He was small, like all his race, and he looked as harmless as a musician. In fact, his eyes had the dreaminess of a musician’s, and the clasp of his hand was like that of a woman. He touched me on the arm one day as I came out of the staff tent at General Nogi’s headquarters, and asked me in fairly good English if I knew San Francisco. Together, with a crooked stick, we traced out a map of the city on the sand at our feet. He knew it as well as I and he pointed to his former home, near the corner of Washington and Mason streets. Then he pulled from his breast pocket a letter sweat-stained and travel-worn, which, read:

His real name was Eijiro Nurimiya. He had seen me the day before at the General’s tiffin and had read the word, “San Francisco,” on my arm band, but had not ventured to speak to me when in the General’s presence. He was one of Nogi’s bodyguard, and I immediately knew he must be a man of some distinction, for throughout the camp it was well understood that Nogi had about him only those private soldiers who had become eminent for service in the field. That day and the following days when Nurimiya came to my bean shed, we had long talks over the tea and cakes. Thus his story is here set down:

He left the Hevener home nearly a year before the war began and worked in a watchmaker’s shop on Jackson Street in San Francisco. Like all of his countrymen he had ambition and desired to rise above the kitchen. But he was a reserve conscript, subject, as such reserves are, to the call of the Emperor at any crisis similar to the one that his country is now in. So he responded to this call March 23d, sailing on the Korea from San Francisco to Kobe, twenty miles from which his home lay in the Ugi Provinces.

His father, a mender of broken barrels, is separated from his mother, who keeps a tea house in Kioto. There is one sister at the tea house with his mother. He had three days with his parents, the first time he had seen them in six years. Then he sailed for Manchuria, where he joined the famous Ninth Regiment, the Black Watch of Japan, a part of the Ninth Division of the Third Army chosen to conduct the operations against Port Arthur. This same regiment had a number of other American Japanese.

The campaign had progressed two months, when Nurimiya saw his first great battle. It was the grand assault against the permanent forts of Port Arthur, lasting through seven frightful August days. He is one of the fifteen survivors of Company C of this Ninth Regiment, which marched into the Seven Days’ Battle three hundred and fifty strong.

The first day Nurimiya went with his comrades against the north battery of the Cock’s Comb Fort, which was finally captured on December 18th. Thus, it took the Japanese four months of desperate work to accomplish that for which Nurimiya’s comrades were lost those seven days in August. Most of the regiment was wiped out in front of the Cock’s Comb. What was left, including Nurimiya, was ordered to reinforce the Seventh Regiment, operating to the right against the fort of the Eternal Dragon. Against the Cock’s Comb Nurimiya fought in the front line. He also had the same good fortune in the fight against the Eternal Dragon, for to the Japanese such an opportunity is considered good fortune. More of his comrades were lost here, including all that came from America. The following two days he lay with a few others hugging the base of the fort in the broiling sun, cut off from provisions. About this I asked him:

“Were you thirsty?”

He replied: “By-m-by very much want to drink, so I make water—red water.”

With that he struck his wrist mimically showing that he had slit one of his veins to slake his thirst.

But the great act of Nurimiya’s life came on the 25th of August, when he made the ninth assault he had participated in during the seven days—and the first successful one. Each Japanese infantryman carries in his breast a linen flag—a cheap affair that you might pick up in a department store for a few pennies—a red sun on a white field. The first man into an opposing trench or redoubt waves this flag above his head. It is a signal to his own artillery, showing them where they must not fire, and also acquaints the commanding officer, viewing the action from some eminence in the rear, with the situation. Nurimiya was the first man to wave his little flag over the Eternal Dragon. The Eternal Dragon was the only fort which the Japanese held in that permanent Russian line through the three months of August, September and October, and it was the object essential to the engineers in outlining their vast siege operations across the plain. Thus it was the San Francisco watchmaker who planted the flag of the Rising Sun on the key fort at Port Arthur.

General Nogi chose Nurimiya and his fourteen comrades for body servants and relieved them for the rest of the campaign from active duty on the firing line.

This is how I found him at the General’s house. I asked if he wanted to go back to America. He replied:

“War all finish I go. Nogi-San need me I stay.”

Then with great eagerness he told me how he wanted to get back into the fight and for the first time in all our acquaintance his eyes lost their dreaminess and the clasp of his hand became taut with energy.

I did not tell him how I that morning had learned from the General himself that never again should Nurimiya be subjected to the supreme test.

“Is it not pleasant here at headquarters, with the band, and the foreigners, and the nice cooking, and the easy work?” I asked.

He was not interested in what I said. He waved an indefinite arm toward the front and replied:

“By-m-by they make plenty die off there. Then I go back.”

He had not yet learned that he was the General’s Pet.