did get away just before sunrise. The start was mysterious, almost
majestic at that hour. For three days those transports had lain around
us--filled, I was told, with soldiers, and yet not one soldier had I
seen. Blacker and more mysterious than ever they looked in that dark
hour before dawn--only the first flush in the east showing sign of
something human in the column of black smoke that was drifting from the
funnel of each. It showed, too, a gray mass lying low on the water, and
near a big black rock that jutted from the sea. That gray mass gave
forth one unearthly shriek and that was all. Instantly thereafterward it
floated slowly around that jutting rock; one by one the silent black
ships moved ghostlike after it, and when the red sunburst came, that
gave birth, I suppose, to the flag of Japan, all in single file were
moving in a great circle out to sea--the prow of each ship turning
toward one red star that looked down with impartial eyes where the brown
children of the sun were in a death-struggle with the cubs of the Great
White Bear. By noon there was great cheer. The Japanese word was good at
last--we were bound for Port Arthur. The rocky shore of Manchuria was
close at hand. A Japanese torpedo-boat slipped by, its nose plunging
through every wave and playful as a dolphin, tossing green water and
white foam back over its whole black length. A signal-station became
visible on one gray peak, and then there was a thrill that took the
soreness of five months from the hearts of eighteen men. The sullen
thunder of a big gun moaned its way to us from Port Arthur. There was
not a man who had not long dreamed of that grim easternmost symbol of
Russian aggression, and each man knew that no matter what might happen
on land, Port Arthur held place and would hold place for dramatic
interest in the eyes of the world. Port Arthur we should see--stubborn
siege and fierce assaults--and gather stories by the handful when it
fell. Dalny was to our left, and it was rather curious that we did not
turn toward Dalny. But no matter--we were going into Talienwan Bay,
which was only a few miles farther away, and we could hear big guns: so
we were happy. Talienwan--a thin curve of low gray stone buildings,
hugging the sweep of the bay, spread the welcome that the officer of
that port came to speak in English--and we landed among carts, Chinese
coolies, Japanese soldiers, Chinese wagons, mules, donkeys, horses,
ponies, squealing stallions, ammunition, a medley of human cries. The
bustle was terrific. A man must look out for himself in that apparent
confusion. As it was an ever-faithful day for Takeuchi that day, I was
serene and trustful. Davis was not, and beckoned to a coolie with a
cart. The man came and Davis's baggage was piled on the cart. Along came
a Japanese officer who, without a word, threw the baggage to the
ground--including a camera and other things as fragile and hardly less
precious. Davis turned to the Post Officer:
"Can I have one of these carts?"
"Certainly," he said.
Davis got another, but while his interpreter was loading his things
again, the same officer came by and tossed them again to the ground. The
interpreter protested and tried to explain that he had permission to use
the carts, but he hadn't time. That officer turned on him. Now I had
been told that there are no oaths and vile epithets in the Japanese
tongue, but I know no English vile enough to report what the man said,
and if I did I couldn't use it without blistering my tongue and
blackening my soul more black than the hair of the blackguard who used
it. But let me do the Colonel in command justice to say that when the
outraged interpreter, taken to him by us afterward, repeated the insult,
the courteous old gentleman looked shocked and deeply hurt, and said he
would deal harshly with the man. I hope he did.
This was ominous, but we were still cheerful. Yokoyama appeared and
Yokoyama was ominous. He was to handle our canteen and charge us twice
the prices that we had known at the Imperial Hotel, on the ground that
he would transport our baggage for us. That meant that he was to charge
us for the transport service that the Government was to give us--not to
him--and furnish us chiefly with canned stuff that each man could have
bought for himself for a dollar per day. We did not know this just then,
but wily Yokoyama had gathered in 500 yen from each of us in Tokio, and
he was ominous before we left Japan. I am putting this in because
Yokoyama, too, is woven into the network that fate was casting about us
that day. Still we were cheerful. Cannon were making the music we had
waited five months to hear. Port Arthur would fall, doubtless, within
ten days, and then--Home! The dream was shattered before we went to
sleep. No officer came to tell us where we were bound--to explain the
shattered word of a Major-General of his own army. It was Yokoyama who
dealt the blow--Yokoyama who, in another land, would have been branded
as a traitor by his own people and could have been put behind the bars
in ours. The truth was that we were not to go to Port Arthur at all.
Next day we travelled--whither God only knew--with every boom of a big
gun at the Russian fortress behind us sounding the knell of a hope in
the heart of each and every man. But we were on the trail of Oku's army
into the heart of Manchuria, though nobody knew it for sure, and there
was yet before us another tragedy--Liao-Yang.
