Crossword-Solution: SOTNIAS 7 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 7

General Gourko recently inspected two sotnias of Don Cossacks who had cleared 340 versts in 3 days, or 74 miles a day.] Swimming was practised in the Warsaw, Odessa, and Moscow districts, the horses being regularly taught with the aid of inflated bags tied under them.

Their peace-footing is as follows:--Daghestan, 6 regular squadrons and 3 of militia; Kuban Circassians, 1 _sotnia_; Terek, 8 _sotnias_; Kars, 3 _sotnias_; Batum, 2 infantry and 1 mounted _sotnia_; Turkomans, 3 _sotnias_; total, 25 squadrons and 2 companies.

General Martel was one of the best officers I served under, and he willingly gave me permission to join a cavalry reconnaissance in force which was made by four dragoon and hussar regiments, and six sotnias of Cossacks.

The French Marshal, terrified by the losses of his troops, which the cholera was devastating by hundreds in their camps at Gallipoli and Varna, and alarmed by the deaths of the Duc d'Elchingen and General Carbuccia, resolved to send an expedition into the Dobrudscha, where there were--as Colonel Desaint, chief of the French topographical department, declared on his return from an exploration--about 10,000 Russians, two regiments of regular cavalry, 10 Sotnias of Cossacks, and 35 pieces of artillery.

There was an escort of French Chasseurs-à cheval and a small one of the 11th Hussars, and the big horses and tall well-fed men of the latter strikingly contrasted with the puny, although hardy steeds, and with the meagre frames of the Cossacks, who seemed to regard them with some wonderment, while the Hussars glanced at them as if they thought that one squadron of theirs would have an easy bargain of half a dozen sotnias of such antagonists.