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Updated: June 11, 2025
Each of them had a gun slung over his shoulders, a huge pair of holsters with a brace of pistols in them, large saddle-bags and leathern cases strapped on at their cruppers. "Hallo, strangers, where do you come from?" exclaimed one of the men, with an oath. "I didn't think there were any whites hereabouts."
Satyrs giving drink to one another, fauns whispering in the ears of stalwart women, centaurs trotting with corpses flung across their cruppers, combatants trampling in frenzy upon prostrate enemies, men sunk in self-abandonment to sloth or sorrow such are the details of these incomparable columns, where our sense of the grotesque and vehement is immediately corrected by a perception of rare energy in the artist who could play thus with his plastic puppets.
They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses like the scales on the hydra. These narrations seemed to belong to another age.
Some clambered up upon the cruppers of the riders and dragged them backwards from their saddles. Others lay upon their faces and hamstrung the chargers with their scythe-blades, stabbing the horsemen before they could disengage themselves. Again and again the guards crashed through them from side to side, and yet the shattered ranks closed up behind them and continued the long-drawn struggle.
While descending some slopes at an angle of I know not what, the use of our cruppers became strikingly apparent. I began, for the first time in my life, to feel anxiety as to the strength of a horse's tail. In going up such places the saddle girths were severely tried, but the mane kept one from slipping down one's perpendicular animal.
But when the work of devastation and pillage was done, he suddenly turned his horses' heads south from Jekaderinograd; overran the Cossack colonies in that direction; and with a considerable number of Kabardians forced into his ranks, with his cruppers loaded with the booty of the plains, and his saddle-bows well furnished with both millet and mutton, regained the mountains.
They are only in time to behold the stanitza in flames, the fort in ruins from the explosion of its magazines, and the victors, their cruppers piled high with goods, and women, just gaining the opposite bank, or crossing the hill-top, on the other side of which lie both safety and freedom.
She had been following their movement from behind while the cruppers sped away and the legs seemed to grow longer as they raced and then diminished till they looked slender as strands of hair. Now the horses were running at the end of the course, and she caught a side view of them looking minute and delicate of outline against the green distances of the Bois.
Men, women, children, hurled themselves on the cruppers and the breasts of the horses, and hung there like cats, with teeth, finger nails and toe nails. Others struck the archers' in the face with their torches. Others thrust iron hooks into the necks of the cavaliers and dragged them down. They slashed in pieces those who fell.
We each carried a net-hammock at the cruppers of our mules, so that we had it ready to hang up between a couple of trees, or in a hut, whenever we stopped, either for our noonday rest or at night.
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