companion breathe fast, and turned his head. The _Word_ man was
staring into the heart of the Cossack charge, his fears forgotten,
fascinated unto madness. The earth roared with hoofs, and the air was
rent with guns. On came the cavalry until it reached Kuroki’s point
and halted it; but upon the Cossacks now from the countless Japanese
skirmish-lines were hurled waves of flying metal--waves that dashed
over the Russian horsemen as the sundered seas rushed together upon
Pharaoh’s hosts.
“It’s like a biograph,” came from Finacune.
Kuroki was checked; his van ridden down. The Russian horse, cumbered
with its dead, and taking an enfilading fire from half the Japanese
command, was now ordered to retire. Only the skeletons of the glorious
squadrons obeyed. Kuroki was stopped indeed--stopped to thrust an
impediment aside. He rose from his knees, fastened a new point to his
plow, and bored in toward the railway upon the strewn and trampled
grain-fields. Already the hospital corps was gathering in the endless
sheaves of wounded.
“One can tell the dead by the way they lie,” Finacune said vaguely.
“They lie crosswise and spoil the symmetry.”
Orloff was steadied a trifle by the cavalry sacrifice, and turned an
erratic but deadly fire upon the Japanese.... At this instant Major
Inuki pounced upon the two correspondents and carried them back
toward headquarters. He made very many monkey-sounds; was quite
unintelligible from excitement; in fact, at the thought of these two
being suffered to see so much alone. If their heads had been cameras,
straightway would they have been smashed....
Practically they had seen it all. Kuroki’s work for that September day
was done. Shortly after the retirement of the cavalry, he received
a dispatch from Oyama saying that Kuropatkin had ordered a general
retreat. Kuroki’s end-run had won the battle for Oyama; Orloff had
lost it for Kuropatkin. The latter, perceiving the havoc at the
Collieries when he came up with his big force, decided not to attack
the victorious flanker. Instead, he set out for Mukden, and commanded
Zurubaieff, the rear-guard, to pull up out of the city, cross the
Taitse, and burn his bridges behind him.
* * * * *
“He’s quite a little ornament-merchant, this Kuroki,” Finacune observed
that afternoon, holding a very sore foot in his hands.
“He’d put out hell--he’s too cold to burn,” replied Feeney.
EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER
BINGLEY BREAKS AWAY FROM THE CAMP OF THE CIVILIANS TO WATCH “THE
LEAN-LOCKED RANKS GO ROARING DOWN TO DIE”
While Feeney and Finacune were flanking with Kuroki, the “Horse-killer”
was with Nodzu, whose business it was to charge the Russian centre
before Liaoyang. Bingley had not shifted commands without a good
reason. He had made up his mind to get to an uncensored cable after
the battle was over, and Nodzu was nearer the outlet of the war-zone.
Moreover, it was said that the civilian contingent with Nodzu was not
subjected to the smothering system, quite to the same extent as that
with the flanker, Kuroki.
Nodzu, himself, did not appeal to Bingley. He seemed like a nice,
polite little person of the sort the “Horse-killer” had observed
serving behind curio-counters in Tokyo. His voice was light, and his
beard wasn’t iron-gray. Bingley remarked that a marooned painter would
have a hard time gathering a pastelle-brush from Nodzu’s beard, and he
noted with contempt that the general spoke drawing-room Japanese to his
staff. The generals whom Bingley respected, roared. They not only split
infinitives, but they forked them with flame.
All three officers under Field-Marshal Oyama--Kuroki flanking on the
right, Nodzu bearing in on the Russian centre, and Oku pushing up the
railroad on the left--had to fight their way to the positions from
which the three finally took the city. Many lesser towns and some very
difficult passes were picked up on the way. For instance, Oku, the left
blade of the crescent, who was being watched by the chief male figure
in this narrative (as Bingley was watching Nodzu), changed the flags
at Kaiping, Tashekao, and Newchwang on the way, Chinese towns of filth
and fatness; and shoved before him in an indignant turkey-trot Generals
Stackelberg and Zurubaieff.
Baking hot weather, and Liaoyang ahead! Nogi was thundering behind at
the fortress of Port Arthur; Togo was a red demon in smoky crashing
seas; blood of the Bear already smeared the Sun flag, and the
blood-flower was in bloom in Manchuria.
