MAKING FOR MANCHURIA

It came at last—that order for the front. On the 18th day of July, the Empress of China swung out of Yokohama Harbor, with eighteen men on board, who had been waiting four months for that order, almost to the very day. During those four months there was hardly a day that some one of those men was not led to believe by the authorities in Tokio that in the next ten days the order would come, and never would the authorities say that during any ten days the order would not come; so that they had perforce to stay waiting in Tokio from the freezing rains of March until the sweltering days of midsummer. Many of those men had been in Japan for five months and more, and yet knew absolutely nothing of the land save of Tokio and Yokohama, which, tourists tell me, are not Japan at all.

The matter has been passing strange. We did not come over here at the invitation of the Japanese Government, but in simple kindness the authorities might have said, with justice:

"This is the business of Japan and of Russia alone. Over here we do not recognize the Occidental God-given right of the newspapers to divulge the private purposes of anybody. We believe that War Correspondents are harmful to the proper conduct of a war. Frankly, we don't want you, and to the front you can never go."

No just complaint could have been made to this. We should have seen beautiful Japan and, our occupation gone for this war, at least, we could have struck the backward trail of the Saxon—the correspondent for some trade of peace, the artist to "drawing fruits and flowers at home." And all would have been well.

Or:

"You gentlemen came over here at your own risk. You create a new and serious problem for us and we don't know how we are going to solve it. If you wish to stay on at your own risk until we have made up our minds—you are quite welcome."

For some this would have made an early homeward flight easy. Or again:

"Yes, we do mean to let you go to the front, but when we cannot say. While you are here, however, we shall be glad to have you see our country. Just now we are quite sure that you will not go for at least ten days: so you can travel around and come back. If we are sure that you can't go for another ten days, you may go away again and come back—and so on until you do leave."

Even this they might have said:

"You English are our allies. We are in trouble, and we may draw you as allies into it. We, therefore, grant your right to know how we behave on the battle-field, where we may possibly have to fight, shoulder to shoulder. Therefore, you English correspondents, you English attachÉs, can go to the front, the rest of you cannot."

Nothing in all this could have given offence. All or any of it would have had at least the combined merits of frankness, consideration, honesty, and it is very hard for this Saxon to understand how any or all could possibly have any bearing on anybody's advantage or disadvantage, as far as this war is concerned.

The Japanese gave no open hint of unwillingness to have us go—no hint that we were not to go very soon. We were urged to get passes for ourselves, interpreters and servants at once. Most of the men obeyed at once, bought horses, outfits, provisions and wrote farewell letters—wrote them many times. This was the middle of March. Ever since we have stayed at the Imperial Tomb in Tokio—the Imperial Hotel is the name it calls itself—under heavy expense to ourselves here and to the dear ones at home who sent us here; unable to go away; told every ten days that in the next ten days we would most likely go, and told on no day that within the next ten we should not go. Now it was soon—"very soon"—in English, and then it was "tadaima"—in Japanese.

Tadaima! That, too, meant "soon," when I first put stumbling feet on the tortuous path of Japanese thought and speech. The unwary stranger will be told to-day that it does mean "soon," and as such in dictionaries he shall find it. But I have tracked "tadaima" to its lair and dragged it, naked and ashamed, into the white light of truth. And I know "tadaima" at any time refers only to the season next to come. Early in March, for instance, it means literally—"next summer about two o'clock."

All this was something of a strain in the way of expectation, disappointment, worry, wasted energy—idleness. And so with a worried conscience over the expense to the above-mentioned dear ones at home, and the hope that some return might yet be made to them; through a good deal of weakness and a good deal of reluctance to go home and get "guyed," we stayed on and on. In May came the battle of Nanshan and the advance on Port Arthur. In June followed Tehlitzu. Both battles any man would have gladly risked his life to see, and I really think it would have been well for the Japanese, granting their accounts of the two battles as accurate—Russian atrocities in one, undoubted Japanese gallantry in both—if impartial observers had been there to confirm. As it stands, the Japanese say "you did"—the Russians say "we didn't"—and there the matter will end.

But we swung out of Yokohama Harbor at last—the Tokio slate for the time wiped clean and all forgiven. We were going to the front and that was balm to any wound. O-kin-san of the Tea House of the Hundred Steps—bless her!—had me turn my back while she struck sparks with flint and steel behind me and made prayers for my safety, and from her kind hand I carried away a little ideographed block of wood in a wicker case which would preserve me from all bodily harm. Whither we were bound we knew not for sure, since by the same token you know nothing in this land for sure. But there were three men among us who had been guaranteed, they said, by the word of a Major-General's mouth, that they should see the fall of Port Arthur. So sure were they that they had made less important representatives of their papers stay behind in Tokio to await the going of the third column. Two others had got the same assurance indirectly, but from high authority, and the rest of us knew that where they went, there went we.