V
ON THE WAR-DRAGON'S TRAIL
There was the dean of the corps, one Melton Prior, who, in spite of his
years--may they be many more--is still the first war artist in the
world. He was mounted on a white horse, seventeen hands high and with a
weak back that has a history. Prior sold him in the end to a canny
Englishman, who sold him to the Japanese--giving Prior the price asked.
"Why, didn't you know that he wasn't sound?" said a man of another race,
who wondered, perhaps, that in a horse-trade blood should so speak to
blood even in a strange land.
"Yes," said the Englishman, "but the Japanese won't know it." They
didn't. There was Richard Harding Davis, who, for two reasons--the power
to pick from any given incident the most details that will interest the
most people, and the good luck or good judgment to be always just where
the most interesting thing is taking place (with one natural exception,
that shall be told)--is also supreme. Mounted on another big horse was
he--one Devery by name--with a mule in the rear, of a name that must
equally appeal. Quite early, after purchase, Davis had laid whispering
lip to flapping ear.
"I'll call you Williams or I'll call you Walker, just as you choose," he
said.
There was no response.
"Then I'll call you both," said Davis, and that wayward animal was
Williams and Walker through the campaign. A double name was never more
appropriate, for a flagrant double life was his. There was Bill the
Brill of the gentle heart, on a nice chestnut; Burleigh, the veteran, on
a wretched beast that was equally dangerous at either end; Lionel James
with cart and coolies of his own, and the Italian on a handsome
iron-gray. There were the two Frenchmen--Reggie, the young, the
gigantic, the self-controlled and never complaining--so beloved, that
his very appearance always brought the Marseillaise from us all--and
Laguerié, the courteous, ever-vivacious, irascible--so typical that he
might have stepped into Manchuria from the stage. There was Whiting,
artist, on the littlest beast with the biggest ambition that I ever saw
vaulting on legs; lanky Wallace, whose legs, like Lincoln's, were long
enough to reach the ground--even when he was mounted--and there were the
two Smiths--English and American--and Lewis, gifted with many tongues
and a beautiful barytone, who, his much-boasted milky steed being lame,
struck Oku's trail on foot. On Pit-a-Pat, a pony that used to win and
lose money for us at the Yokohama races, was little Clarkin the
stubborn, the argumentative, who, at a glance, was plainly sponsor for
the highest ideals of the paper that, in somebody's words, made virtue a
thing to be shunned; and, finally and leastly, there were Fuji and his
unhappy attachment, who chronicles this.
These were the men who thought they were going to Port Arthur and who,
with the sound of the big guns at that fortress growing fainter behind
them, struck Oku's trail, up through a rolling valley that was bordered
by two blue volcanic mountain chains. The sky was cloudless and the sun
was hot. The roads were as bad as roads would likely be after 4,000
years of travel and 4,000 years of neglect, but the wonder was that,
after the Russian army had tramped them twice and the Japanese army had
tramped them once, they were not worse.
The tail of the War-Dragon, whose jaws were snapping at flying Russian
heels far on ahead, had been drawn on at dawn, and through dust and mire
and sand we followed its squirming wake. On the top of every little hill
we could see it painfully crawling ahead--length interminable, its
vertebræ carts, coolies, Chinese wagons, its body columns of soldiers,
its scales the flashes of sword-scabbard and wagon-tire--and whipping
the dust heavenward in clouds. The button on that tail was Lynch the
Irishman on a bicycle, and that button was rolling itself
headward--leading us all. Behind, Lewis was eating the road up with a
swinging English stride, and, drinking the dust of the world, we
followed. Fuji had side-stepped from barrack-yard into that road, sawing
on his bit, pawing the earth, and squealing challenges or boisterous
love-calls to anything and everything that walked. Sex, species, biped,
or quadruped--never knew I such indiscriminate buoyancy--all were one to
Fuji. With malediction on tongue and murder in heart, I sawed his
gutta-percha mouth until my fingers were blistered and my very jaws
ached, but I could hold him back only a while. We overtook the Italian,
a handsome boy with a wild intensity of eye--one puttee unwound and
flying after him. The iron-gray was giving trouble and he, too, was
unhappy. We passed Reggie--his great body stretched on a lumpy heap of
baggage--with a pipe in his mouth, that was halved with his perennial
smile of unshakable good-humor, and the other Frenchman squatting
between two humps of baggage on a jolting cart.
