hundred miles. The great mass of the American army had been rushed
weeks before to southern California, and the remnant left in the
Gulf region had more recently been hastened to Panama. In fact, the
American squadron had steamed into Colon on the very morning the
Japanese alighted on Texas soil.
On the second morning of their arrival, Japanese officials circling
above the captured region, roughly allotted the land to Captains
under whose leadership were a hundred planes each. The captains then
assigned each couple places to stake their plane, which were located
a hundred meters apart, allowing to each about two and a half acres
of land.
Professor Oshima and Komoru, as soil chemists, were constantly on
the go making studies of the land and advising with the other
experts as to the crops to plant, and the methods of tillage for the
various locations.
In the cotton lands, where Ethel and her associates were located,
the soil was immediately put to a fuller use. The cotton plants were
thinned and pruned and between the rows quick growing vegetables
were planted. Elsewhere the great pastures were broken up with
captured kerosene-driven gang plows and by dint of hard labor the
sod was quickly reduced to a fit state for intensive cultivation.
The outside work of the professor and his secretary threw Ethel
altogether in the company of Madame Oshima. For this fact she was
very grateful, as her aversion to Komoru, to whom she was nominally
bound, grew more and more a source of worry and fear. So the two
women of Aryan blood worked together in the cotton field side by
side with the Orientals--worked and waited and wondered what was
awing in the surrounding world.
The gasoline wagons came around and refilled the fuel tanks of the
planes. Mechanics inspected the engines carefully and replaced
defective parts. The rice cakes and soyu brought from Japan, had
been replaced by a diet of wheat and maize products and fresh fruits
and vegetables taken from the captured stores and gardens. Such
captured foods, however, had all been inspected by the dieteticians,
and those of doubtful wholesomeness destroyed or placed under lock
and key to be used only as a last resort.
Thus weeks passed. The green things of Japanese planting had poked
their tender shoots through the black American soil. There had been
no fighting except in few cases, where a company of foolhardy
militia or a local posse had tried to attach the Japanese outposts.
American aeroplanes had wisely staid away.
But the fight was yet to come. The Federal Government had recalled
its ships from Panama and was bringing back the soldiers from
California. On the great flat prairie between Galveston and Houston,
a mighty military camp was being established. Aeroplane sheds were
erected and repair shops built. Long lines of army tents were
pitched in close proximity. Army canteens were established that the
thirsty soldiers might get pure liquor and good tobacco and a few
rods away--over the line--other grog shops were opened wherein were
sold similar goods not so guaranteed. Gambling sharks arrived and
set up shell games and bedraggled prostitutes--outcasts from urban
centers of debauchery---came and camped nearby and made night
hideous with their obscene revelry.
So the American soldier prepared for battle against the enemy who,
fifty miles away, slept undisturbed in the midst of gardens beneath
the wings of their aeroplanes.
Never since Roman phalanx moved against the hordes of disorganized
barbarians had such extremes of method in warfare been pitted
against each other. Indeed it is doubtful if the invasion of the
Japanese should be called war at all. They were not blood-thirsty.
In fact, the Japanese invaders had sent word to the American
Government asserting their peaceful intentions if they were
unmolested, though threatening dire vengeance by firing cities and
poisoning water supplies if they were attacked.
Madame Oshima shook her head. "Such talk is only pretense," she
said, "the Japanese intend to live in America and would never so
embitter the people--and it will not be necessary."
Ethel was in doubt. She pictured the Japanese planes flying above
the unprotected inland cities dropping conflagration bombs upon
shingled roof or casks of prussic acid into open reservoirs. She
wished she were out of it all. She wanted to escape and yet she knew
not how.
The Americans made no hasty attacks. They feared the threats of the
Japanese and awaited the gathering of many hundred thousand
soldiers. At the end of four weeks the American army was spread in a
giant semi-circle surrounding the Japanese encampment from coast to
coast. Along the Gulf Coast was also a line of American battleships,
so that the Japanese encampment was entirely surrounded with an
almost continuous line of aeroplane destroying guns.
All preparations were at last complete and with cavalry beneath and
aeroplanes above, the American strategists planned a dash across the
Japanese territory with the belief that the outlying lines of
artillery would bring to earth those that succeeded in getting into
the air.
