Headquarters, Third Imperial Army, Before Port Arthur, Oct. 12th:

“Goddama’s here!”

“Who?”

“General Goddam—what’s his name?”

“Kodama?”

“That’s it. Who is he? They couldn’t do more for the Emperor—special train, guard mounted, and all that. He came while I was in the staff tent—a mite of a fellow in a huge coat.”

Thus Villiers two weeks ago announced the advent to the army of the Chief of the General Staff. Who is he? The soldiers know, for they have a verse in their interminable war song:

But who is he? A poor, unlettered samurai of the famous Censhu clan who to-day, at fifty-two years of age, rules Japan and guides her armies. Many will dispute this. They will tell you that the illustrious Mutsuhito, member of the oldest dynasty in the world, rules Japan. They believe that the Marshal Marquis Oyama and the Marshal Marquis Yamagata, veteran spirits, great warriors, shrewd in counsel, valorous in conflict, guide their armies. They forget, perhaps they do not know, that Gentaro Kodama, whose rank is that of Lieutenant-General, his title Baron, his position Assistant Chief of the General Staff, thinks while the others sleep and works while the others eat; that the “illustrious ones” may “guide” and “rule.” People seldom know the boss behind the President, the power behind the throne, or the advisor at the general’s ear.

Most public men in Japan will tell you that Kodama is an unsafe person of second-rate capacity. That is what the Directorate said of Napoleon, it is what Halleck and his staff said of Grant, it is what the Crown Prince said of Von Moltke. They will tell you that his charge of the commissary and transport in the China war was an accident. That is what the Directorate said of Napoleon after Egypt, what Halleck said of Grant after Donelson and Henry, what the Crown Prince said of Von Moltke before the Franco-Prussian war.

The public men sent Kodama to Formosa to get rid of him, as Napoleon was sent to Italy, as Grant was sent to Pittsburg Landing, as Von Moltke was shipped from Metz. Kodama went and raised Formosa from savagery to commerce and prosperity. He could have been Prime Minister. “No,” he said. “I would rather pull strings than be one of the strings to be pulled. Russia is peeking up over the border. Let us prepare. Give me a desk in the War Office.”

The public men shook hands, grateful that the unsafe upstart was out of the way. Only soldiers and seers foresee war. Kodama is not a seer. The public men reveled in peace and wondered occasionally that Kodama should bury himself in that dry hole of a war office. They were grateful because the unsafe upstart kept out of the way.

Then the war came and what a scrimmage there was as the public men scrambled for place! One had his finger on things; this only one knew just where, when and how to strike. He alone knew where every merchant steamer in Japan was and how quick each could be turned into a transport. He alone knew the points in the Korean coast where an army could be landed and how quick it could be gotten there. Above all he had audacity—the audacity of genius. His name was Gentaro Kodama, sometime military governor of Formosa, sometime chief of the etape bureau.

How shameful for the upstart to command! He had never left his native land. He spoke only Japanese. He had a most vulgar way of pitching into things, of living on the tick of the watch, of showing people in and out minus ceremony, of laughing as a boy might at the things he liked and of frowning ingenuously at what displeased him. More horrors! He scorned a frock coat for ordinary wear and stuck to a kimono. Only upstarts defy the fashions. Sometimes, however, the upstart happens to be a great man—a Socrates barefoot, a Grant without his shoulder straps. Now there were plenty of men who had been abroad, who could speak French and English perfectly, who could crease their trousers and who could add the proper dignity to a function. Besides, Kodama was only a lieutenant-general, of whom the realm had a dozen others, to say nothing of four full generals, two field marshals and an emperor. Why should he run the war?

But Yamagata and Oyama knew and the Emperor knew. They were too keen not to see and they were too patriotic to let Japan suffer. They could not give Kodama the place, but they crowned him with power. So to-day he has the only coach on the Japanese end of the Trans-Siberian railway and is the first to pass over the rebuilt road from Liaoyang to within sight of Port Arthur.