"Ah!" he cried with extended hands, "you see--you see--" his head was
tossed to one side just then, he clutched wildly first one way and then
the other and with palms upward again--"you see how com_fort_able I am.
It ees gr-reat--gr-reat!" From laughter I let Fuji go then and he
went--through coil after coil of that war-dragon's length, past the
creaking, straining vertebræ, taking a whack with teeth or heels at
something now and then and something now and then taking a similar whack
at him. The etiquette of the road Fuji either knew not, or cared nothing
for--nor cared he for distinctions of rank in his own world or mine. By
rights the led cavalry horses should have had precedence. But nay, Fuji
passed two regiments without so much as "by your leave"; but I was doing
that for him vigorously and, whenever he broke through the line, I said
two things, and I kept saying them that I might not be cut off with a
sword:
"Warui desu!" I said, which means "He's bad!" and "Gomen nasai," which
is Japanese for "Beg pardon." These two phrases never failed to bring a
smile instead of the curse that I might have got in any other army in
the world. We passed even an officer who seemed and was, no doubt, in a
great and just hurry, but even his eyes had to take the dust thrown from
Fuji's heels. I pulled the beast in at last on top of a little hill
whence I could see the battle-hills of Nanshan. But I cared no more for
that field than did Fuji, both of us being too much interested in life
to care much for post-mortem battle-fields, and when the rest came up,
we rode by Nanshan without turning up its green slopes and on to where
the first walled Chinese city I had ever seen lifted its gate-towers and
high notched walls in glaring sunlight and a mist of strangling dust. We
passed in through the city gates and stopped where I know not. It was
some bad-smelling spot under a hot sun, and being off Fuji and in that
sun, I cared not. I have vague memories of white men coming by and
telling me to come out of the sun and of not coming out of the sun; of
horses kicking and stamping near by and an occasional neigh from Fuji
hitched in the shade of the city wall and guarded by a Chinaman; of a
yellow man asleep on a cart, his unguarded face stark to that sun and a
hundred flies crawling about his open mouth; and of an altercation going
on between two white men. One said:
"Your horse has kicked mine--remove him!"
"Move your own," said another, and his tone was that of some Lord Cyril
in a melodrama. "Mine was there first."
The other took off his coat:
"I'm sorry, but I've got to fight you."
"Very well, then," said Lord Cyril, stripping, too, and then the voice
of a peace-maker that I knew well broke in and in a moment all was
still. Takeuchi rode in on a mule. No hitting the dust for the proud
feet of Takeuchi then, as I learned, nor afterward, when there were any
other four feet that could be made to travel for hire.
"I want a 'betto,'" he said--which is Japanese for hostler--"for Fuji."
"Whatever need there be for Fuji, the accursed," said I, lapsing into
such Oriental phraseology as I had read in books, "buy, and buy
quickly--my money is in thy belt." He bought then and kept on buying
afterward.
Straightway I fell again into sun-dreams with the yellow man near by
whose mouth was wide, for it was my first experience with the God of
Fire in his hell-hot Eastern home, and I strayed in them until I was
shaken into consciousness by a white man with a beer-bottle in his hand.
I remember a garden and trees next, a Chinese room with mats, a Chinese
woman--the first I had seen--with a sad, pretty face, who rose, when I
came to the door, and stalked into a house as though she were walking on
deer-hoofs (every step she took on her tiny, misshapen feet made me
shudder), and then the sound of Davis's guitar and Lewis's voice on the
soft night air and under a Manchurian moon soaring starward above the
Eastern city-wall.
... It is noon of the second day now and we sit in the shade of
willow-trees. We left that first Chinese town of Kinchau and its dirty
natives this morning at eight. The dragon's tail again had been drawn
ahead through a narrow valley, rich in fields of millet and corn, from
which on either side a bleak, hilly, treeless desert ran desolately to a
blue mountain chain. Now, still on its trail, we sit in a green oasis,
on real grass and under sheltering willows. A lot of little Chinese boys
are around us, all naked except for a little embroidered varicolored
stomacher which hangs by a cord from the neck of each--for what purpose
I know not--and their elders are bringing water for us and sheaves of
millet-blades for the menagerie of beasts we ride. They seem a
good-natured race--these Manchurian farmers--genuine, submissive,
kindly, but genuine and human in contrast, if I must say it, with the
Japanese. Who was it that said the Chinese were the Saxons of the East
and the Japanese the Gauls? I know now what he meant.
