considered. That night he closed up on Oku’s rear, crossing a big
valley and climbing a lesser range. Daylight found him in a densely
thicketed slope overlooking the city and the Japanese command. In that
hot red dawn, he beheld the bivouac of the Islanders--a crowded valley
stretching away miles to the east in the fast lifting gloom; leagues
of stirring men, the faint smell of wood-smoke and trampled turf, the
gray, silent city over the reddened hills, the slaty coil of the river
behind.
The mighty spectacle gripped the heart of the watcher; and there came
to him, with an awful but thrilling intensity, the whole story of the
years which had prepared this amphitheatre for blood on this sweet
last summer day.... Oppression in Tyrone; treachery in India; the
Anglo-Japanese alliance; the Russo-Japanese war--a logical line of
cause and effect running true as destiny, straight as a sunbeam through
all these huge and scattered events--holding all Asia in the palm of
history! Farther back, to the Kabul massacre, was to be traced the
red history of this day--the mad British colonel; Shubar Khan!... And
what did the future hold? If Russia called the French and Germans to
her aid, England, by treaty, was called to the aid of Japan. America
might be drawn by the needs of England, or for the protection of her
softening cluster of Philippine grapes. Famine in a Tyrone town; a leak
in one Tyrone patriot’s brain--and a world-war!...
The click of a rifle jerked Routledge out of his musings. A Japanese
lieutenant and a non-commissioned officer were standing twenty paces
away. The enlisted man had him covered.
TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE STRIKES A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE JAPANESE EMPEROR AND THE
JAPANESE FIGHTING-MAN, WHILE OKU CHARGES INTO A BLIZZARD OF STEEL
Queerly enough, Routledge’s first thought was that the moment of the
wound had come, but this was out of the question. These men would not
fire at him. They would send him to the rear under a guard; or, worse,
escort him to the command where the other correspondents were held. The
Englishmen would then suggest to the Japanese that their captive had
once proved a traitor to England, and that it would be well to look
deep into his present business, lest he repeat.... He would miss the
battle, be detained for a Russian spy--and Noreen would hear.
Routledge was ordered to approach, and obeyed, swallowing Failure.
The lieutenant spoke English, but disdained to look at proffered
credentials. The sergeant gripped Routledge’s arm, and his superior led
the way down the slope through the lines of troops. Many of the little
soldiers of Oku were eating rice and drinking tea from bowls; some were
bathing their bodies, others cleansing their teeth with great zeal,
using soaps and pointed sticks. These meant to be gathered unto their
fathers that day with clean mouths. Down and forward, the American was
led, no word being spoken until they were in the midst of Oku’s front.
Here was the field headquarters of some high officer of the left wing.
Routledge breathed a hope that action would be joined before he was
ordered back. The unknown commander stood in the centre of a thick
protecting cordon of men. Evidently he was too rushed at present to
attend the case of the detained civilian. Aides and orderlies spurred
out with dispatches, and others riding in took their places.
Three or four minutes had passed when certain commands went ripping
down the unformed lines and action was indeed joined. The lieutenant
was brushed away in the torrent of infantry which just now swept over
them, but the sergeant held grimly to his prisoner’s arm. Oku had
ordered the first charge of the day. This was the reeking red splash on
the map of all the world.
The soldiers leaped over Routledge and his captor. Shielding his head
from their boots and rifle-butts, the American looked deep into the
sweating brown faces that rushed past--red, squinting eyes, upper lips
twisted with a fury they could not have explained, the snarling muscles
drawn tight--and not a zephyr of fear in the command! Some of the men
still had their eating-sticks and bowls and paper napkins. One stuffed
the contents of a dish of rice into his mouth as he ran--an eight-pound
rifle clapped between his elbow and ribs.
