feared. Germany feared him so genuinely that at his death the Berlin papers almost openly reveled in it. The Germans understand war well enough to know that no science can stand against such a military genius as Skobeleff. England, too, feared him, for he was never loath to talk about his plans for the conquest of India.

V

How came he to die so young, with the best years of his life before him? In Mos

cow I was told that one black night in the early, rainy spring of 1882 the corpse of a tall, finely built man was brought to the morgue by unknown persons who escaped before they could be questioned. It was wrapped in a sheet, and there was nothing to identify it, and it was three days before the police discovered that they held all that remained of Russia's greatest general. Such is the official police account.

In his memoirs Archibald Forbes hints at the story which was circulated for a generation in the palaces and barracks of Europe:

The true account of his woeful and awfully sudden death has never been written, nor can it be written. He did not commit suicide, or, at all events, with intent; he was not assassinated; he did not die of heart disease. He sacrificed his life to a paroxysm of what was perhaps his chief weakness -sensuality.

But there is another account, to me more plausible, which also is circulated.

with persistent recurrence. I have heard it from several sources, from the porter in Denver, from a Russian sub-officer crossing the Pacific, from a journalist in St. Petersburg.

This account tallies with the others in certain physical details, but gives a more believable reason for his end. It appears that he spent his last night in a dance-hall in the slums of Moscow, whither he had gone to join a well-known Gipsy dancer. This Gipsy, it is believed, was in the pay of the secret police, who, inspired by supporters of the czar after they had been falsely informed that Skobeleff was plotting against him with the Nihilists, set her on to place poison in Skobeleff's drink.

Some of his utterances against the czar were certainly ill advised. It is certain he was cordially disliked in high circles; it is certain he was with the Gipsy the night of his death. It is also said that thereafter she immediately retired from Moscow, and lived in affluence in a southern country.