That day and that night and next day we had quiet seas and sunlight. The second night we were dining in Kobbe at a hotel to which Kipling once sang a just pÆan of praise—Kobbe, which he knew at once, he said, was Portland, Maine, though his feet had not then touched American soil. He was quite right. Kobbe might be any town anywhere. The next daybreak was of shattered silver, and it found us sailing through a still sea of silver from which volcanic islands leaped everywhere toward a silver sky. We were in the Inland Sea. To the eye, it was an opal dream—that Inland Sea—and the memory of it now is the memory of a dream—a dream of magic waters, silvery light and forlorn islands—bleak and many-peaked above, and slashed with gloomy ravines that race each other down to goblin-haunted water-caves, where the voice of the sea is never still. This sea narrowed by and by into the Shimonoseki Straits, which turn and twist through rocks, islands, and high green hills. Through them we went into the open ocean once more. In the middle of the next afternoon we passed for a while through other mountain-bordered straits, and by and by there sat before the uplifted eye Nagasaki, with its sleepy green terraces, rising from water-level to low mountain-top—where the Madame ChrysanthÈme of Loti's fiction is a living fact to-day. Who was it that said, after reading that book, he or she would like to read Pierre Loti by Madame ChrysanthÈme? It must have been a woman—and justly a woman—sure. There is an English colony at Nagasaki and an American or two who cling together and talk about going home some day—all exiles, all most hospitable to the stranger, and all unconsciously touched with the pathos of the exile wherever on earth you find him.

Between four and five o'clock these exiles take launches for a beach five miles away, since the Japanese regulations now forbid bathing at any nearer point. They carry out cakes and tea and other things to drink and I took one trip with them through one beautifully radiant late afternoon, but even in that way there was no evading the Japanese. Two of them, whether fishermen, sailors, officers, or what not, calmly fixed their boat-hooks to the launch and there they hung. The fact that the ladies of the launch were undressing and dressing in one end did not seem to disturb them at all, and to this day I am wondering what possible harm a man or a woman in a bathing-dress among waves can do in time of war in a place that is impregnable and five hundred miles from the firing-line. I found the Japanese as different in Nagasaki as is their speech. There they say "Nagasaki" with a hard g. In Tokio, where the classics are supreme, they pronounce it "Nangasaki," almost—just as the rickshaw men in the one place lose something of the samurai haughtiness that characterizes them in the other. It is the difference between the flat and the broad "a" in our own land, and between the people who use the one and the people who use the other. Everybody left next morning, but I clung to Nagasaki as long as I could, and in consequence took an all-night ride on a wooden seat. Early next morning I was crossing the Shimonoseki Straits from Moji in a sampan. It was before sunrise. The mist on the sea was still asleep, but on the mountains it was starting its upward flight. Through it fishing-boats were slipping like ghosts, and here and there the dim shape of a transport or a little torpedo-boat was visible. The flush in the East was hardly as deep as a pale rose before I was noiselessly oared to the stone quay of the little village whence we were to take transport at last for the front. The foreign hotel was full. Richard Harding Davis had gone to a Japanese hotel and had left word for me to follow. So in a rickety rickshaw I rattled after him through the empty street. I found him in a Japanese room as big as the dining-room of an American hotel, covered with eighty mats, full of magic woodwork, and looking out where there were no walls (the walls in a Japanese house are taken out by day) for full fifty feet on mountain and sea and passing transports and sampans. Davis was unpacking. Hanging over the balcony was a yellow moth of a girl some fourteen years old, who smiled me welcome. On another balcony at the other end of the hotel, three other sister moths were lighted, and among them I saw a correspondent beating a typewriter vigorously—they watching him with amazement and brushing him with their wing-like sleeves as they hovered about. Others still were fluttering fairy-like anywhere, everywhere. The latest occupant of our room had been the Marquis Ito—we found it quite big enough for two of us. Li Hung Chang had the same room when he came over to make peace terms after the Japanese-Chinese War. We could see the corner of the street near by where a Japanese tried then to assassinate that eminent Chinaman, and in that very room the great Shimonoseki treaty was signed. We had it two nights and a day, and we learned, when we went away, that we were not told the history of that room for nothing. First, our interpreters hinted that great men like Ito and Li Hung Chang and Our Honorable Selves were always expected to make a present to the hotel. It was the custom. We followed the custom to the extent of ten yen each, and an old lady came in and prostrated herself before each of us in turn. Now, when you are clothed only in pajamas, are seated in a chair, and have your bare feet on a balcony in order to miss no vagrant wind, it is somewhat embarrassing to have a woman steal in without warning, smite her forehead to the mat several times, and make many signs and much speech of gratitude. You won't smite yours in turn; you can't bow as you sit, and if you rise, it looks as though you were going to put foot on the neck of a slave. We looked very red and felt very foolish, but we did not exchange confidences. If there was any slumbering supposition in our minds that this was a polite Oriental method of dealing with guests who have doubtful luggage, or a slumbering hope that the "present" might have a dwindling effect on our bill, there needn't have been. We had to pay in addition for that room and those eighty mats and that Fuji landscape of delicate woodwork; we had to pay for all the brilliant moths that fluttered incessantly about, for the chamber-maids and the smiling bronze scullery-girl who looked in on us from the hallway; for the bath-boy and the cook or cooks. Every junk and sampan that passed had apparently sent a toll for collection to that hotel. The gold of the one sunset and the silver of the one dawn were included in the turkey-tracked, serpent-long bill that was unrolled before our wondering eyes. In fact, if Marquis Ito's breakfast and the biggest dinner that Li Hung Chang had there nine years before were not put down therein, it was a strange oversight on the part of the all-seeing eye that had swept the horizon of all creation during the itemization of that bill. That was business—that bill. The present had been custom. I cheerfully recommend the method to highway robbers that captain other palaces of extortion in other parts of the world. Get the present first—it's a pretty custom—and the rest is just as easy as it would have been anyway.