The correspondent warmed to the human atoms hurtling by and to the
sergeant who stuck so fast to his arm. There was something tremendous
in the delusion of these poor pawns who were doing their cruel work
so well. There was an infernal majesty in the huge gamble for the old
gray walls of Liaoyang on this gorgeous morning.... War is immense and
final--for the big devil-clutched souls who make it--an achievement,
indeed, to gather and energize and hurl this great force against an
enemy, but what a rotten imposition upon the poor little obscure men
who _fight_, not a tithe the richer if they take all Asia! So the
thoughts of Routledge surged. Into the havoc, from time to time, he
threw a sentence, wrung from the depths of his understanding:
“... Once a father threw his children out of the sleigh to hold back
a wolf-pack--as he whipped his horse to the village. Would you call
such a man ‘father’?... Yet you call a nation ‘fatherland’ that hurls
you now to the wolves!... Oh, ye of mighty faith!... Pawns--poor
pawns--of plague, famine, war around the world--God, tell us why the
many are consumed to ashes at the pleasure of the few!... Oh, glorious
Patriotism--what sins are committed in thy name!”
The great system of Russian fortifications now opened fire upon the
Japanese charge. Men were falling. The bulk of the infantry avalanche
had passed, and smoke was crowding out the distances. The long
_p-n-n-n-g_ of the high bullets, and the instant _b-zrp_ of the close
ones, were stimulus for that fast, clear thinking which so often comes
close to death. Routledge’s brain seemed to hold itself aloof from his
body, the better to grasp and synthesize the startling actions of the
present.
The smoke blurred all but a finger-bone of the valley; yet from
that part he could reconstruct the whole horrid skeleton of a
Twentieth-century crime.... The brown line of Japanese rolled up
against the first Russian trench. Routledge thought of toy soldiers,
heads bent forward, legs working, and guns of _papier maché_ in
bayonet charge. The works wore a white ruff of smoke, and its lace was
swept by stray winds down over the fallen....
The grip upon his arm relaxed. For a moment Routledge thought he
was hit, when the blood rushed down the veins of his arm where the
tightened fingers had been. He was free--and at what a cost! The
little sergeant was down--his legs wriggling and beating against
the American’s, the “red badge of courage” widening on his breast.
Routledge bent over him and looked long into the dying face--forgetting
the world and the war, forgetting all but the spirit behind the hour.
The face was brown, oriental. In the corner of the mouth was a flake of
rice, and the coarse-grained dust of Manchuria was over all. The eyes
were turned back, and the ears were bad. Evolution was young in the
shape of the head and the cut of those ears--small, thick, close to the
skull, criminal ears. But the mouth was beautiful! It was carved as if
some God had done it--and on a fine morning when joy was abroad in the
world--and the perfection of the human mouth was the theme of the day.
Routledge had not even water to give, but he said, “Hello.”
Deep understanding came to him from the dying face. He saw what it
meant to this little soldier to go out for his Emperor--saw the faith
and pity of it all. It was the smiling face of a man who comes home
after years of travail to the marvel of a loved woman’s arms.
“_Sayonara!_” the fine lips muttered. One of the sweetest and saddest
words of human speech--this Japanese farewell.
“_Sayonara!_” Routledge repeated.... The body jerked itself out, but
the smile remained. The whole story of the Japanese conquest stirred
in Routledge’s brain. It was all in the smile upon the face of the
guard--all in that one perishable portrait of joy.
Routledge had once seen the Emperor for whom this soldier died
with a smile. Though it was forenoon, he had been forced to put on
evening-clothes for the Presence. Mutsuhito came back to his mind as he
bent over the fresh corpse....
“He has no such mouth as yours, little sergeant,” he said in a swift,
strange fashion. “His head is not so good as your hard, bad head,
though his ears are better. He was dazed with champagne, as you have
never been. He had the look of an epileptic, and they had to bring him
a red-blooded woman of the people to get a son from him--and that son
a defective!... A soft, inbred pulp of a man, without strength of will
or hand or brain, and God only knows what rudiment of a soul--such is
the Lord of Ten Thousand Years, whom you die for with a smile. You are
greater than the Empire you serve, little sergeant--greater than the
Emperor you die for; since he is not even a clean abstraction.... God
pity you--God pity you all!”
The sun sent streamers into the white smoke drapery upon the Russian
bank. The Island Empire men were thrashing against it. They met with
their breasts the fire that spurted continuously from the ledges. One
man of a Japanese company lived to gain the top of the trench. He
was skewered on Russian bayonets and shaken down among his writhing
fellow-soldiers, as the wing of a chicken is served upon a waiting
plate. Running, crawling, Routledge made his way down and forward.