* * *
One evening at the hour of twilight, messengers passed rapidly among
the Japanese distributing maps and orders to prepare for flight.
Late that night, their possessions made ready for flight, Komoru and
Ethel sat with Professor and Madame Oshima beneath the latter's
plane.
"Our scouts have come to the conclusion," said Oshima, "that a
cavalry attack is to be expected in the early morning. So our plan
is for a signal plane to rise at two o'clock directly over the
center of our territory. It will carry a bright yellow light.
Beginning with the outlying groups our forces are to fly toward the
light, rising as they go. Attaining an altitude of two miles they
are thence to fly due north as our maps show. We will suffer some
loss, but two miles high and at night I guess American gunners will
not inflict great damage."
Ethel shuddered.
"Do you think the American aviators will follow us?" asked Komoru.
"That depends," replied the older man, "upon the reception we give
them; we have them outnumbered."
"They carry men gunners," said Madame Oshima.
"So," said the Professor, "but shooting from an aeroplane depends
not so much upon the gunner as upon the steersman. Their planes
wabble, the metal frame work is too stiff, it doesn't yield to the
air pressure."
Along such lines the conversation continued for an hour or so.
Neither the men nor Madame Oshima seemed the least bit excited over
the prospects; but Ethel, striving to keep up external appearances,
was inwardly torn with warring emotions.
Making an excuse of wishing to look for something among her luggage,
the girl finally escaped and walked quickly toward the other plane.
But instead of stopping, she passed by and continued down between
the rows of cotton, avoiding as much as possible the lights that
dotted the field about her.
"Oh, God!" she repeated under her breath; "Oh, God! I can't go! I
won't go!"
For some time she walked on briskly trying to calm her feverish mind
and reason out a sane course of procedure.
She was passing thus where the lights of two planes glowed fifty
meters at either side, when she stumbled heavily over some dark
object between the cotton rows. She turned to see what it was; and,
bending forward, discerned in the starlight the body of a man. She
started to run; then, fearing pursuit the more, checked her speed.
As she did so some one grasped her arm and a heavy hand was clapped
over her mouth.
"Keep quiet," commanded her captor hoarsely. In another instant he
had bent her back over his knee and thrown her--or rather dropped
her for she did not resist--upon the soft earth beneath.
"If you make a sound, I'll have to shoot," he said, resting a heavy
knee upon her chest and clasping her slender wrist in a vise-like
grip of a single hand.
The girl breathed heavily.
The man reached toward his hip pocket and drawing forth a bright
metallic object held it close to her face. Her breath stopped short.
Then a flood of light struck her full in the eyes, as her captor
pressed the button on his flash lamp.
"God! a woman!" the man gasped. The exclamation and voice were
clearly not Japanese.
Ethel felt the grip loosen from her wrists and the weight shift from
her chest.
"You're no Japanese!" he said under his breath, at the same time
letting the glowing flash lamp fall from his hand.
Presently Ethel raised her head and reached for the lamp where it
lay wasting its rays against the black soil. She now turned the glow
on the other and saw kneeling beside her a young man in American
clothes. He was hatless and coatless and his soft gray shirt was
torn and mud bespattered. A massive head of uncombed hair crowned a
handsome forehead, but the face beneath was marred by a stubby
growth of beard.
"Who are you?" whispered Ethel finding her voice.
"Put out the light," he commanded, reaching forward to take it from
her.
"Who are you?" he asked reversing the query as they were again in
darkness.
"I'm a girl," said Ethel.
The man laughed softly.
"I'm not," he said.
Ethel drew herself into a sitting posture. "Which side of this war
are you on?" she asked.
The man was afraid to commit himself--then a happy thought struck
him. "The same side that you are," he answered diplomatically.
It was Ethel's turn to smile.
"You are an American?" she ventured at length.
"Yes," he said. "So are you?"
"Yes."
"Then why are you wearing Japanese clothes?"
"Because--" she said hesitatingly, "I haven't any others."
For some minutes he said nothing.
"Are you going to give the alarm of my presence?" he asked at
length.
"No."
"Then I'll go," he said.
Rising from his knees, but still stooping, he made off rapidly down
the cotton row.
Ethel breathed deeply. Confused thoughts flashed through her mind.