Bingley felt the floods of hate stir and heat within him on the morning
of August twenty-fourth, when over the hills from the right, which
was eastward, sounded the Beginning--Kuroki in cannonade. Feeney and
Finacune had had the luck to beat him to real action. The next day Oku
took up the bombardment on the left. It was not until the following
morn that Nodzu leaped to his guns, and the hot winds brought to the
nostrils of the “Horse-killer” the pungent breath of powder.
The correspondents were held back in the smoke as usual. Five months
in the field, and they had not yet caught up with the war. Again, on
the second day of Nodzu’s action, the correspondents were left behind
under a guard who was extremely courteous. This was more than white
flesh could bear. The civilians implored, demanded. It was remarkable
that Bingley did not mix strongly in this rebellion. He was planning
carefully, desperately, to be in at the end, and showed the courage to
wait. He realized that the battle was far from ended yet; even though
Kuroki was mixing hand-to-hand in the east, Oku in the west closing in
over barriers of blood, and Nodzu in the centre engaged daily with a
ten-mile front of duelists--a bare-handed, hot-throated fiend, chucking
his dead behind him for elbow-room.
Bingley studied maps and strategy--not from Nodzu’s standpoint alone,
but from the whole. What would he do if he were Field-Marshal Oyama?
The theatre of war was dark on the morning of August twenty-ninth, but
in mid-afternoon Nodzu began firing--firing at nothing! He stood still
and belched thunder, as if it were something to be rid of; ripping open
the very kernels of sound, and making the summer afternoon no fit place
for butterflies. Bingley’s eyes were very bright. This tallied with one
of his hypotheses. It was a demonstration, under the cover of which his
old friend Kuroki was to start a flanking movement.
That night the smileless young giant worked long in his tent. Stretched
full-length upon his blankets, a lantern by his side, he wrote hard in
his note-books and drew maps of the flying flanker, whom Feeney and
Finacune were now following. He showed these maps, all dated to the
hour, in London afterward, with the remark that he had divined the
strategy of Liaoyang before the battle.
He glanced at his watch, at last, and at his field outfit, which
was all packed and in order. Then he slept until dawn. No one slept
after that, since Nodzu was up with the first light, like a boy with
a new cannon on the morning of the Fourth. Bingley was missed at
breakfast. His Korean coolies knew nothing, except that they had been
ordered to take care of the Bingley property and wait for orders. The
“Horse-killer” had made a clean departure with a good mount and nothing
but his saddle-bags. Still, no one fathomed his audacity. Confidently,
it was expected that he would be returned in short order by some of the
Japanese commanders who happened to read the civilian insignia flaring
upon his sleeve. As a matter of fact, Bingley quickly would have been
overhauled had he not brooded so long and so well upon the time. The
middle Japanese army was too busy that morning to think of one daring
civilian.
Bingley’s plan was this: To watch what he could of the battle,
unfettered, making his way gradually westward behind Oku until the end,
or until such time as he mastered the color and saw the end; then to
ride alone down the railroad, nearly to Fengmarong; there to leave his
horse, cross the Liao River, and travel on foot down to Wangcheng. He
planned to catch the Chinese Eastern at Wangcheng and make the day’s
journey to Shanhaikwan beyond the Wall, where the Japanese could not
censor his message. In a word, Bingley’s plan was to stake all on
reaching a free cable before any other man, and to put on that cable
the first and greatest story of the greatest battle of the war.
That was a day in which Bingley truly lived. A mile behind Nodzu’s
reserve, he spurred his horse down into a tight darkened ravine, and
tethered the beast long to crop the pale grass blades thinly scattered
throughout the sunless crevasse. Marking well the topography of the
place, so that he could find it again in anything but darkness,
Bingley moved back toward the valleys of action. Nodzu was hammering
the impregnable Russian position before the city from the hills, and
charging down at intervals great masses of infantry to hold the main
Russian force in their intrenchments before the city, and thus to
prevent the Russian general from sending back a large enough portion of
his army to crush or outflank the Japanese flanker.