The Japanese hope lives high above the loss of companies. It was a glad
morning for the Island Empire men, a bright task they were given to
do. Other companies, full quota, were shot forward to tread upon the
dead and beat themselves to death against the entrenchment. A third
torrent was rolled against the Russians before the second had suffered
a complete blood-letting.... Routledge saw one five-foot demon wielding
his rifle-butt upon the rim of the trench, in the midst of gray Russian
giants. For an instant he was a human tornado, filled with the idea
to kill--that Brownie--then he was sucked down and stilled. Routledge
wondered if they completely wiped out the little man’s smile at the
last.
He was ill from the butchery, and his mind was prone to grope away from
the bleeding heart of things; still, he missed little of the great
tragedy which unfolded in the smoke. And always Oku, unparalleled
profligate of men, coiled up his companies and sprung them against a
position which Napoleon would have called impregnable--Oku, whose voice
was quiet as a mystic’s prayer. The thought came to Routledge that the
women of America would tear down the capitol at Washington with their
hands, if the walls contained a monster who had spent the blood of
their sons and lovers as Oku was doing now.
A new tumult in the air! It was like an instant horrid crash of drums
in the midst of a violin solo. Artillery now roared down upon Oyama’s
left wing.... The wildest dream of hell was on. Routledge, crawling
westward through the pit of fire, saw a platoon of infantry smashed
as a cue-ball shatters a fifteen block in pool.... Westward under the
Russian guns, he crawled through the sun-shot, smoke-charged shambles,
miraculously continuing alive in that thick, steady, annihilating
blizzard of steel--his brain desperate with the rush of images and the
shock of sounds. Over a blood-wet turf he crawled, among the quivering
parts of men....
Silence. Oku stopped to breathe and pick up the fragments.... From
far up on the Russian works--it was like the celestial singing in the
ears of the dying--began a distant, thrilling music. Some regiment or
brigade, swinging into the intrenchments to relieve a weary command,
had burst into song.... Once before Routledge had caught a touch of
this enchantment, during the Boxer Rebellion. He had never been able
to forget Jerry Cardinegh’s telling of the Russian battle-hymns at
Plevna.... Great emotions bowed him now. Another terrace of defense
caught up the song, and the winds that cleared the reeking valley
of smoke carried along the vibrant inspiration. Every Russian heart
gripped the grand contagion. From terrace to terrace, from trench
to trench, from pit to emplacement, that glorious thunder stalked,
a company, a battery, a brigade, at a stride. Each voice was a raw,
dust-bitten shout--the whole a majestic harmony, from the cannon-meat
of Liaoyang! Sons of the North, gray, sodden, sorrow-stunted men
of pent misery and unlit souls--Finlander, Siberian, Caspian,
Caucasian--hurling forth their heart-hunger in a tumult of song that
shook the continent. The spirit of All the Russias giving tongue--the
tragedy of Poland, the clank of chains, the mockery of palaces, the
iron pressure of frost, the wail of the wolf-pack on frozen tundras,
the cry of the crushed, the blind groping of the human to God--it was
all in that rhythmic roar, all the dreadful annals of a decadent people.
As it was born, so it died,--that music,--from terrace to terrace, the
last wavering chant from out the city walls. The little Japanese made
no answer. Routledge could not help but see the mark of the beast in
contrast. It wasn’t the Russians that bothered Oku, but the Russian
position. Kuroki would pull them out of that.... Song or steel, they
would take Liaoyang. They prepared to charge again.
* * * * *
In the disorder of the next charge Routledge crossed the railroad
and passed out of the Japanese lines. Late afternoon, as he hurried
westward for his horses, he met the eyes of Bingley. He was not given a
chance to pass another way. The race for the cable was on.
TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE ENCOUNTERS THE “HORSE-KILLER” ON THE FIELD OF LIAOYANG, AND
THEY RACE FOR THE UNCENSORED CABLE AT SHANHAIKWAN
To each man the intention of the other was clear as the purpose of a
fire-department’s run. One of them would file the first uncensored
story of the great battle. Bingley had given up his chance to follow
the Japanese army, and had set his stony face to freedom for this
end--and England could not have horsed a man more unwhippable.
Routledge, striding into the sunset, toward the place he had left
his mounts, discovered with a smile that his pace was quickening,
quickening. The character of the man just passed was an inspiration
to rivalry. Moreover, from a newspaper standpoint, the issue at hand
was big among dreams. The Great God, News, is a marvellous master.
