As he had done on his first Imperial sortie a year and a half before, Lewis trekked southeast through Red Russia to Kamieniec.
Thence he pushed farther south than he had ever been before into Podolia and Nogay Tartary or the Yedisan.
There, along the east bank of the Southern Bug, opposite the hamlet of Zhitzhakli a few miles north of the Black Sea, he arrived at General Headquarters of the Russian Army.
By June 19, 1788, he had presented himself to its Commander in Chief, the Governor of the Southern Provinces, the Director of the War College -- The Prince.

Catherine's first war against the Grand Turk had ended in 1774 with a peace treaty quite favorable to her.
By 1783 her legions had managed to annex the Crimea amid scenes of wanton cruelty and now, in this second combat with the Crescent, were aiming at suzerainty over all of the Black Sea's northern shoreline.

Through most of 1787 operations on both sides had been lackadaisical;
those of 1788 were going to prove decisive, though many of their details are obscure.
To consolidate what her Navy had won, the Czarina was fortunate that, for the first time in Russian history, her land forces enjoyed absolute unity of command under her favorite Giaour.
Potemkin was directing this conflict on three fronts: in the Caucasus;
along the Danube and among the Carpathians, in alliance with the Emperor Joseph's armies;
and in the misty marshlands and shallow coastal waters of Nogay Tartary and Taurida, including the Crimean peninsula.
Here the war would flame to its focus, and here Lewis Littlepage had come.

Potemkin's Army of Ekaterinoslav, totaling, it was claimed, 40,000 regular troops and 6,000 irregulars of the Cossack Corps, had invested Islam's principal stronghold on the north shore of the Black Sea, the fortress town of Oczakov, and was preparing to test the Turk by land and sea.
During a sojourn of slightly more than three months Chamberlain Littlepage could see action on both elements.

As his second in command The Prince had Marshal Repnin, one-time Ambassador to Poland.
Repnin, who had a rather narrow face, longish nose, high forehead, and arching brows, looked like a quizzical Mephistopheles.
Some people thought he lacked both ability and character, but most agreed that he was noble in appearance and, for a Russian, humane.
The Marshal came to know Littlepage quite well.
At General Headquarters the newcomer in turn got to know others.
There was the Neapolitan, Ribas, a capable conniver whose father had been a blacksmith but who had fawned his way up the ladder of Catherine's and Potemkin's favor till he was now a brigadier (and would one day be the daggerman designated to do in Czar Paul 1,, after traveling all the way to Naples to procure just the right stiletto).

Then there were the distinguished foreign volunteers.
Representing the Emperor were the Prince De Ligne, still as impetuous as a youth of twenty;
and General the Count Pallavicini, founder of the Austrian branch of that celebrated Italian house, a courtier Littlepage could have met at Madrid in December, 1780.
From Milan came the young Chevalier De Litta, an officer in the service of Malta.
Out of Saxony rode the Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg, one of the Czarina's cousins and a lieutenant general in her armies, a frank, sensitive, popular soldier whose kindnesses Littlepage would "always recall with the sincerest gratitude".

Though Catherine was vexed at the number of French officers streaming to the Turkish standard, there were several under her own, such as the Prince De Nassau;
the energetic Parisian, Roger De Damas, three year's Littlepage's junior, to whom Nassau had taken a liking;
and the artillerist, Colonel Prevost, whom the Count De Segur had persuaded to lend his technical skills to Nassau.
England contributed a young subaltern named Newton and the naval architect Samuel Bentham, brother to the economist, who for his colonel's commission was proving a godsend to the Russian fleet.
From America were the Messrs. Littlepage and Jones.

Lewis had expected to report at once to Jones's and Nassau's naval command post.
On arrival at headquarters he had, however -- in King Stanislas' words to Glayre -- "found such favor with Pe Potemkin that he made him his aide-de-camp and up to now does not want him to go join Paul Jones."
So of course he stayed put.
Having done so, he began to experience all the frustrations of others who attempted to get along with Serenissimus and do a job at the same time.

The Prince's perceptions were quick and his energy monstrous, but these qualities were sapped by an Oriental lethargy and a policy of letting nothing interfere with personal passions.
At headquarters -- sufficiently far from the firing line to make you forget occasionally that you were in a war -- Lewis found that the Commander in Chief's only desk was his knees (and his only comb, his fingers).
An entire theater had been set up for his diversion, with a 200-man Italian orchestra under the well-known Sarti.
In the great one's personal quarters, a portable house, almost every evening saw an elegant banquet or reception.
Lewis could let his eye caress The Prince's divan, covered with a rose-pink and silver Turkish cloth, or admire the lovely tapis, interwoven with gold, that spread across the floor.
Filigreed perfume boxes exuded the aromas of Araby.
Around the billiard tables were always at least a couple of dozen beribboned generals.
At dinner the courses were carried in by tall cuirassiers in red capes and black fur caps topped with tufts of feathers, marching in pairs like guards from a stage tragedy.

Among the visitors arriving every now and then there were, of course, women.
For if Serenissimus made the sign of the Cross with his right hand, and meant it, with his left he beckoned lewdly to any lady who happened to catch his eye.
Usually Lewis would find at headquarters one or more of The Prince's various nieces.

