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i9i3] GENERAL DUMBADZE 225
honest man, not distinguished by any extraordinary
ability, but who had never abused his position of
intimate association with the Sovereign.1 He was
sincerely mourned ; a few tears were shed at his funeral,
celebrated with all military and official honours; but
every one consoled^themselves quickly, and his
successor had already been chosen. . . .
My French readers will doubtless remember Edmund
About’s charming tale called " The Man with the
broken Ear." This fantastic and amusing story, which
verges on political satire, has as its hero a gallant colonel
of the Napoleonic armies who in 1812, at the rout of his
troops, is saved from certain death by an old German
wizard who turns him into a mummy and bequeaths
him to a learned society, with a description of the
means to be taken to restore him to life. The mummy,
after many vicissitudes, ends by falling into the hands
of a French great-nephew; the means prescribed are
adopted, and the hot-headed officer of the Grand Arm}’
is restored to life at the age of thirty in the midst of
the Napoleonic France of i860 !
I remembered "the Man with the broken Ear’
every time that I found myself in the presence of the
worthy General Dumbadze, who since 1906 had been
the military governor of the town of Yalta and its
environs, that is to say the guardian and principal
guarantee of the safety of the Emperor and his family
during their frequent visits to Livadia. Only in
Dumbadze’s case the old German wizard had not cast
his spell over a colonel of Napoleon’s Grand Army,
but over a young lieutenant of the gallant Caucasian
troops during the mountain warfare of the ’thirties
and ’forties, a period which has been described by the
greatest Russian authors (Puchkin, Lermontoff, Tolstoi).
Georgian by birth, of brilliant courage and unimpeach-
1 I have never understood what the functions were of the " G^ndral du
jour," a barbarous term of Prussian survival. I believe that in reality
he had no very defined functions, which meant that he had a hand in
everything.
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