Next day we went back again to Moji, where a polite and dapper little officer examined us and our passes and asked us many questions. Why he did I know not, since he seemed to know about us in advance, and every now and then he would look up from a pass and say: "Oh, you are so-and-so"—whereat "so-and-so" would look a bit uneasy. At two o'clock that day we set sail—correspondents, interpreters, servants, horses, a few soldiers, and much ammunition—on the transport Heijo Maru. Every ship has that "Maru" after its name, and I have never been able to find out just what it means—except that literally it is "round in shape." We steamed slowly past a long, bleak, hump-backed little island that had been the funeral pyre for the Japanese dead in the war with China. For ordinarily the Japanese, after taking a lock of hair, a finger-nail, or the inkobo (a bone in the throat), which they send back to relatives, burn their dead. But this funeral pyre was for those who died in the hospital, and the wounded and sick therein could see by the flames at night where next day their own ashes might lie. Thence we turned northward toward the goal of five months' hope on the part of those hitherto unhappy but now most cheerful eighteen men.

Fuji was on board. Fuji is my horse, and he had come down by rail. He is Japanese and a stallion—as most Japanese horses are. He has a bushy, wayward mane, by the strands of which you can box the compass with great accuracy, and a bushy forelock that is just as wayward. His head, physiognomy, and general traits will come in better when later they get an opportunity for display. All I knew then of Fuji was that he had nearly pulled the arms out of the sockets of several men, and had broken one man's leg back in Tokio. I was soon to learn that this was very little to know about Fuji.

Takeuchi also was aboard. Takeuchi is my interpreter and servant. He is tall and slender, and has a narrow, intelligent face and general proportions that an American girl characterized as Greek. I call him the ever-faithful or the ever-faithless—just as his mood for the day happens to be. He keeps me guessing all the time. When I make up my mind that I am going to say harsh things next day, I find Takeuchi tucking a blanket around me at three o'clock in the morning. He knows they are coming, and when I do say them Takeuchi answers, "I beg you my pardon," in a way that leads me to doubt which of us is the real offender after all. Sometimes my watch and money disappear, but Takeuchi turns up with them the next morning, shaking his head and with one wave of his hand toward the table.

"Not safe," he says, smiting his waistband, where both were concealed. "I keep him." He has both now all the time. His first account overran, to be sure, the exact amount of his salary for one month and for that amount I had him sign a receipt. Two hours later he said, in perplexity:

"I do not understand the receipt I give you."

I pointed out my willingness to be proven wrong. He worked for an hour on the account and sighed:

"You are right," he said. "I mistake. I beg you my pardon."

He had overlooked among other things one item—the funeral expenses of some relative, which he had charged to me. I made it clear that such an item was hardly legitimate and since then we have had less trouble. However, when he wishes anything, he says:

"I want you, etc., etc., etc.," and at the end of the sentence he will say "please," with great humility; but until that "please" comes I am not always sure which is servant and which is master. From Takeuchi I have learned much about Japanese character, especially about the Buschido spirit—the fealty of Samurai to Daimio, of retainer to Samurai, of servant to master. It is useless to be harsh with or to scold a Japanese servant. Just make your appeal to that traditional spirit of loyalty and all will be better—if not well. He may rob you himself in the way of traditional commissions, but you can be sure that he will allow the same privilege to nobody else. But of Takeuchi—as of Fuji—more anon.