Lewis, in a big white helmet, has just ridden in on a diminutive white
jackass. I envy the peace and content of both of them, for Fuji was
particularly bad this morning. Again he passed everything on the road,
and as we swept the length of a cavalry column, I saw a soldier leading
a puny stallion a hundred yards ahead. When he heard us, he shouted a
warning:
"Warui desu!"
At the same time the beast he was leading turned, with ears laid back
and teeth showing, and made for us, dragging the soldier along. I was
greatly pleased.
"Here, Fuji," I said, "is where my revenge comes in. You are going to
get it now and, if I mistake not, literally in the neck."
But the brute attacked me instead--_me_. He got my right forearm between
his teeth and held on until I shifted a stick from right hand to left
and beat him off--the soldier spouting Japanese with French vivacity
meanwhile and tugging ineffectively. I got away only after the vicious
brute had pasted Fuji with both heels first on one side of my right leg
and then similarly on the other, missing me about three inches each
time. Fuji now shows blood but I am little hurt. Somehow in the
scrimmage O-kin-san's charm--the little block of wood--was broken in its
wicker case and whether the heels reached it that high I don't know. But
it was a good omen--that it should be broken and its owner still come
out unhurt--and it means that I am to be safe in this campaign. The puny
brute had not strength enough to break an Anglo-Saxon arm--and it is his
kind that make impossible for the Japanese certain big guns that the
Russians use.
... It is 6 P.M. of the third day now and we are at Wa-fang-tien. We
left Pa-lien-tan this morning and made thirty-two miles. We took lunch
in a stinking Chinese village, and the chicken--well, it was a question
which was the more disturbing conjecture--how long it had lived or how
long it had been dead. Oh, Yokoyama! Fuji has not improved. He kicked
the Italian on the leg today and I've just helped to bandage it. Again
to-day I had to let him go. I tried to tire him out by riding him
through mud-holes and see-sawing him across deep wagon-ruts. But it was
no use. If a horse, bullock, man, woman, child, cat, or dog is visible
500 yards away, Fuji with a squeal makes for it. When the object is
overtaken, Fuji pays no attention to it, but looks for something else
toward which he can start his squealing way. For brutal, insensate
curiosity give me Fuji, or rather give him to anybody but me. 'Tis an
Eveless land for Fuji, but hope springs eternal for him. Dinner is just
over--tinned soup, half-cooked tinned sausages, prunes and rice from
Yokoyama's larder--which we are stocking at 12 yen per day. Hundreds of
coolies are squatting along the railroad track. In front of us a group
of Japanese soldiers has stood for five minutes staring at us with the
frank curiosity of children. They began to move away when I pulled this
note-book. Leaning against the tallest telegraph-pole, with hands bound
behind him, his pigtail tied to a thick wire twice twisted, stands a
miserable Chinese coolie. An hour ago I saw him on his knees across the
track, held down by four men, while the littlest Japanese soldier in the
group beat him heavily with a stick much thicker than the thumb. Then
they led him praying, howling, and limping to the telegraph-pole, where
he stands as an awful example to his fellows. He had stolen some coal
and it was his second offence. It was all right, of course, but it was
strange to see the apparent joy with which the Japanese did it and
stranger still to see the other coolies grinning, chatting, and making
fun of the culprit. I wonder whether they were crooking the pregnant
hinges of the knee or what on earth it did mean. We were hung up here at
3 P.M., and allowed to go no farther. There is no order for us to
remain--only a "strong desire" that we should--which is the Japanese
way. Davis and I had a great bath to-day in a pool which somebody had
dammed up--for what purpose I know not. What I do know is that it was
not meant for us.
... Sitting on the sand, we are this August 5th under birch saplings and
by the side of a running stream. Davis and Lewis are asleep in the sand.
Fifteen miles only is our _métier_ to-day and Brill is anxious to go on.
The roads are bad farther on, say the Japanese, and transportation
difficult: the only satisfactory reason yet given for this hideous
delay, and this, I'm afraid, not the true one. They simply don't trust
us--that's all. The body of the dragon is naturally getting bigger and
his vertebræ are distinctly more lumpy. For instance, he gathered in a
train of thirty freight-cars this morning and he had six hundred coolies
pulling it for him. The button of him dropped back to-day toward the tip
o' tail that is his anatomical place. Brill passed him on the road. His
bicycle-tire was punctured and he was trying to mend it, Brill says,
with 25-cent postage-stamps. He evidently succeeded, for he has just
arrived. He seems to have had a high old time on the way. At the last
Chinese village he halted long enough to offer a prize--what I don't
know--to the Chinese child that could display the prettiest embroidered
stomacher. He had them lined up in a shy, smiling row, and was about to
deliver the prize when the winner was suddenly thrust forward with a
wonderful piece on his chubby tum-tum. The wild Irishman gave him the
prize, hoisted him on the bicycle and circled the compound swiftly to
the delight of the village. I asked him how he communicated with these
isolated heathens and he said he talked Irish to them. I'm quite sure he
does and he seems to make himself understood.