She would not return to go with Komoru; in her Japanese garb she
feared the early morning sweep of American cavalry; but to the man
who had just left her, why could she not explain?
Without further debate, she arose, and at top speed ran after the
retreating figure.
The next instalment of this absorbing tale will
appear in the September issue of PHYSICAL CULTURE.
It tells of how the Japanese attempt to obtain
control of the United States through scientific
measures rather than barbarous warfare, and is
wonderfully interesting and readable. Don't miss
it.
PART THREE.
In the Clutch of the War-God
THE TALE OF THE ORIENT'S INVASION OF THE OCCIDENT, AS CHRONICLED IN
THE HUMANICULTURE SOCIETY'S "NOTES ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY"
By Milo Hastings
SYNOPSIS: In the year of 1958, Ethel Calvert, a
daughter of an American grain-merchant, residing
in Japan, because of her father's death in an
anti-foreign riot, is forced to take refuge, with
Madame Oshima, the French wife of a Japanese
scientist. She becomes accustomed to the land and
mode of living followed by the Japanese, and is
finally persuaded to adopt the costume of the land
of her exile. War is declared between Japan and
the United States, and Professor Oshima, and
Komoru, his Secretary, together with Madame Oshima
and Ethel Calvert, sail for the United States in a
Japanese war vessel. When near the Pacific Coast,
the many men and women who have been passengers on
the vessel, leave the ship by means of aeroplanes,
and sail eastwardly toward Texas, where they
establish plantations and conduct a desultory
warfare by aeroplanes with United States troops.
While working in the fields Ethel discovers a
young American in concealment. He warns her to
keep silent, and immediately runs away.
In a few minutes Ethel had caught up with the man who, more
cautiously, ran before her. Checking her speed, she followed
silently.
For a half-mile she pursued him thus. He came to the end of the
field and dodged into the thicket of bushes that lined the fence
row. He moved more slowly now, and she followed by sound rather than
by sight. At length they came to where a brook ran at right angles
to the fence row. The man stopped and crawled under the barbed-wire
fence and came out on the turnpike that ran alongside.
Ethel, peering out from the bushes, saw him walk boldly forward and
stand upon the end of the stone culvert that conducted the brook
beneath the roadway. For a moment only he remained so, and then
clambered quickly down at the end of the arch and disappeared in the
darkness beneath. She heard a foot splash in the water, and then all
was quiet save the gurgle of the stream.
Climbing over the fence, she top ran forward upon the culvert. She
listened and looked toward either end, resolved to call to him if he
emerged.
As she stood waiting she saw the yellow signal light rise in spirals
higher and higher and then circle slowly in one location. A few
minutes later the dim tail lights of the planes came up out of the
horizon and flew towards the signal light.
After a half-hour of waiting, she boldly resolved to enter the
hiding place of the man she had followed.
Cautiously feeling her way, she clambered down over the end of the
culvert and peered into its black archway.
At first, dimly and then with brighter flash, she saw a light
within. Creeping slowly forward, wading in the stream and stumbling
over rough blocks of stone, she made toward the light. Midway the
passage, the side wall of the culvert had fallen or been torn down
and there in a little damp clay nook, sitting hunched upon a rock
was the silhouette of the unshaven man.
Beyond him glowed the dim light and by its faint rays he was
hurriedly writing in a note book.
With a start he became aware of her presence, and turned the
flash-light upon her.
"I followed you," she stammered. "I want to explain. I'm an American
girl captive among the Japanese."
He stared at her quizzically in the dim light.
"I ran from you," he said, "because I was afraid to trust you--there
are a number of Europeans among the Japanese forces. I couldn't know
that you wouldn't have given the alarm, and for one man to run from
fifty thousand isn't cowardice; it's common sense--even bravery,
perhaps, when there's a cause at stake."
"I understand," replied the girl.
"Won't you be seated?" he said, arising and offering her his place
on the rock. She accepted, and he asked her for more of her story.
In reply she told him whom she was and related as briefly as she
could the incidents of her life that accounted for her peculiar
predicament.
"I suppose I owe you something of an explanation, too;" he said,
when she had finished. "My name is Winslow--Stanley Winslow; I am
--or at least was---the editor of the _Regenerationist_. Do you know
what that is?"
