The Shadow of Great Britain

Chapter 1513: Chapter 253: The Blood Knight Charging for Freedom: Arthur Hastings

Dear Sir David Eckett:

At this moment, as I pick up my pen, the blizzard outside is pelting the windows with grains of Baltic sea salt, but compared to the smoke rising between the Caucasus Mountains, this northern cold is merely a child’s whimper. A few days ago, when I read the sketch you enclosed with your letter depicting the destruction of a Chechnya village, the figures huddled on scorched earth, the baby swaddles hanging amid the broken walls, my silver inkstand was even cracked by a drop of hot sealing wax.

God bears witness, even in the hellish landscapes depicted by Dante, I have never seen a tragedy more gut-wrenching.

Have you seen the wild horses on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea? Those creatures once galloped freely under the moonlight, their manes brushing the grasslands like black silk sweeping across harp strings. But now, Russian iron hooves are trampling this land into a swamp of flesh and blood! Those Cossack cavalry, self-proclaimed ”spreaders of civilization,” wield their sabers against the necks of elders more skillfully than Tatars skinning sable.

When you told me that a Chechnya mother was nailed to her own oak door to protect her child, and the tribe’s millennia-old star and moon totem was engraved on the door frame, dear friend, my heart felt as though it were forced into a lit twelve-pound cannon.

We often liken Britain to a lighthouse shining upon the world, yet when the cries from the eastern shores of the Black Sea are deliberately erased, the glass cover of this lighthouse becomes stained with a layer of indelible blood. Do you know how the Russian nobility in the salons of Saint Petersburg discuss the Caucasus? They use silver forks inlaid with enamel to poke at caviar pancakes, casually saying, ”It’s just pruning an overgrown bramble thicket.”

But those ”brambles” are living people! They are Caucasus Mountain people who can play ancestral epics on the domra, weave rainbow-like blankets from wool!

Whenever I read your letters, I always think of the elms by the Thames River, shrouded in morning mist. Their roots buried deep in the soil, their branches stretching towards the heavens, just like British diplomats, needing to root themselves in the needs of reality while looking towards the stars of idealism.

Yesterday, I reread Lord Byron’s ”Child Harold’s Travels” in the embassy library, and upon reading ”Freedom, though your banner may be torn, yet it flies” I suddenly realized you are writing a modern epic even more poignant.

Those Russian officers, when using Pushkin’s poetry collection to cushion their wine glasses, have they ever thought that their compatriots are rewriting ”Caucasus Captive” with gunpowder? When you told me that a blind Chechnya singer, still chanting ancestral epics before being throat-slit, I seemed to hear Byron’s lyre shatter loudly in the valleys.

David, we cannot let the tyrant of St. Petersburg turn the Caucasus into another ”Bronze Horseman,” only this time, it’s living tribal bloodlines being consumed by floodwaters, rather than the illusion of St. Petersburg! God sees, if Byron were still alive, he would surely abandon Greece’s olive branch and instead use sonnets to compose a requiem for the cries of the eastern shores of the Black Sea.

This morning I stood by the embassy window, watching the sliding ice on the Neva River, suddenly recalling Dickens’ unpublished note: London’s fog is the shroud of the poor. Isn’t the smoke of the Caucasus currently a shroud of civilization? When the image of a mother holding her dead child in your sketchbook is made into a magazine illustration, I want to make all British housewives tremble at the breakfast table—just like Dickens using Oliver Twist’s broken bowl to strike the gilded plate of the Victorian Era.

I once mocked Wordsworth’s ”Dingdeng Temple,” saying the pastoral idylls of the Lake Poets were ”the daytime dreams of an opium addict.” But now, when I read your descriptions of Chechnya shepherds, their flocks’ throats pierced by Cossack cavalry, bloodied bells scattered among iris blooms. Doesn’t this scene evidently represent the dark variations of Wordsworth’s verses? Nature never betrayed the heart that loved her? No! Russian hooves are trampling ”Lyric Poetry Collection” into parchment in the mud!

Please allow me to promise you most frankly: every page of ink in my magazine, ”British,” will turn into lead bullets aimed at Russian tyranny. I have instructed the editor to name the next special issue ”Caucasus Christ of Suffering,” which will not only publish the survivor testimonies you provide but also feature engravings created by the Royal Academy of Arts based on the sketches. Let those dozing members of Parliament see how the Russian bear licks the skulls of Caucasus infants with its barbed tongue!

As you know, David, sometimes literature is closer to the truth than diplomatic notes. Therefore, when Viscount Palmerston selectively quotes my diplomatic report in Parliament, he is essentially reciting a piece so ridiculous it lacks rhyme.

This morning I just received a diplomatic letter from Viscount Palmerston returned from White Hall Street 15, previously, I specially pressed the summary of Russian military atrocities you recorded beneath a copy of the diplomatic report and sent it back to London. Yet, even though His Excellency read the Russian military internal memo stating ”it takes 200 rubles worth of gunpowder to suppress a village,” the reply he gave was merely—this is not inhumane, at best, it’s the running account of an abattoir accountant.

In addition, I must remind you as a friend: beneath the ice of St. Petersburg, the undercurrents are far more perilous than what is visible on the surface. Yesterday a ”well-meaning person” from Russian Third Hall suggested to me that some ”British tourists’ sketchbooks could lead to diplomatic misunderstands.” I immediately spilled whiskey over his sable collar (of course, later claiming it was a slip of hand), and told him: ”True artists never embellish the portraits of executioners.”