THE BACKWARD TRAIL OF THE SAXON

Out at the gate of the compound, last night, a barytone voice lifted a pÆan of praise to the very stars. We were to leave that wretched enclosure next day, the Three Guardsmen said, and that night the White Slaves listened to the barking of dogs, the droning chorus of school-children chanting Chinese classics and the medley of small noises in streets and compound, and sank to sleep for the last time in Haicheng. As usual, the raucous cries of Dean Prior and Burleigh ushered in the dawn, and the usual awakening and bustle of servants and masters followed. For the last time Little Wong, Cup-bearer and Page-in-Waiting, with his hand at his forehead, clicked his heels before each of us in turn, stirred his master, the Irishman, from slumber deep, and, with a radiant smile and flashing teeth, fired volleys of Tansan right and left. Within half an hour we were gathered under Yokoyama's tent for our last breakfast. For the last time Big Reggie, the Frenchman, marched past us, and for the last time we made him keep step to a ringing Marseillaise. Half an hour later, the compound was full of squealing horses, and soon carts, coolies, the White Slaves of Haicheng, and the Three Guardsmen wound out of the gate, through the narrow streets and under the city wall—on the way to see a battle at last. Two hours we marched, climbed then a little hill, left our horses on the hither side, crawled over the top to where that battle was raging—some ten miles away. Up in the mountains somebody was evidently letting loose giant puffs of cigarette-smoke high in the air. No sound was perceptible, but they were shells, a Guardsman said.

"Whose shells?"

"I don't know," said the Guardsman. As a matter of fact, those shells were so far away that we could not tell whether they were Russian or Japanese, whether they were coming toward us or going away. But we could count them, and, of course, that was great profit and fun. So, while that battle raged, we fearlessly strolled around the hill-side or sat in groups and told stories, and one daredevil of a correspondent, made reckless by the perils we had passed, deliberately turned his back to the fight and calmly read a newspaper.

The Three Guardsmen were justly pained by such a neglect of such an opportunity to study strategy and tactics in a great war, and they did not look happy. Thus for two hours did we not see the battle of Anshantien.

Toward noon the shell-smoke waned and we moved on to another compound, where we were to spend the night. At dusk a Guardsman came in radiant and filled our hearts with fatuous cheer. We were to see another fierce engagement next morning. But we must rise early and travel fast or we should be too late, as the attack would be made before dawn. The Three Guardsmen would come themselves to awaken us at three o'clock so that there could be no mistake. He was so earnest and so sure that we went to bed greatly excited, and nobody slept except the Irishman, who lifted his head from sound slumber, however, when one vagrant beer-bottle was popped to decide a wager, at midnight.

"Don't you think I don't hear you," he said.

"I win the bet," said Brill.

Three hours later, the Guardsmen found us awake. We arose and stumbled in the mud and darkness for a cup of coffee, and started single file through raining blackness toward that ever-vanishing front. Nobody said a word, and the silence and mystery of the march was oppressive as we waded streams and ploughed through mud between walls of dripping corn. Every now and then the Authority on International Law, who led us, would halt the column and get off his horse to look for the trail that had been left for us the day before. At least he did the looking, but it was always Captain James, the Englishman, who found the trail; a more stealing, mysterious, conspirator-like expedition I have never known. It was hard to believe that we were not creeping up to make an attack on something ourselves, or that the Russians might not burst from the corn on either side at any minute.