Would England or America be first to connect with Manchuria by wire?
_World-News_ or _Thames_? If New York beat London, Dartmore would trace
the story.... Dartmore had been a savage. Bingley had been a savage.
Routledge laughed aloud. He had long since put away any resentment
toward either of these men, but there was vim, and glow, in getting
into the struggle again. He felt that he had earned his entry to this
race. He had counted upon taking the chances of discovery. Already
Bingley had seen him, and the word would go back; but the result of it
would require time. He had long planned to close his own campaign for
the year, even if the Japanese pushed on to Mukden. He would go deeper,
past following, into China--even to the Leper Valley.
It was a momentous incident to Routledge--this meeting with the
“Horse-killer.” The quick, startled, sullen look on the face of
Bingley--not a flicker of a smile, not even a scornful smile, to answer
his own--had meant that Cardinegh, dead or alive, had not told.
Bingley found the highway two miles west of the railroad, and spurred
south in the darkness at the rate of about seven miles an hour. He
meant to do six or seven hours of this before resting his mount....
Between twelve and one in the morning--and at most twenty miles to
go! If there was anything left in his horse, after an hour’s rest, so
much the better. Otherwise he could do it on foot, crossing the river
above Fengmarong by six in the morning. This would leave two hours for
the last two or three miles into Wangcheng. As for the other, without
a mount, Bingley did not concede it to be within human possibility
for him to reach the Chinese Eastern at any point to-morrow morning.
Evidently Routledge had not planned to get away so soon. It would take
eighteen hours at least to reach Wangcheng by the river, and Routledge,
aiming westward, seemed to have this route in view.... With all his
conjecturing, Bingley could find no peace of mind. Even if Routledge
had not planned to reach travelled-lines to-morrow, would not the sight
of a rival, with his speed signals out and whistling for right of way,
stir him to competition? Such was his respect for the man who had
passed on, that Bingley could not find serenity in judging the actions
and acumen of Routledge by ordinary weights and measures.
Any other British correspondent would have hailed the outcast with the
old welcome, notwithstanding the race-challenge which his appearance
involved. On the morning he left Tokyo, five months before, Bingley
had also promised Miss Cardinegh to carry the news of her father’s
confession and death to Routledge, if he should be the first to find
him. It did not occur to Bingley now, isolated as he had been so
long, that this was the first time Routledge had been seen. Moreover,
in their last meeting, at the Army and Navy ball, there had been a
brief but bitter passage of words. Bingley was not the man to make an
overture when there was a chance of its being repelled. Finally, the
sudden discovery of a trained man, with carnage behind and the cable
ahead, was a juggernaut which crushed the life from every other thought
in his brain.
Routledge found his horses in excellent condition. The Chinese whom
he had brought from Pingyang had proved faithful before, but with all
the natives, not alone the banditti and river-thieves, emboldened
by the war, the safe holding of his property was a joy indeed. At
seven in the evening, the sky black with gathering storm, he left his
servant, rich in _taels_ and blessings, and turned westward along the
Taitse river-road. This was neither the best nor the shortest way, but
Routledge preferred to be impeded by ruts, even by chasms, than by
Japanese sentries. With Bingley’s full panoply of credentials it would
have been different.
Sixty-five miles to ride, a river to cross, an audience with Consul
Milner, a train to catch, to say nothing of enforced delays by the
possible interest of the Japanese in his movements--all in fourteen
hours.
As Bingley conjectured, the chance meeting had hastened the plan of
Routledge. He had intended to reach Wangcheng the following day, but
by no means in time for the morning train; in fact, he had determined
to tarry at the American consulate until the decision from the battle
should come in. Wangcheng had changed hands since his last call at the
port, but he counted on the wise and winning American to be as finely
appreciated by the Japanese as he had been by the Russians. Milner
would get the returns from the battle almost as soon as the Japanese
commander at the base. The one word _victory_ or _defeat_, and a line
covering the incidental strategic cause, was all that Routledge needed
for a startling story. He had mastered the field, and Oku had supplied
a rainbow of pigments.