Yamagata stays in Tokyo, one foot in the grave, holding himself to work with will and prayer, snowed with seventy years, in counsel with the Emperor; Oyama, loved by the people, always a figurehead, goes to command the northern armies, and Nogi is given the glory of reducing the “Gibraltar of the East,” but Kodama, with his hands on everything, the brains of all, unifies the whole. I saw him leave Tokyo, cheered by the coolies of the streets, who, like the Emperor and his marshals, know. Already the campaign was in his hands. He went straight to Liaoyang and saw the first great blow struck at Kuropatkin. Then he came here, stayed two days, saw his plans being effected to his satisfaction and got back to Liaoyang before the battle of the Shaho. It was on his way back, during the day’s rest in Dalny, that I saw him for the second time, when he granted me an interview, in which he made his first public utterance.

Certain names flash across an age as meteors across a sky. CÆsar and Napoleon are such names to the student of history, Bernhardt and Irving to the lover of the stage, Shakespeare to the man of books. Their mere pronouncement has a mysterious power, some occult influence to startle and make dumb. Like a searchlight’s flare they throw one into a hopeless sense of insignificance and awe. So it was with me, a student of the war, when Villiers uttered that word, “Goddama,” two weeks ago. I recalled the months in Tokyo when we stormed the war office in vain, how London, Washington and Berlin brought their influences to bear, how the cabinet was assembled, how the ministers pleaded that correspondents, creators of that vast, indefinable power called “public opinion” have some rights. Kodama said they had no rights; they might have privileges, but no rights. One day a grave-faced official announced: “I am very sorry, gentlemen, but you will have to wait the pleasure of General Kodama. We have done all we could for you. The question now is, shall the ministers or Kodama run the war? I much fear Kodama is the man of the hour.”

Thus the name rose over me as a symbol of power and hauteur. Three days ago I started to Dalny from the front to lay in stores. There was a four- or five-mile walk to Cho-ray-che, the field base where acres are covered with rice and ammunition cases and where a shattered Russian station is being used by the Japanese commissary. On the siding lay the train of flat cars we were to take. In the center was the first coach seen on the Liaotung since the battle of Nanshan, May 26th. It was an ordinary Japanese third-class coach, with paneled doors for each compartment, and hard seats. Out of the corner chimney rose a whirl of smoke and it was easy to see what an improvement even those hard seats would be over the tops of ammunition cases where there was a three-hour ride to be made in the face of a sleet Manchurian wind.

“Back to civilization,” I cried.

“Not for us,” said Gotoh, my interpreter. “That is General Kodama’s coach. It was transported especially for him and he has just brought it down from Liaoyang.”

Then I saw him, with his salient, pointed chin, and his goatee like a French noble, bent over an improvised table, scanning papers. Five or six members of his staff gazed lazily out at a company of soldiers doing fatigue duty with the empty ammunition cases, swarming up over the track and back again, human ants. They had heard the captain say the eyes of Kodama were upon them and they worked feverishly, with rhythmical precision. The General never saw them. His staff did, but he had work to do, and he knew the men were doing theirs.

As we lay shivering on that jolty ride into Dalny, day dying out with bursts of grand color and night coming in to the orchestral music of battle opening in our rear, Gotoh snuggled among the empty cases at my feet, pulled his overcoat about his head, and hummed a song composed by the biwa players of Kioto:

“As a slender boat alone in a great storm,” it ran, “so Japan sails the sea of modern civilization; does she not then need great leaders for her forty million souls!”

The mudflats of the bay were chocolate brown in late sunset as we turned south and slid into the city, shivering, crouched low on the pouches kept huge for bullets anon. Two kerosene lamps in the coach and the sparks from the engine streaked the night as we tooted into the revamped station of spruce and corrugated tin which stands where the hole in the ground was out of which the Russians blew their beautiful Byzantine architecture. We slipped to the ground, cold, hungry, tired, and slouched under the two arc lights that make Dalny a brilliant metropolis after our six weeks around camp fires and tallow dips.

