A RUSSIAN PRINCE IN THE RANKS

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5118, 18 August 1877, Page 1 (Supplement)

A RUSSIAN PRINCE IN THE RANKS

A correspondent of the London Daily News writes from the Russian headquarters:—l have just been surprised by a visit from Prince Tserteleff. The prince will be remembered by many people in London society as the young and clever secretary who accompanied General Ignatieff on hie trip to England, and his name is more or less familiar to the public as the Second Secretary of the Russian Embassy at Constantinople. It is to be remembered that the prince resigned his situation in the diplomatic service and volunteered for the war as a common soldier. He is now serving as a simple cavalryman in the dragoons, although he expects soon to be transferred to the Circassian Cossacks under the command of General Skobeleff; He has been on outpost duty along the Danube ever since the beginning of the war, and is so changed by his uniform, by exposure to the weather,_and his face is so sunburnt arid so rough-looking that I am afraid his own mother would hardly recognise him. He, in fact, resembles more a

I good-looking butcher-boy than-anything eke I can think of—a fact which, with the candor which should characterise friends, I did not k«sitate to communicate to him. He was extremely flattered by the information. His gi.aat ambition is to look like a soldier, and this he considered as a preliminary accomplishment in the right direction. He is very proud of his uniform, in spite of its being about as ugly a one as could easily be imagined ; and although thece was no necessity for iti he put it on at St. Petersburg to make the trip to Kischeneff, in order, as he said, to get accustomed to it as soon as possible, and not to look as though he was masquerading. The uniform is dark blue, \*'th light blue facings, a grey overcoat o£ coarse, heavy eloth which a London groom would, probably, not consider respectable for a horse blanket, and which resembles somewhat the material used for convicts' clothes—a black, hideouß-looking leather cap, with a ilsor or peak cocked up at a most ridiculous and ungainly angle. The sword is not worn attached to a belt, but to a strap slung over the shoulder. .Although the prince wa3 very proud of this costume, he found when he got to Kischeneff that it was a source of great embarrassment to him, and resulted in his getting, nearly starved to deth. According to the regulations then in existence, and which have only been relaxed since, a soldier cannot- go into a theatre, restaurant, cafe, club or any public place where he would be liable to meet aa officer. He had not yet been attached to his regiment, and was not therefore drawing rations. The poor fellow consequently could not go anywhere to get anything to eat except when he was invited to dinner in a private house. He went wandering about the streets, a kind of an outcast and vagabond, without any visible means of existence, like a Constantinople dog, picking up a meal wherever he could find one. He finally found me, and from that time forward things went better, »nd he used to come to my hotel, order his breakfast or dinner, and eat it in my room. As I happened to be laid up with a Bprained ankle at that time, the arrangement suited me very well, and being thus isolated as it were and cut off from society and the rest of the world, we might have been inclined to indulge wild Bacchanalian dissipation, had it not been for the fact that the Hotel du Nord, in which I was stopping at Kischeneff, did nob offer aDy materials for excess in the way of either eating or drinking. All we could get to eat was roast mutton and wild asparagus, while the only thing to drink consisted of some very stale beer, and a villainous kind of decoction, which they called champagne, and which no man in his senses would dream of drinking unless he were bent upon a painful and lingering suicide. Now, Ipeer and mutton are very good in themselves, but they do not form a sufficient variety upon whioh to found a banquet, and although they are quite enough to sustain life, they are not calculated tq tempt two young men, fresh from the res» taurants of St. Petersburg, to any excess either in eating or drinking, and we were perforce obliged to remain temperate. At last the prince got his papers enabling him to join his regiment, which had gone forward, and one cold, wet, rainy morning he mounted his horse at the door of the hotel, and rode away, without'.servant or guide, like G. P. R. James' solitary horseman, to overtake his- regiment, .vhieh was already two or three days' march in advance. He succeeded in rejoining it, and since that time has been doing duty on the Danube. He said that he likes soldiering better even than he expected, although he finds it pretty hard work to keep his arms and accoutrements clean ; and he found it rather difficult at first to get on and off his horse, which, in addition to himself, carried behind the saddle part of a tent, a sack of oats, a blanket, a frying-pan, a tea-kettle, and a. large bundle of hay, together wiih various other things that are considered useful in a soldier's life. He has been under fire three or four times already, and has been over the. Danube once ou a reconnoitering expedition. Everything considered, the prince may be esteemed as good a soldier, I think, as a diplomatist ; but I hope for the sake of journalism I that he will be more communicative in his new than he was in his old profession. . There was never anything to be got out of him as a diplomatist. Never would be tellyou anything that you did not know before, or, if he did, you would be pretty sure to find it in some newspaper a week old that had escaped you. In my opinion a diplomatist of this kind is utterly and entirely useless, and the sooner he exchanges it, as.the prince has done, for another profession, the bettes for all concerned. He has, I may remark, some pretensions to the literary profession besides, and has written a couple of novels, and was engaged, I believe* on a historical work of some kind, when the sudden cropping up of the Eastern question interrupted it. He has hitherto kept his authorship a profound secret from his chiefs, because it would have created a great commotion in the service had it been known that he was dabbling in literature. A man with enough intellect to write anything more than a despatch beginning with "I have the honor," and finishing "I am." &c, would be regarded as a black sheep in any diplomatic service In the world, and dealt with accordingly. But although the prince may be a successful soldier, and reap multitudinous laurels on the field of battle, his hands and face have been completely spoiled, never, I fear, to recover their pristine freshness. .