Noon found Bingley still at large and across a big valley, now almost
empty of troops. He was forced to cross one more ridge to command the
battle-picture. This required a further hour, and he sat down to rest
upon the shoulder of a lofty, thickly timbered hill which overlooked
the city for which the nations met--a huge, sprawled Chinese town,
lost for moments at a time in the smoke-fog. The river behind was
obscured entirely; still, the placing of the whole battle array was
cleared to him in a moment. All his mapping and brooding had helped him
marvelously to this quick grasp of the field. He wished that he could
cable the picture of the city, the river, the railroad, the hills, just
as he saw them now--so that London might also see through Bingley eyes.
As for the rest--Nodzu’s great thundering guns and his phantom armies
moving below in the white powder-reek--he could write that....
“But I’ve got to get a strip of real action--I’ve got to see the little
beasts go,” he muttered at length. “It’s a long chance, but I’ve got to
get a touch of the blood-end--to do it right. It is as necessary as the
lay of the land.”
And down he went, forgetting fear and passing time, even during certain
moments, forgetting the outer world that would cry, “Bingley! Bingley!”
when he was through.... Deeper and deeper he sank into the white mist
of smoke which five minutes before had been torn by flame and riven
with rifle crashes.
It was a moment of lull between Nodzu’s infantry charges. A land
current of air cleared the low distance. The southern line of
intrenched Russian infantry looked less than a mile away. Behind them,
the land was pitted and upheaved with defenses to the very wall of the
city, having the look, as Bingley observed, as the wind swiftly cleared
away the smoke, of the skin of a small-pox convalescent. There was
no sign of life in the Russian works, but his quick eye marked that
shrapnel was emplaced on the higher mounds.... Had he lived a thousand
years for the single purpose of viewing a battle--hundreds of acres of
embattled thousands straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked
and strewn with life essences, yet swarming with more raw material
for murder--he could not have judged his advent better. It was the
thirtieth of August--the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly
sacrifices to hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki
flanked.
Suddenly--it was like a tornado, prairie fire, and stampede rolled
into one--Nodzu of the pastelle-brush beard called up his swarm from
thicket, hummock, gulley, ditch, from the very earth, and launched
it forward against the first blank ridge of the Russians. This brown
cyclone tore over Bingley of the _Thames_ and across the ruffled
valley. The “Horse-killer” sat in awe. There was not yet a shot. The
Russian trenches had the look of desertion.
“Hell!” he snapped viciously. “Those trenches are abandoned. Kuropatkin
might as well be cooling his toes in Lake Baikal for all Nodzu will
find there, and he’s rushing as if----”
At this instant the Russian works were rubbed out of vision in a burst
of white smoke, and the sound of Russian bullets was like the swooping
of ten thousand night-hawks.... A terrific crash, a blast of dust,
burnt powder, filings, sickening gases--and that which a moment ago
was a dashing young captain with upraised sword was now wet rags and
dripping fragments of pulp.
“Shrapnel,” said Bingley. “He’s happy now. He was playing to a gallery
of Samurai saints--that little officer.... Nervy devils all--never
doubt it.... But we’re walloped--walloped sure as hell. We can never
take those works.”
The position of the enemy was now obscured by trembling terraces of
white smoke, out of which poured countless streams of death, literally
spraying Nodzu’s command, as firemen play their torrents upon a burning
building. A rat couldn’t have lived out a full minute in the base of
that valley. The Japanese left a terrible tribute, but the few sped
on and upward to the first line of Russian entrenchments. A peculiar
memory recurred to Bingley. Once in London he had seen a runaway team
of huge grays attached to a loaded coal-cart. The tailboard of the cart
jarred loose, and the contents streamed out behind as the horses ran.
So the hard-hit streamed out from the Japanese charge as it passed over
the base of the valley.
Even as the maddest of the Japanese survivors were about to flood over
the first embankment, it was fringed with bayonets as a wall with
broken glass; and along the length of the next higher trenches shot a
ragged ring of smoke--clots of white strung like pearls.... As a train
boring into a mountain is stopped, so was Nodzu’s brown swarm halted,
lifted, and hurled back.
“The little brown dogs!” observed Bingley with joyful amazement. “Why,
they’d keep the British army busy!... And they smile, dam’ ’em--they
smile!”