We sailed along at slow speed until we came to the Elliott Group of Islands. We paid a yen apiece for each meal, and the captain and the purser—a nice little fellow who got autographs from all who could write and pictures from all who could draw—were the only officers with whom we came in contact. We had poker o' nights, and sometimes o' days, and now and then we "played the horses." Thus we reached the Elliott Group of Islands.

There we had company, transports coming in until there was a fleet of ten; other transports going back to Japan, and an occasional gun-boat hovering on the horizon. There we stayed three wearing days—told each day that we should start on the next at daybreak. But there came one matchless sunset as a comfort—a sunset that hung for a while over a low jagged coast—a seething mass of flaming gold and vivid, quivering green; that smote the sea into sympathy, lent its colors to the mists that rose therefrom, and sank slowly to one luminous band of yellow, above which one motionless cloud of silver was, by some miracle, the last to deepen into ashes and darkness. And as it darkened in the West, some white clouds in the East pushed tumbling crests of foam over another range of hills, and above them the full moon soared. Thus, all my life I had waited to see at last, on a heathen coast, Turner doing the sunset, while Whistler was arranging colors in the place where the next dawn was to come.

Here we saw Chinamen for the first time on native heath. They came out to us in sampans, always with one or two children in the bow, to get scraps to eat at the port-holes aft, or empty bottles, which they much prized; or drifted past us on the swift tide, watching like birds of prey for anything that might be thrown overboard. And we saw the attitude of Japanese toward Chinamen for the first time, as well, and all the time one memory, incongruous and unjust though it was, hung in my mind—the memory of a town-bred mulatto in a high hat with his thumbs in the arm-holes of a white waistcoat, and loftily talking to a country brother of deeper shade in the market-place of a certain Southern town. One day a sampan, with a very old man and a young one aboard, made fast to the gangway. They had fish to sell, and during the haggling that followed, a Japanese sprang aboard, dropped a coin or two, picked up the fish, and tried to cast the sampan away—the Chinamen sputtering voluble but feeble protests meanwhile. In the confusion, the stern of the sampan struck a ship's boat that was swinging on a long hawser from the same gangway, the bow of it struck the ship's side, and the racing tide did the rest. The boat was overturned, old man and young one disappeared and all under water shot away. We thought they were gone, but there were two lean, yellow arms fastened by yellow talons to the keel, and in a moment the young man was dragging the old man to safety on the bottom of the boat. The ship's boat was cast away, the Japanese who had caused the trouble sprang aboard with the crew, gave chase to the bobbing wreck, caught it several hundred yards away, righted it, and later we saw the young Chinaman working it, half submerged, toward the distant shore, and the shivering, bedraggled old one being brought back to the ship. We were all indignant, for the officers of the ship, far from interfering, laughed during the whole affair, and, laughing, watched the old man and the young one sweep away. But no sooner was the old man aboard than the servants and interpreters gave him rice, saki, empty bottles, and clothes, and took up a subscription for him; and when the young one got to the ship an hour later the old man climbed into the sampan, mellow and happy. It seemed a heartless piece of cruelty at first, but it was perhaps, after all, only the cruelty of children, for which they were at once sorry and at once tried to make amends. To me, its significance was in the loftily superior, contemptuously patronizing attitude of the Japanese toward the yellow brother from whom he got civilization, art, classical models, and a written speech. Later, I found the same bearing raised to the ninth degree in Manchuria. Knowing the grotesque results in the efforts of one imitative race to adopt another civilization in my own country, the parallelism has struck me forcibly over here in dress, Occidental manners, the love of interpreters for ponderous phraseology and quotations, rigid insistence on form and red tape and the letter thereof. Give a Japanese a rule and he knows no exception on his part, understands no variation therefrom on yours. For instance, every afternoon we went into the sea from that gangway, and Guy Scull diving from the railing of the upper deck and Richard Harding Davis diving for coins thrown from the same deck into the water (and getting them, too) created no little diversion for everybody on board. On the third afternoon, Davis, in his kimono and nothing else, was halted by the first officer at the gangway. The captain had found a transport rule to the effect that nobody should be allowed to go in bathing—the good reason being, of course, that some of several hundred soldiers in bathing might drown. Therefore, we eighteen men, though we were in a way the guests of the captain's Government—in spite of the fact that we were paying for our own meals—and though for this reason a distinction might have been made, the rule was there, and, like Japanese soldiers, we had to obey. It looked a trifle ominous.