On we went until another hill loomed before us, and at the foot of this hill we waited for the dawn. By and by another cavalcade approached, the military attachÉs, equally impressive, equally mysterious, equally solemn and expectant. And on that little hill we waited, in the cold wind and drifting sleet and rain, the correspondents huddled on top, the cloaked attachÉs stalking along on a little terrace some thirty feet below, everybody straining his eyes through the darkness to see the first flash of a gun. Morning came and we were still straining—big Reggie nibbling a hard-boiled egg on the very summit of the hill, a Lieutenant-General of the English Army patrolling the terrace like some "knight-at-arms alone and palely loitering," because no shells sang, and the rest of us dotting the muddy mound with miserable, shivering shapes, while wind, rain, and cold made merry over the plight of all. The Three Guardsmen moved restlessly about, speaking words of good cheer; but something was happening to that battle and we got tired of straining and began to walk recklessly around that hill and borrow chocolate and tobacco and bread from one another for breakfast. Even the Guardsmen got uneasy—hopeless—and once I found myself on the other side of the hill, where one of them lay huddled in his army coat. For a little while we talked inter-continental differences.

"We do not understand, we Occidentals, why the Japanese prefers to commit hara-kiri rather than be captured, and we argue this way: If I allow myself to be captured, I may be exchanged or escape, and thus have a chance to fight another day; if not, my enemy has to take care of me and feed me, so that I reduce his force and resources just that much. If I kill myself I make a gap in my own ranks that I can't fill again. If I accept capture, I am worrying and exhausting you all the time. The only good I can see in hara-kiri is the effect that it might have on the fighting capacity of the men who are left. Is there any economic consideration of that sort under the Japanese idea?"

The Guardsman shook his head. "No," he said, "it is instinct with us; but," he added presently, "I think we are coming around to your point of view, and I think we will come around to it more and more. You see, we have transferred the Buschido spirit of feudalism into the army. The loyalty of Samurai to Daimio has been transferred to soldier and officer, and this instinct for hara-kiri is so great an element in the Buschido spirit that I think our officers are a little fearful about trying to change it too rapidly." But a Japanese will not talk long about such matters with a foreigner.

The Guardsman pulled a little brass check covered with Chinese characters from his pocket.

"This is how we identify our dead," he said. "Every soldier carries one of these, and every officer."

"That's a good idea," I said, but I couldn't help thinking how little use he could ever have for that check as long as he was guarding us. It is said that just about this time the wife of a correspondent back in Tokio went trembling to the War-Office. "I have heard nothing from my husband," she said. "Tell me if he has been killed." The official was startled.

"Impossible!" he said.

I climbed the hill again to see how that battle was going on. The first line of "The Burial of Sir John Moore" will do for that battle. It wasn't going on, so one of the Guardsmen galloped ahead to learn what the trouble was with the Schedule, and for two long, chilly hours we huddled on that windy mole-hill, with no flash of gun in the distance, no puff of smoke high in the air. The Guardsman came back then. Kuropatkin had quietly sneaked away while we were sneaking for that hill, and the Japanese were after him. Thus passed the second day of the battle of Anshantien.

At noon we were hitting the muddy trail again for another Chinese compound. Evidently we were getting nearer the front; the flies and fleas were thicker here, a dead pig protruded from a puddle of water in the centre of the compound, and there were odors about of man and horse, that suggested a recent occupation by troops. We policed the filthy enclosure that afternoon, and quite late the thunder of big guns began far away, while a yellow flame darted from the unseen sun, spread two mighty saffron wings through the heavens, fitted them together from earth and sky, and left them poised motionless, while from them stole slowly out the rich green-and-gold radiance that comes only after rain—drenching wet earth and still trees and quiet seas of corn. By and by crickets chirped, quiet stars shone out above the yellow, and the dusk came with a great calm—but it was the calm that presaged the storm of Liao-Yang.

We had a serious consultation that night. The artists couldn't very well draw what they couldn't see. Some of us, not being military experts, and therefore dependent on mental pictures and incident for material, were equally helpless. Thus far the spoils of war had been battle-fields, empty trenches, a few wounded Japanese soldiers, and one Russian prisoner in a red shirt. So, hearing that General Oku feared for our safety, we sent him a round-robin relieving him of any responsibility on our account, and praying that we should be allowed to go closer to the fighting, or our occupation would be gone. Then we went to sleep.

