storming party to a standstill.  Skobeleff was ready for the emergency.  True to his Plevna tactics of ever feeding an attack at the crisis with new troops, he hurled forward two battalions of the line and companies of dismounted Cossacks.  These pushed on the onset, hewed their way through all obstacles, and soon met the smaller storming parties which had penetrated at other points.  By 1 p.m. the Russian standard waved in triumph from the central hill of the fortress, and thenceforth bands of Tekkes began to stream forth into the desert on the further side.

Now Skobeleff gave to his foes a sharp lesson, which, he claimed, was the most merciful in the end.  He ordered his men, horse and foot alike, to pursue the fugitives and spare no one.  Ruthlessly the order was obeyed.  First, the flight of grape shot from the light guns, then the bayonet, and lastly the Cossack lance, strewed the plain with corpses of men, women, and children; darkness alone put an end to the butchery, and then the desert for eleven miles eastwards of Denghil Tepe bore witness to the thoroughness of Muscovite methods of warfare.  All the men within the fortress were put to the sword.  Skobeleff himself estimated the number of the slain at 20,000[335].  Booty to the value of L600,000 fell to the lot of the victors.  Since that awful day the once predatory tribes of Tekkes have given little trouble.  Skobeleff sent his righthand man, Kuropatkin, to occupy Askabad, and reconnoitre towards Merv.  But these moves were checked by order of the Czar.

[Footnote 335:  Siege and Assault of Denghil Tepe.  By General Skobeleff (translated).  London, 1881.]

A curious incident, told to Lord Curzon, illustrates the dread in which Russian troops have since been held.  At the opening of the railway to Askabad, five years later, the Russian military bands began to play.  At once the women and children there present raised cries and shrieks of dread, while the men threw themselves on the ground.  They imagined that the music was a signal for another onslaught like that which preluded the capture of their former stronghold[336].

[Footnote 336:  Russia in Central Asia in 1889.  By the Hon. G.N.  Curzon (1889), p. 83.]

This victory proved to be the last of Skobeleff’s career.  The Government having used their knight-errant, now put him on one side as too insubordinate and ambitious for his post.  To his great disgust, he was recalled.  He did not long survive.  Owing to causes that are little known, among which a round of fast-living is said to have played its part, he died suddenly from failure of the heart at his residence near Moscow (July 7 1882).  Some there were who whispered dark things as to his militant notions being out of favour with the new Czar, Alexander III.; others pointed significantly to Bismarck.  Others again prattled of Destiny; but the best comment on the death of Skobeleff would seem to be that illuminating saying of Novalis—­“Character is Destiny.”  Love of fame prompted in him the desire one day to measure swords with Lord Roberts in the Punjab; but the coarser strain in his nature dragged him to earth at the age of thirty-nine.