Hurrying along I suddenly found myself in a group of officers bound the same way. All but one instinctively fell back and left me ahead with a tub of a man in a fur coat and a red cap with two braid stripes which told him to be a lieutenant-general. Swathed to his ankles in an overcoat of thick martens he looked huge, but the two red braids and the star of Nippon were level with my armpit. When he shook hands he lost all the clumsiness of the fur. As his fingers grasped mine in real earnest there passed from them the spirit of the island empire—its tininess, its audacity, its febrile intensity—for the grip was sinuous and sure as the clasp of a wild thing, hearty and elegant as a comrade’s. He walked with the stately swing of a star actor, poised his cigar with the air of a gentleman of leisure and smiled roguishly on me as he talked. A word brought a thin man in spectacles—his secretary—from the group behind. Through him the General said he had not seen a foreigner in three months, he remembered me from a chance word over a tiffin in the Shiba detached palace last May, and would I be kind enough to call on him to-morrow when he would have a day of rest before his trip north toward the Shaho. We parted at the first corner and he walked on with his stately swing, which his enemies call the strut of a turkey cock, his staff grouped artistically behind.

Dalny bristled with the military. The base now of all the armies, it had become a huge supply depot through which passed the food and ammunition for a third of a million men, and to which poured the dribble of wounded. Every house in the Russian quarter, including two magnificent churches and the fine hotel, were used for hospitals, in which four thousand patients then were. A hospital ship left every day for Japan, carrying from 200 to 1,000 wounded and prisoners. Each day a transport came in bearing twice as many fresh troops. A brigade had just landed and was to be sent north at dawn to take the place of the lost in the Liaoyang battle. There was no barrack room, and though the general wore a fur coat his men stacked arms on the curbs and slept on the pavements. It was two days after the arrival of the advance guard of the civic invasion of Manchuria. Fifteen Tokyo and Osacca merchants had left home with all their fortunes to try luck in a new land. In a Chinese restaurant that night I met one of them, an old Tokyo friend who spoke English. It was a great moment in his life, he said, this parting with the old and taking on of the new. He had already been given a house in the old Russian quarter at a nominal rental, which he expected later to acquire from his government at a low figure. In a few days he expected to open a store. He asked me to call on him and gave me his card with an address in “Nogimachi.” Thus I learned that all the town has been re-christened. The old Russian names attached to the elegant streets which looked more like roads among fashionable English villas were changed. Japanese generals had been honored. The chief hospital was in Oyamamachi, the etape office on Yamagatamachi, the reserve detail bivouacked on Fukishimamachi and I slept on Kurokimachi.

In Kodamamachi Gotoh and I the next day called on General Kodama, who was living in the Russian Mayor’s house. In a side room where the secretary ushered us we waited for the General, then in his bath. This gave us time to examine the house. The Mayor was the engineer who laid out Dalny, and, naturally, he spread himself on his own home. Three stories high, with a wide balcony, a yard full of flowers and a big brick fence, it looks out on the convergence of the two main streets. It is built like the early palaces on what is now Tar Flat in San Francisco, with casements two feet thick, buttressed by solid masonry. The walls are thick enough to harbor great Russian stoves and bear evidence to the coming cold. The ceilings are enormously high, the double windows stained glass, the balustrades massive, the flooring of matched hardwood polished, all conveniences in the latest modern style. I know of no house in all Japan so fine. The panels were scratched in places where the Chinese bandits had sacked, and there was little furniture. Otherwise, all was in good condition. In scorn of the place the Japanese guard had slipped his neat, low futon into an alcove, but in respect he stood at “present arms,” his rifle loaded, to prevent outlawry. The silence was deep, the dispatch of business swift. Occasionally a messenger passed through the hall, with no hurry and with no dignity. It would have been difficult to persuade Sherlock Holmes that the army was about.

Presently the secretary announced that the General was ready, and led us down a corridor to a side room on the west, which the sunlight, falling through the stained windows, dyed purple and gold. As we advanced I could not but think of the superb setting Mansfield gave the throne room scene in “Richard III,” and how he knelt by the dais as the light died out, whispering to himself, “Richard, to thy work!”