Right now he found Sophie De Witt, that magnificent young matron he had spotted at Kamieniec four years ago.
The Prince took her with him on every tour around the area, and it was rumored he was utilizing her knowledge of Constantinople as part of his espionage network.
One evening he passed around the banquet table a crystal cup full of diamonds, requesting every female guest to select one as a souvenir.
When a lady chanced to soil a pair of evening slippers, Brigadier Bauer was dispatched to Paris for replacements.

But if The Prince fancied women and was fascinated by foreigners, he could be haughtiness personified to his subordinates.
He had collared one of his generals in public.
His coat trimmed in sable, diamond stars of the Orders of Saints Andrew or George agleam, he was often prone to sit sulkily, eye downcast, in a Scheherazade trance.
When this happened, everything stopped.
As Littlepage noted: "A complete picture of Prince Potemkin may be had in his 1788 operations.
He stays inactive for half the summer in front of Oczakov, a quite second-rate spot, begins to besiege it formally only during the autumn rains, and finally carries it by assault in the heart of winter.
There's a man who never goes by the ordinary road but still arrives at his goal, who gratuitously gets himself into difficulty in order to get out of it with eclat, in a word a man who creates monsters for himself in order to appear a Hercules in destroying them".

To help him do so The Prince had conferred control of his land forces on a soldier who was different from him in almost every respect save one: both were eccentrics of the purest ray serene.

Alexander Vasilievitch Suvorov, now in his fifty-ninth year (ten years Potemkin's senior), was a thin, worn-faced person of less than medium height who looked like a professor of botany.
He had a small mouth with deep furrows on either side, a large flat nose, and penetrating blue eyes.
His gray hair was thin, his face beginning to attract a swarm of wrinkles.
He was ugly.
But Suvorov's face was also a theater of vivacity, and his tough, stooping little frame was briskness embodied.
Like all Russians he was an emotional man, and in him the emotions warred.
Kind by nature, he never refused charity to a beggar or help to anyone who asked him for it (as Lewis would one day discover).
But he was perpetually engaged in a battle to command his own temper.

When Littlepage was introduced, if the General behaved as usual, the newcomer faced a staccato salvo of queries: origin?
Age?
Mission?
Current status?
Woe betide the interviewee if he answered vaguely.
Suvorov's contempt for don't-know's was proverbial;
better to give an asinine answer than none at all.
Despising luxuries of any sort for a soldier, he slept on a pile of hay with his cloak as blanket.
He rose at 4:00 A.M. the year round and was apt to stride through camp crowing like a cock to wake his men.
His breakfast was tea;
his dinner fell anywhere from nine to noon;
his supper was nothing.
He hadn't worn a watch or carried pocket money for years because he disliked both, but highest among his hates were looking glasses: he had snatched one from an officer's grasp and smashed it to smithereens.
He kept several pet birds and liked cats well enough that if one crept by, he would mew at it in friendly fashion.
Passing dogs were greeted with a cordial bark.

Yet General Suvorov -- who had never forgotten hearing his adored Czarina declare that all truly great men had oddities -- was mad only north, northwest.
He had come to learn that a reputation for peculiarity allowed mere field officers a certain leeway at Court;
in camp he knew it won you the affection of your men.
He had accordingly cultivated eccentricity to the point of second nature.
Underneath, he remained one of the best-educated Russians of his day.
He dabbled in verse, could get along well among most of the European languages, and was fluent in French and German.
He had also mastered the Cossack tongue.

For those little men with the short whiskers, shaven polls, and top knots Suvorov reserved a special esteem.
Potemkin -- as King Stanislas knew, and presently informed Littlepage -- looked on the Cossacks as geopolitical tools.
To Serenissimus such tribes as the Cossacks of the Don or those ex-bandits the Zaporogian Cossacks (in whose islands along the lower Dnieper the Polish novelist Sienkiewicz would one day place With Fire And Sword) were just elements for enforced resettlement in, say, Bessarabia, where, as "the faithful of the Black Sea borders", he could use their presence as bargaining points in the Czarina's territorial claims against Turkey.
Suvorov saw in these scimitar-wielding skirmishers not demographic units but military men of a high potential.
He knew how to channel their exuberant disorderliness so as to transform them from mere plunderers into A-1 guerrilla fighters.
He always kept a few on his personal staff.
He often donned their tribal costumes, such as the one featuring a tall, black sheepskin hat from the top of which dangled a little red bag ornamented by a chain of worsted lace and tassels;
broad red stripes down the trouser leg;
broader leather belt round the waist, holding cartridges and light sabre.
Suvorov played parent not just to his Cossacks but to all his troops.
It was probably at this period that Littlepage got his first good look at the ordinary Russian soldier.

These illiterate boors conscripted from villages all across the Czarina's empire had, Suvorov may have told Lewis, just two things a commander could count on: physical fitness and personal courage.
When their levies came shambling into camp, they were all elbows, hair, and beard.
They emerged as interchangeable cogs in a faulty but formidable machine: shaved nearly naked, hair queued, greatcoated, jackbooted, and best of all -- in the opinion of the British professional, Major Semple-Lisle -- "their minds are not estranged from the paths of obedience by those smatterings of knowledge which only serve to lead to insubordination and mutiny".