Ethel confessed, that she did not.
"Perhaps I flatter myself, but then I suppose you have had no chance
to keep up on American affairs."
Just then a crash, followed by a whirring, clattering noise broke in
above the sound of the man's voice and the gurgle of the brook
running through their hiding-place.
"What's that?" Winslow exclaimed, starting towards the end of the culvert.
[Illustration: She was washing her woven grass sandals by rubbing
the soles together in the stream.]
Ethel followed him. Before they reached the open the trees in front
of them were lit up by the lurid light of a fire. Beside the road a
hundred yards away was the crumpled mass of a metallic aeroplane.
The gasolene tank had burst open and was blazing furiously.
"Americans," said Winslow; "let's see if the crew are dead."
The gasolene had largely spent itself by the time they reached the
plane.
Poking about in the crumbled debris, they found the driver impaled
upon a lever that protruded from his back.
"I wonder what grounded her," mused Winslow, as he inspected the
dead man with his flash-lamp. "Oh! here we are! Good shooting that,"
he added, pointing with his lamp to a soggy hole in the side of the
man's head.
"I guess they're at it," he said, pressing out his light and turning
his eyes skyward.
The woman, speechless, followed his gaze. Across the sky flashed
here and there brilliant beams of search-lights, but far more
numerous were the swiftly moving star-like tail-lights of the
Japanese planes.
Now and again they heard the crackling of machine guns, occasionally
the burr of a disordered propeller and once the faint call of a
human voice.
"Look," said Ethel, pointing to the southward. "See that brilliant
yellow light. It's the Japanese signal plane; they are all to fly in
towards it, and then, soaring high will escape over the American
lines."
"The lines are a joke," returned Winslow. "It's plane against plane.
And the Japs will get the best of it; or at least they'll get away,
which is all they want. They are going to Dakota, where five train
loads of gasolene will be setting on a siding waiting to be
captured. We printed the story ten days ago, though the
administration papers hooted at the idea."
As they walked back toward the culvert, Ethel stumbled over
something in the roadway. She asked for the light, and discovered to
her horror that she was standing in the midst of the remnants of a
man who had been spattered over the hard macadam of the turnpike.
"Ugh! take me away," she shuddered, averting her eyes and running
toward the stream,
"The gunner fell out of the plane when she lurched, I guess,"
commented Winslow to himself, examining the shreds of clothing
attached to the mangled remains beneath him.
For some reason Winslow did not immediately follow the girl but went
back and looked over the wrecked plane again.
He removed the magazine pistol from the impaled man's pocket and
searched about in the locker until he found a supply of cartridges.
The sky was beginning to brighten from approaching dawn now, and the
searchlight flashes were less brilliant. Winslow stood gazing upward
until the forms of the lower flying planes became visible. Suddenly
he saw a disabled plane come somersaulting out of the air and fall
into a field quarter of a mile away. Evidently there were explosives
aboard, for a shower of flame, smoke and splinters arose where she
fell.
The onlooking man hopped over the fence and ran toward the spot.
There was little to be seen--a mere ragged hole in the sod. As he
unconcernedly walked back he passed at intervals a propeller blade
sticking upright in the soil, a broken can of rice cakes and a
woman's hand.
The dawn had now so far progressed that the observer could see some
order in the movement of the air craft. He studied with fascination
the last of the Japanese planes as they circled up toward their
aerial guide-post and moved thence in a steady stream to the
northward.
The American planes which had been harassing and firing on the
Japanese as they circled for altitude, now turned and closed in on
the rear of the enemy and the fighting was fast and furious. Plane
after plane tumbled sickeningly out of the sky. But for Winslow the
sight lasted only a few minutes, for the combatants were flying at
full speed and soon became mere flitting insects against the gray
light of the morning sky.
Striding down the roadway past the mangled body of the American
gunner, Winslow reached the culvert.
Ethel Calvert was sitting on a flat stone at the edge of the water.
She held her woven grass sandals in her hands and was washing them
by rubbing the soles together in the stream.
As Winslow looked down at her in silence, the girl looked up and
eyed him curiously. Neither spoke. The man stooped and washed his
hands in the brook and then stepping up-stream a few paces he drank
from the rivulet.