Here there was no false splendor, only the light of purple and gold—and a great character. I felt his presence before he advanced to meet me with a lithe stride. He shook hands with the intensity of the night before and again I felt that clasp as of a palm all sinew and nerves. But there was gayety in his gesture as he threw his hands out, palms up, like a Frenchman, and bade me welcome. He wore a kimono and slippers—nothing more. I could see the bare V sloping in to his chest, thin and skin-drawn, and it was plain where the brown of sun-tan shaded into the clothes-covered white. He stepped back around a table and, dropping the slippers, climbed into a great chair, against whose russet leather he nestled the kimono and became lost, curling his bare toes under, whence, from time to time, they peeked and wiggled.

Overwhelmed by his littleness, for the swivel armchair could easily have held three generals like him and have had room left, top and bottom, for several colonels and a major, I thought of the huge overcoat of the night before and remembered what Lincoln said to Grant when the two met Alexander H. Stephens in a similar greatcoat on the River Queen in the fall of ’64: “That certainly is the littlest ear out of the biggest shuck that ever I did see.”

Gotoh and the General plunged into the labyrinths of the impossible Japanese language and left me to the joy of studying the toes and mustaches of this remarkable personality. He did not touch his mustaches, which, though long, had none of the ordinary poise and polish. No. They partook of the nature of the man and seemed the superficial ganglia of his sensitive alertness. Three single hairs from each side, twisted in a loose wisp, glimmed the air furiously like the whiskers of a cat, as the General’s salient, pointed chin chopped out the sentences. Then I noticed a phenomenon. While the body of the mustache and the whiskers on one side were as black as my coat, untouched by time, the right wisp was white with hoary snow. It was as if the Genius of his time had selected him from among the common race of men and touched him there.

“The General wishes to apologize for receiving you this way—in a kimono.” At last the interpreter spoke, after the two had been chattering several minutes. Could it really be the great General familiar with a mere man of words like Gotoh, so insinuating the smile, so comradely the gossip? Yet, doubtless, in that few minutes he got from Gotoh every pertinent rag of information the interpreter had about me. “But he has been a long time without the luxury of a good bath, and the Russian Mayor left a fine one——”

“Tell the General,” I interrupted, “that he is the first man I have met in six months who has given me the satisfaction of appearing as he is. This is his finest tribute to Western civilization—informality.”

Then they went at it again—chattering. The General, thrusting his elbows on the table, banged his chops into his palms, and, with his eyes, pierced first me, then Gotoh, a roguish twinkle lighting up his face for an instant to be replaced by the curl of irony on his lips. Could this be the man of lightning decision, and of iron will, who gave the order on February 8th to attack Port Arthur before a declaration of war? I looked at his head, round and small like a bullet, yet singularly long from nose bridge to dome. The absence of excess tissue, skin stretched tight over parietal bones and neck scrawny from spirited strain, together with a peculiar atmosphere of concentration and mastery which invested him, said it was as full of meat as an Edam cheese. Not a statesman, the ministers say, but a giant of organization, a master of detail, the brains of new Japan.

Is he not also the greatest editor in the history of journalism? Because it is he who for six months has cornered the news market of the world, so that, until the present time, not a single authentic account has come from the field except those issued in the official reports of his own generals. He has controlled the news as he has controlled the armies—noiselessly, perhaps clandestinely, but nevertheless absolutely. If the telegraph announces Japanese victories, he reasoned, the public will not listen to the wail of the special correspondent. He has substituted fact for criticism, and, like the Duke of Wellington, announces his victories first, his reverses afterward. Now that the campaign is outlined and all can see what he is driving at, the time for speech has come; so he speaks.

“You have seen Port Arthur. You may think it easy to take,” he went on through Gotoh. I protested.

“It is not easy,” he continued. “It is quite difficult to take.”