It's sunset now at North Wa-fang-tien and all of us are out in a
hard-packed, sand-floor yard under little birch trees. It was a hot ride
to-day--the last mile being over a glaring white road and through
glaring white sand. That glare of a fierce sun made the head ache and
the very eyeballs burn. I almost reeled from Fuji, who for that mile
was, for the first time, almost docile.
We had a shock and a thrill to-day--Brill, Lewis, Davis, and I. It was
noon, and while we sat on a low stone wall in a grassy grove, a few
carts filled with wounded Japanese passed slowly by. In one cart sat a
man in a red shirt, with a white handkerchief tied over his head and
under his chin. Facing him was a bearded Japanese with a musket between
his knees. The man in the red shirt wearily turned his face. It was
young, smooth-shaven, and _white_. The thrill was that the man was the
first Russian prisoner we had seen--the shock that among those yellow
faces was a captive with a skin like ours. I couldn't help feeling pity
and shame--pity for him and a shame for myself that I needn't explain. I
wondered how I should have felt had I been in his place and suddenly
found four white men staring at me. It's no use. Blood is thicker than
water--or anything else--in the end.
This is distinctly a human country--a country of cornfields, beans and
potatoes, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, goats, and no freaks in
tree-trunk, branch, or foliage. But I can't get over seeing a Chinaman
in a cornfield. It is always a shock. He doesn't seem to have any right
there--somehow nobody does except a white man or a darky. There are
tumble-bugs in the dusty road and gray, flying grasshopper-like things
that rise from the dust, flutter a few feet from the earth and drop back
again, just as they do at home. And the dragon-flies--why, they are
nothing in the world but the "snake-doctors" that I used to throw stones
at when I was a boy in the Bluegrass. The mountains are treeless and
volcanic, but it's a human country and I don't feel as far from home as
I did in Japan. Brill says it all looks like a lot of Montana hills
around Ohio cornfields: only the corn is millet that grows twelve feet
high. The people eat the top, they feed the blades to live-stock, and
the stalk serves almost every purpose of bamboo and for firewood as
well. You can ride for hours between two solid walls of it, and you
wonder how there can be people enough in the scattering villages to
plant and till, or even to cut it. A richer land I never saw. It looks
as though it would feed both armies, and yet there was no sign--no
burned house or robbed field or even a cast-off bit of the soldier's
equipment to show that an army had ever passed that way. One fact only
spoke significantly of war. No woman--except a child or a crone--was
ever visible. This struck me--when I recalled the trail of the
Massachusetts volunteers from Siboney to Santiago and the thousands of
women refugees straggling into Caney--as very remarkable. I suppose both
Japanese and Russians are trying to keep the good-will of the Chinaman
as well as of the rest of the world. I don't wonder that the Russians
are fighting for that land, nor shall I wonder should the Japanese, if
they win, try to keep it. But how it should belong to anybody but the
Chinaman who has tilled it in peace and with no harm to anybody for
thousands of years--I can't for the life of me see.
Next morning there was a sign of war. At daybreak some red flecks from
the dragon's jaws drifted back from the mist and dust through which he
was writhing forward. It looked, some man said, like the procession of
the damned who filed past Dante in hell. Each man had a red roll around
him. They uttered no sound--they looked not at one another, but stared
vacantly and mildly at us as they shuffled silently from the mist and
shuffled silently on. The expression of each was so like the expression
of the rest that they looked like brothers. A more creepy, ghost-like
thing I never saw. I knew not what they were, but they fascinated me and
made me shudder, and I found myself drawing toward them, step by step,
hardly conscious that I was moving. I do not recall that any one of us
uttered a word. Yet they were only sick men coming back from the
front--soldiers sick with the _kakke_, the "beriberi," the sleeping
sickness. It was hard to believe that the face of any one of them had
ever belonged to a soldier---hard to believe that sickness could make a
soldier's face so gentle. That man in the red shirt and those gray
ghosts that shuffled so silently out of one mist and so silently into
another are the high lights in the two most vivid pictures I've seen
thus far.