Returning he regarded the girl. She had placed her sandals beyond
her on the grassy bank and sat with her bare feet in the shallow
stream. Her head, buried in her arms, rested upon her knees. The
slender shoulders now shook convulsively and the sound of a sob
escaped her. In the calmness of his cynicism, the man sat down on
the rock and placed a strong arm around the trembling woman.
[Illustration: In another moment, he turned in a gap through the
fence and rode down upon the fleeing woman.]
"I know," he said, "it's a dirty damned mess, but we didn't start
it."
After a time the girl raised her head. "I know we didn't start it,"
she said; "but isn't there something we can do to stop it?"
"Well," he replied slowly, "I rather hope to have a hand in stopping
it, and perhaps you can help."
"How?"
"Surely you can do as much in stopping it as one of those poor
devils that get smashed does in keeping it going," he went on.
"How?" she repeated.
"Well, that's quite a long story," he replied; "if you don't already
know."
"I told you who I was."
"Yes."
"Well, the Regenerationists, along with many other sincere men and
women in this country tried to prevent this war and are trying to
get it peaceably settled now. The Japs don't want to die. They want
a chance to live. We've got a lot of vainglorious, debauched,
professional soldiery that wanted to fight something, and now
they're getting their fill. In the first place, there is no need of
war and in the second place, when there is war, the same stamina
that will make efficient humans for the ordinary walks of life will
make good soldiers. But money talks louder than reason. The ruling
powers in American government are a crew of beer-bloated politicians
who are in the pay of a cabal of wine-soaked plutocrats, and the
American people under such administration have become a race of
mental and physical degenerates. The Japs knew this or they would
never have invaded the country."
"What are you going to do about it? And what are you doing here now
within the Japanese lines?" asked Ethel when her companion paused.
"Oh, I am acting as my own war correspondent," he replied, smiling a
little.
"_Pat-a-pat, pat-a-pat_"--Winslow jumped up excitedly and clambered
to the top of the embankment.
Ethel noting his alarm, slipped her feet into her sandals and rose
to follow him.
"Quick," he exclaimed, hurrying down the bank again. "It's American
cavalry."
"But let us go meet them," said the girl.
"No, never," replied Winslow, taking her by the arm and hurrying her
into the culvert. "You don't understand. As for you in kimo, your
reception would be anything but pleasant; and as for me, I'm an
outlaw with a price on my head."
Reaching the chink where the rocks had fallen out of the culvert
wall, Winslow squeezed into it and pulled the girl down beside him.
Carefully he crowded her feet and his own back so that their
presence could not be detected from the end of the culvert.
"I'm afraid we left tracks on the bank, but we can at least die
game," he said, pulling his magazine pistol from his belt and
handing it to the girl, while he drew from his hip pocket the weapon
he had taken from the dead aviator.
"I hate these things," he said, "but when a man is in a corner and
no chance to run, I suppose he's justified in using a cowardly
fighting machine."
They heard clearly now the hoof beats on the roadway above.
Presently an officer rode his horse down to the stream at the head
of the culvert. "Anything under there?" called a voice from above.
"Nothing doing," replied the other, peering beneath the archway.
"You're a fool sitting there like that," called a third voice.
"Company C lost two men back there from a wounded Jap under a
bridge."
The horseman urged his beast up the bank and the troop passed on.
For some hours the man and the girl remained in the culvert;
meanwhile Winslow explained the Regenerationist movement, which was
not as his enemies interpreted, a traitorous party favoring the
Japanese, but only a group of thinkers who advocated principles not
unlike those which had made the Japanese such a superior race either
at peace or at war.
As she listened, it seemed to Ethel as if her own dream had come
true, for here indeed was a man of her own blood with stamina of
physique and mental and moral courage, who professed and practiced
all she had found that was good among the people of her enforced
adoption and in addition much that, to her with her racial prejudice
in his favor, seemed even better than the ways of Japanese.
In reply to her questions as to the cause of his outlawry, Winslow
explained that he and other leaders of his party had long been at
swords' points with the conservatives who were in power and that the
administration, taking advantage of the martial frenzy of the war,
were persecuting the Regenerationists as supposed traitors.
* * *
As the sun indicated mid-forenoon the dishevelled editor of the
Regenerationist and his newly found follower sauntered forth and
took to the turnpike.