“Of course—of course—thirty forts—ten years of engineering—impregnable natural defenses—a stubborn army of great fighters—clever officers to face——”

“But——” he reached halfway across the table, not waiting for Gotoh to tell him what I said, and I had no need of an interpreter to know the five words he uttered:

“I hold Port Arthur there!” I looked into the hollow of his hand, twitching nervously, and saw the palm that is without bones, the palm all nerves and sinew.

“But where will the army winter? You are not building barracks. You have only shelter tents, flimsy as paper, which the Manchurian winds would laugh at.”

“Do not worry. You shall winter inside. We will take it soon. I hesitate to use the big guns for fear of hurting noncombatants.”

Then the tea came, via a soldier whose shoulder straps bearing the figure 9 showed him to be one of the few survivors of the famous 9th regiment, which lost 94 per cent. of its men in repeated unsuccessful assaults on the Cock’s Comb forts during the three days battle from August 21st to 23d, and I saw that Kodama, like Nogi, rewards the heroism of private soldiers by relieving them from duty on the firing line and giving them honorable work as body servants.

The General fondled his tea, delicious in a lacquered cup; Giokuro it was, the best Japan grows, and bits of the leaf glittered in the bottom like particles of steel. The steam curled about his face. He lit a cigar, puffed vigorously, and smoke wreathed with steam. Through the haze his whiskers, twisted in a loose wisp, bobbed spasmodically as his pointed chin spat out the sentences. He pulled himself further together, tying his legs acrobatically, and made room in the great chair for still another general. I wondered if he would disappear entirely, wizard-like, in a cloud of smoke. Then I thought of that criminal condemned to capital punishment, executed in experiment by the tea expert, who drank and drank until he shriveled and shrunk to powdery fiber. Plainly Giokuro, Havana and hot baths had helped hard work in drying up this tiny great man.

“We can’t tell what damage the big guns will do,” went on the aspirate voice out of the smoke. Gotoh was turning over the sentences now as fast as they came. “This is the first time in history that coast defense guns have battled with each other. We have brought ours from Japan. As the Russians cannot use theirs against our navy they have turned them landward.”

“Why not against your navy?”

“Because—” he quickly drew from a drawer a brass tube attached to a pot of India ink. Out of the tube he drew a brush and began sketching nervously on a piece of blotting paper. The brass tube was a yatate, the first one I have seen in the army. Generations before siege artillery Japanese warriors who took arrow holders from the enemy disgraced them by converting them into ink pots and brush holders, for to soil a thing with business in those days was to disgrace it. But merchants found the device a neat invention and made arrow holders in miniature. The idea spread and soon all the men of business in the empire carried yatates in their belts. The army discarded them in disgust. Now Kodama comes, oblivious of tradition, satisfying his caprice and comfort, and to his work, as a samurai of old, introduces the yatate. When he finds the samurai superstition concerning the gaining of eternal life by a soldier killed in battle of value in his chess game of war he cherishes the belief, but when the silly prejudice against business gets in his way he cuts acquaintance with the samurai.

Quickly, under the yatate brush, there grew a sketch of Port Arthur and the peninsula—curves for the east and west harbor, a cross for the town, fuzz for Liaotishan, a loop for the Tiger’s Tail. Then from east to west of the Liaotung he drew a dotted line in a semicircle and paralleled it with another dotted line.

“Our mines,” he said, pointing to the outer; “their mines,” pointing to the inner. “We have laid a series of electric mines counter to theirs, which, if firing at, they explode, will ignite their series and damage their coast defenses and harbor. Locked in this mutual mining our navy and their coast defense must remain inactive, as neither cares to take an initiative. So they have turned not only their coast defense, but their navy guns landward. We, in reply, have landed our navy guns and brought from Japan our coast defense artillery. So you will see the spectacle of two great naval equipments fighting on land. I wish I could bring all the tacticians in the world to witness. There will be much to learn for future warfare.” He puffed vigorously. The whiskers poised themselves. His eyes, looking at the sketch, were lost in introspection. He was reveling in the situation.

“You think it, then, a battle of strategists?”