This last referred to the dead and wounded which the hospital corps
was now bringing back.... From out of the welter, a new charge formed
and failed. Again--even Bingley was shaken by the slaughter and his
organs stuck together--Nodzu hurled a third torrent of the Samurai up
that unconquerable roll of earth. It curled like a feather in a flame,
diminished, and faltered back....
The day was ending--Bingley’s gorgeous, memorable day. He had travelled
twenty-five miles on foot; he had caught up with the Japanese army
after five months in the field; he had seen Nodzu charge and Zurubaieff
hold; he had seen the wounded who would not cry, and the dead who would
not frown.
The whole was a veritable disease in his veins. The day had burned,
devoured him. He was tired enough to sleep in a tree, chilled from
spent energy; so hungry that he could have eaten horn or hoof; but
over all he was mastered by the thought of Bingley and his work--the
free cable, the story, the _Thames_, the battle, Bingley, the first
and greatest story, acclaim of the world, the world by the horns! So
his brain ran, and far back in his brain the films of carnage were
sorted, filed, and labelled--living, wounded, dead; the voices of the
Japanese as they ran, Russian-pits from which death spread, shrapnel
emplacements which exploded hell; barbed entanglements spitting the
Japanese for leisure-slaying, as the butcher-bird hangs up its living
meat to keep it fresh for the hunger-time; the long, quick-moving,
burnished guns that caught the sun, when the smoke cleared, and
reflected it like a burning-glass--such were the details of the hideous
panorama in Bingley’s brain.
The chief of his troubles was that Liaoyang still held. He had always
laughed at the Russians, and looked forward to the time when he should
watch the British beat them back forever from India. The valor of the
stolid, ox-like holding angered him now. Suppose Liaoyang should not be
taken! It would spoil his story and hold him in the field longer than
he cared to stay. He had but scant provisions for two days. He planned
to be off for the free cable to-morrow night.
“It’s going to rain,” he gasped, as he let himself down at nightfall
into his ravine. He heard the nicker of the horse below. It did not
come to him with any spirit of welcome, for Bingley was sufficient unto
himself, but with the thought that he must keep the beast alive for the
race to the cable after the battle.
“Yes, it’s going to rain,” he repeated. “You can count on rain after
artillery like to-day.... Living God! I thought I knew war before, but
it was all sparrow-squabbling until to-day!”
He found his saddle-bags safely in the _cache_ where he had left
them--this with a gulp of joy, for the little food he had was in them.
Crackers, sardines, a drink of brandy that set his empty organism to
drumming like a partridge. It also whetted his appetite to a paring
edge, but he spared his ration and smoked his hunger away. Then in the
last drab of day, and in the rain, he cut grasses and branches, piling
them within the reach of his horse. A stream of water began to trickle
presently down the rocks when the shower broke. Bingley drank deeply,
and caught many _ponchos_ full afterward for his mount. Later he fell
asleep, shivering, and dreamed that the devil was lashing the world’s
people--a nation at a time--into pits of incandescence. The savagery
of the dream aroused him, and he became conscious of a strangeness in
his ears. It was the _silence_, and it pained like rarefied air. Wet,
stiffened, deathly cold, he fell asleep again.
The next day, the thirty-first, and the worst of the battle, Bingley
curved about Oku’s rear to the railroad which marked for him a short
cut to the outer world. Another, that day, watched Oku closely as
he forced the Russian right wing to face the Japanese, but Bingley,
even from a distance, was charged and maddened by the dynamics of the
action....
Late in the afternoon, a little to the west of the railway, he stopped
to finish his food and gather forage for his horse, when over the crest
of a low hill appeared a tall human figure. The Japanese put no such
giants in the field, and Bingley was startled by a certain familiarity
of movement.
The man approached, a white man. Chill, weakness, and hatred welled
suddenly in Bingley’s veins. He was not alone on the road to a free
cable. The man he feared most in the world was entered in the race
with him--the man he had seen last at the Army and Navy reception, and
roughed and insulted, nearly three years before.
Routledge smiled, but spoke no word. Bingley regarded the strong,
strange profile, haggard, darkened as a storm arena. He saddled
savagely and rode after the other. It was fifty-five miles to
Wangcheng, where he meant to catch the _Chinese Eastern_ for
Shanhaikwan to-morrow morning--fifty-five miles in the dark, over
rain-softened roads.