We were only ten hours' sail now from Port Arthur, and one morning we did get away just before sunrise. The start was mysterious, almost majestic at that hour. For three days those transports had lain around us—filled, I was told, with soldiers, and yet not one soldier had I seen. Blacker and more mysterious than ever they looked in that dark hour before dawn—only the first flush in the east showing sign of something human in the column of black smoke that was drifting from the funnel of each. It showed, too, a gray mass lying low on the water, and near a big black rock that jutted from the sea. That gray mass gave forth one unearthly shriek and that was all. Instantly thereafterward it floated slowly around that jutting rock; one by one the silent black ships moved ghostlike after it, and when the red sunburst came, that gave birth, I suppose, to the flag of Japan, all in single file were moving in a great circle out to sea—the prow of each ship turning toward one red star that looked down with impartial eyes where the brown children of the sun were in a death-struggle with the cubs of the Great White Bear. By noon there was great cheer. The Japanese word was good at last—we were bound for Port Arthur. The rocky shore of Manchuria was close at hand. A Japanese torpedo-boat slipped by, its nose plunging through every wave and playful as a dolphin, tossing green water and white foam back over its whole black length. A signal-station became visible on one gray peak, and then there was a thrill that took the soreness of five months from the hearts of eighteen men. The sullen thunder of a big gun moaned its way to us from Port Arthur. There was not a man who had not long dreamed of that grim easternmost symbol of Russian aggression, and each man knew that no matter what might happen on land, Port Arthur held place and would hold place for dramatic interest in the eyes of the world. Port Arthur we should see—stubborn siege and fierce assaults—and gather stories by the handful when it fell. Dalny was to our left, and it was rather curious that we did not turn toward Dalny. But no matter—we were going into Talienwan Bay, which was only a few miles farther away, and we could hear big guns: so we were happy. Talienwan—a thin curve of low gray stone buildings, hugging the sweep of the bay, spread the welcome that the officer of that port came to speak in English—and we landed among carts, Chinese coolies, Japanese soldiers, Chinese wagons, mules, donkeys, horses, ponies, squealing stallions, ammunition, a medley of human cries. The bustle was terrific. A man must look out for himself in that apparent confusion. As it was an ever-faithful day for Takeuchi that day, I was serene and trustful. Davis was not, and beckoned to a coolie with a cart. The man came and Davis's baggage was piled on the cart. Along came a Japanese officer who, without a word, threw the baggage to the ground—including a camera and other things as fragile and hardly less precious. Davis turned to the Post Officer:

"Can I have one of these carts?"

"Certainly," he said.

Davis got another, but while his interpreter was loading his things again, the same officer came by and tossed them again to the ground. The interpreter protested and tried to explain that he had permission to use the carts, but he hadn't time. That officer turned on him. Now I had been told that there are no oaths and vile epithets in the Japanese tongue, but I know no English vile enough to report what the man said, and if I did I couldn't use it without blistering my tongue and blackening my soul more black than the hair of the blackguard who used it. But let me do the Colonel in command justice to say that when the outraged interpreter, taken to him by us afterward, repeated the insult, the courteous old gentleman looked shocked and deeply hurt, and said he would deal harshly with the man. I hope he did.

This was ominous, but we were still cheerful. Yokoyama appeared and Yokoyama was ominous. He was to handle our canteen and charge us twice the prices that we had known at the Imperial Hotel, on the ground that he would transport our baggage for us. That meant that he was to charge us for the transport service that the Government was to give us—not to him—and furnish us chiefly with canned stuff that each man could have bought for himself for a dollar per day. We did not know this just then, but wily Yokoyama had gathered in 500 yen from each of us in Tokio, and he was ominous before we left Japan. I am putting this in because Yokoyama, too, is woven into the network that fate was casting about us that day. Still we were cheerful. Cannon were making the music we had waited five months to hear. Port Arthur would fall, doubtless, within ten days, and then—Home! The dream was shattered before we went to sleep. No officer came to tell us where we were bound—to explain the shattered word of a Major-General of his own army. It was Yokoyama who dealt the blow—Yokoyama who, in another land, would have been branded as a traitor by his own people and could have been put behind the bars in ours. The truth was that we were not to go to Port Arthur at all. Next day we travelled—whither God only knew—with every boom of a big gun at the Russian fortress behind us sounding the knell of a hope in the heart of each and every man. But we were on the trail of Oku's army into the heart of Manchuria, though nobody knew it for sure, and there was yet before us another tragedy—Liao-Yang.

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