Bingley, having left the field, would not loiter on the road to the
cable, nor would he halt before reaching an uncensored cable--therefore
Shanhaikwan to-morrow night! Routledge did not care to accept second
place, if hard-riding would win first. He faced the longer journey,
and also set apart an hour before train-time for an interview with
the Consul. It was eminently plain to him that this day had marked
the crisis of the great battle, even if it had not already ended with
nightfall. The unparalleled fury of Oku’s assaults was significant to
this effect. To-morrow would doubtless bring the verdict; and all day
to-morrow he would be on train to Shanhaikwan, in touch with Milner by
wire at every station. Even if he reached the cable with the battle
still raging, he could file the story of the great conflict, as it
was synthesized in one man’s brain--up to the point of the historic
last sentence.... Even as he rode, the lines and sentences fused in
his mind, a colorful, dashing, galvanic conception that burned for
expression.
On and on, hours and miles; cloud-bursts and flashes of lightning to
show the trail ahead--until he came to doubt his watch, even the dawn
of a new day, in the pressure of the illusion formed of dragging hours
and darkened distances.
The rains helped to keep his mounts fresh. Every two hours he changed.
The beasts had been long together, and either led with a slackened
thong. He ran them very little, and it was after midnight before he
dulled the fine edge of their fettle. They were tough, low-geared
Tartar beasts, heavy-breasted, short in the pasterns, and quartered
like hunters--built for rough trails and rough wear. Routledge slapped
and praised them, riding light. It would take more than one gruelling
night under such a horseman to break their hearts.
Two hours after midnight the rain ceased, and the wrung clouds parted
for the moon. The hill country was passed. Routledge moved swiftly
along the river-flats. It was the second night he had not slept, and
his fatigue was no trifle, but he was drilled to endure. It was not in
him to make a strongly reckonable matter out of muscular stiffness and
cuticle abrasions. True, rain softens the glaze of a saddle, and long
riding on the sticky leather tears the limbs, but Routledge had a body
that would obey so long as consciousness lasted. He used it that night.
Five-thirty in the morning; daylight; sixty miles put behind. Ahead
far in the new day he discerned the Japanese outposts of Fengmarong;
and on the right hand was the big, mottled Liao, swollen with flood. If
he were to be detained by the Japanese, he preferred it to be on the
opposite bank--the Wangcheng side. Routledge rode up to the ferry-scow
and called for service. Yellow babies were playing like cinnamon-cubs
on the shore; two women were cooking rice and fish; two men were asleep
in the sail-tackle. These he aroused. They helped him with the horses,
half-lifting the weary, trembling beasts aboard. Cups of tea; rice with
black dressing, as the scow made the opposite landing at a forty-five
degree angle! A quick and safe crossing; and two hours for the Japanese
lines, the American Consul, and the Chinese Eastern!... A distant call
through the morning light! Bingley, horseless, imperiously demands the
return of the craft to the Fengmorang bank.
Routledge had hoped to be missed by the other, at least until
train-time. He smiled at the compelling incidents of the race thus far,
and at the surpassing prospects--even though he chilled at the thought
that the Japanese in Wangcheng would have big excuse to detain him
if Bingley intimated that his rival had once betrayed England to the
Russian spies on the Indian border. Consul Milner would sweat, indeed,
to free him against that....
Yet Routledge had a feeling that he would win against Bingley. Work
had always favored him. So far he had borne out the prophecy that he
would not be wounded in battle, in a manner past astonishment. It was
no less than a miracle--his escape from the firing of both armies at
Liaoyang. Often during the night-ride he had thought of the wound
that was to come to him--thought with a chill of dread of the lawless
country he passed through. Now, with Wangcheng ahead, and in touch with
the safe-lines of foreign-travel--the chance seemed minimized once
more. There must be significance in this.... He looked back and saw the
Chinese beating up against the river to the Fengmarong landing, where
Bingley waited, doubtless frothing his curb.
At the edge of the town Routledge was arrested by a five-foot Japanese
sentry, and was locked with his world tidings in a garrison, lately
Russian, which overlooked Wangcheng’s little square. He wrote “A. V.
Weed” on a slip of paper and asked to have it taken to Consul Milner;
then sat down by the barred window to watch the Consulate across the
Square. It was now seven o’clock. The train left in an hour, and the
station was a mile away. Minutes dragged by.