“Hell! he can’t make it on foot,” Bingley muttered. “I’ll beat him to
the train.”
And yet he was angered and irritated with the reflection that the man
ahead had never yet been beaten.
NINETEENTH CHAPTER
NOREEN CARDINEGH, ENTERING A JAPANESE HOUSE AT EVENTIDE, IS CONFRONTED
BY THE VISIBLE THOUGHT-FORM OF HER LOVER
Noreen Cardinegh buried her father alone. At least, those besides
herself who took any part in the last service for the famous
correspondent were only Japanese hired for the manual labor. To the
English who were still at the hotel, eager to assist the woman, and
charged to do so by Feeney, Finacune, and Trollope before they left,
the morning was sensational. In spite of the fact that scarcely any
one had been admitted to the Cardinegh room for the past two days,
Talliaferro and others had arranged for the funeral. They were abroad
at nine o’clock in the morning, and found the formality over.... The
Japanese clerk told them all. At her request, he had made arrangements
with a Tokyo director of such affairs. The body had been taken out
at dawn. Miss Cardinegh had followed in her rickshaw. A place had
been secured in the Kameido gardens--very beautiful now in the cloud
of cherry blossoms. She had preferred a Buddhist to a Shinto priest;
refusing the services of an American or English missionary. The clerk
explained that he was permitted to tell these things now.... Possibly
Miss Cardinegh would see one or two of her friends at this time....
Yes, she was in her room.
* * * * *
“Come,” she said in a low trailing tone, in response to Talliaferro’s
knock.
Noreen was sitting by the window. The big room had been put in order.
The morning was very still. The woman was dry-eyed, but white as a
flower. She held out her hand to Talliaferro and tried to smile....
Strangely, he thought of her that moment as one of the queens of the
elder drama--a queen of stirring destiny, whose personal history was
all interpenetrated with national life, and whom some pretender had
caused to be imprisoned in a tower. This was like Talliaferro.
“We were all ready and so eager to help you, Miss Cardinegh,” he began.
“You know, some of the older of the British correspondents have dared
to feel a proprietary interest in all that concerns you. Why did you
disappoint us so?”
“I did not want anything done for him--that would be done on my
account,” she said slowly. “It was mine to do--as his heritage is mine.
I only ask you to think--not that anything can extenuate--but I want
you to think that it was not my father, but his madness.”
“We all understand that--even those who do not understand _all_ that
happened.”
“The tragedy is the same.... Ah, God, how I wish all the fruits might
be mine--not Japan’s, not Russia’s!”
He started to speak, to uproot from her mind this crippling conception,
but she raised her hand.
“You cannot make me see it differently, Mr. Talliaferro,” she said
tensely. “I have had much time to think--to see it all! You are very
good--all of you. One thing, I pray you will do for me.”
“You have but to speak it, Miss Cardinegh.”
“When you take the field--all of you, wherever you go--watch and
listen for any word of Mr. Routledge.... He may be the last to hear
that he is vindicated. Follow any clue to find him. Tell him the
truth--tell him to come to me!”
Peter Pellen’s “Excalibur” accepted the mission, declaring that he
would faithfully impress it upon the others with the second army,
shortly to leave; as Feeney and Finacune certainly would do with the
first. And so he left her, one of the coldest and dryest men out of
London; and yet, just now, he carried himself under a stiff curb, lest
he forget his war....
“And that’s the end of the man who lowered the fluids in the British
barometer, like a typhoon in the China Sea,” he observed in solitude.
“And the Japanese buried him in the Kameido, in cherry-blossom
time--buried him for money--the man who opened the veins of their
Empire!”
The work all done, Noreen Cardinegh met the deluge. The elements had
been forming for three days. She had sensed them vaguely in sudden
shivers of dread. Her soul was bared now to the primal terror, the
psychic terror, of the outcast, against which seasoned valor quails....
By the window, she sat dry-eyed, in the midst of her father’s
possessions! From the street, over the hotel-gardens, came to her
ears the screaming of children. Japanese schoolboys were passing, a
procession of them. They were playing soldier--marching very erect and
proudly, with sticks for guns.