“Only that. This is entirely a game of strategy. The chief question is: are our naval and siege guns, reinforced by field artillery, more powerful than their naval and coast defenses reinforcing the forts? Lesser questions concern the individual generalship of divisions and brigades.”

“But the boy in khaki—is he not the deciding force?” My mind ran back to those terrible August days when I lay in the broiling sun watching the soldiers hurled against the barbed wire, under the machine guns, onto the parapets, only to melt away like chaff before the wind. I thought of the night in the storm when the general in command gave the order to retreat, but before his aide could deliver it to the colonel in the field, the soldiers, impatient, went in and took the opposing trenches. I thought of all the sights in that mighty game I had just left; great guns in the shock of battle peppered by shrapnel but holding to their work like bulldogs on the grip, the sappers creeping with pick and shovel through the night hounded by shells, the pioneers going up with pincers to nip the wire met by the death sprinkle of Maxims, the infantry in a thin brown line following, the men popped out as expert drivers flick off flies with a whiplash, but advancing, advancing, till a handful out of a host creeps up, and flings itself, fanatical with the lust of battle, worn in the gory charge so that life never can be the same again in sweetness and in peace, into the redoubt paid for a dozen times with blood, and which even then is but curtain raiser for drama still more heartrending, because, beyond, rising tier on tier, series after series, are redoubts and forts, trenches and barbed wire, moats and gorges, rifles and cannon until the soul grows sick with the thought that Port Arthur must be bought with sacrifice so great, agony so monstrous.

“No,” said Kodama. “This is a question of military strategy.” He thrust the yatate from him, stretched back into his chair and puffed cigar wreathings into the air. They looked like the smoke of a volley from a battery of howitzers. As he settled down to the talk again, sometimes his eyes flashing, sometimes his mustaches, one black, the other white with a venerable sign, twitching, his bare toes twisting with suppressed energy, I thought I saw a huge black spider serene in the Russian chair.

“Will you bring any more reserves?”

“No. We have an army large enough to take Port Arthur. The enemy has about 20,000 men, we about 60,000. Three to one makes the odds about even when you consider the defenses. More men are not necessary. It is not a question of men now, but of ammunition and generalship.”

“How about food? It has been reported that you let junks and even transports run the blockade, that you won’t starve them out, but want the glory of forcing them to surrender?”

His eyes snapped as he answered: “That is absolutely false. We have them entirely hemmed in and maintain a perfect blockade.”

“Do you find the forts stronger than you expected?”

“They are very well built—on the Belgian model, I believe. They are like the forts on the Belgian frontier where the lay is similar. Toward the sea side they are iron plated, but toward us there is only earth, with some concrete and masonry. It is the arrangement that puzzles us. A very clever engineer must have devised them, for we find an absolute change from the Chinese war of ten years ago when we took Port Arthur in a day. Then, one fort, Issusan, taken the others fell. That was the key to the position. Now, one cannot say that any single fort is the key. All are so arranged we must take them in detail. The capture of one means only the capture of an individual fort, not of a series as in the old days. Study as we may we find it difficult to minimize their strength. They have even carried the fortifications to such an extent that the sea escarpments jut over and they bathe there with ease and safety.”

He looked so cosy in his kimono, redolent of the bath, that I ventured: “You envy them, then. Aha! This is the secret of Japanese persistence. The Russians have such a fine place to bathe.”

He gurgled and continued: “We began yesterday to shell with our new guns—the Osacca mortars. It will be most interesting to watch their effect on the earth forts.”

The General paused. It was time to go. We had taken the better part of an hour from him. We rose. He slipped from the chair, tickled his toes into his slippers, and threw his shoulders back jauntily, giving himself the air that a little man does unconsciously when a sense of the physical is borne in upon him.

Then I felt that creepy clasp as of a boneless hand. When I closed the door he crept back to his perch. So I left him, noiseless leader of forty millions, swathed in the great Russian chair, lost in the Mayor’s Byzantine house, withered to essence like a tea leaf.

And his salary is the same as that of a congressman of the United States.