The straw that broke the camel's back was added to the burden of the beast next morning. The final word came from General Oku, through a Guardsman, that the Russians were in flight, that there would probably be no decisive battle for some time and that if there should be, we were to be allowed no closer than four miles from the firing-line. Well, you cannot see, that far away, how men behave when they fight, are wounded, and die—and as all battles look alike at a long distance, there was nothing for some of us to do but go home. So, on a bright sunny morning, Richard Harding Davis, Melton Prior, the wild Irishman, and I sat alone in the last dirty compound, with the opening guns of Liao-Yang booming in the distance. I had sold Fuji to Guy Scull, and I wondered at the nerve of the man, for the price, though small, was big for Fuji. I pulled that vicious stallion's wayward forelock with malicious affection several times, and watched Scull curvet out on him to a more dangerous fate than any danger that war could hang over him. Away we went, then, Davis, Prior, and the Irishman on horseback—what became of his bicycle, I don't know to this day—on the backward trail of the war-dragon—for home. We went back through Haicheng, and spent a few hours in the same deserted compound that we had left only a few days before. Its silence was eloquent of the clash and clatter and storm of our ten days' imprisonment there. There we went to see General Fukushima, who with great alacrity gave us a pass back to Japan. He could not understand why all of us would have preferred to be at Port Arthur. It mystified him a good deal.

"General," said Dean Prior, "you promised me that I should go to Port Arthur." The General laughed.

"I tried to get you to stay for the third column," he said, and Prior was silent, whether from conviction or disgust, I don't know.

He wanted us to take a roundabout way to Newchwang, so that we would be always under Japanese protection. There were Chinese bandits, he said, along the short cut that we wanted to take, and there had been many murders and robberies along that road. Just the same, we took that road. So away we went, with carts, coolies, interpreters, and servants—they in the road and I stepping the ties of the Siberian Railway. One hundred yards ahead I saw two Japanese soldiers coming toward me on the track. When they saw me—they mistook me for a Russian, I suppose—they jumped from the track and ran back along the edge of a cornfield—disappearing every now and then. I was a little nervous, for I thought they might take a pot shot at me from a covert somewhere, but they were only dashing back to announce my coming to a squad of soldiers, and as I passed them on the track the major in command grinned slightly when he answered my salute.

We had a terrible pull that day through the mud, and we reached a Chinese village at dusk. The Irishman, with the subtle divination that is his only, found by instinct the best house in the town for us to stay. It had around it a garden full of flowers, clean mats and antique chairs within, and there was plenty of good cold water and nice fresh eggs. My last memory that night, as I lay on a cot under a mosquito-net, was of the Irishman and our aged host promenading up and down the garden-path. The Chinaman had never heard a word of English before in his life, but the Irishman was talking to him with perfect gravity and fluency about the war and about us, giving our histories, what we had done and what we had failed to do, and all the time the old Chinaman was bowing with equal gravity, and smiling as though not one word escaped his full comprehension. How the Irishman kept it up for so long, and why he kept it up for so long, I do not know, but they were strolling up and down when I went to sleep.

The next day we had another long pull through deeper mud. For hours and hours we went through solid walls of ten-foot corn; sometimes we were in mud and water above the knees. Once we got lost—anybody who followed that Irishman always got lost—and an old Chinaman led him and Davis and me for miles through marshy cornfields. Sometimes we would meet Chinamen bringing their wives and children back home—now that both armies had gone on ahead—the women in carts, their faces always averted, and the children dangling in baskets swung to either end of a bamboo pole, and carried by father or brother over one shoulder. By noon the kind old Chinaman connected us with our caravansary in another Chinese town. There the Irishman got eggs by laying a pebble and cackling like a hen, and the entire village gathered around us to watch us eat our lunch. They were all children from octogenarian down—simple, kindly, humorous, and with a spirit of accommodation and regard for the stranger that I have never seen outside of our Southern mountains. After lunch we took photographs of them, and of ourselves in turn with them, and the village policeman—he did not carry even a stick—was a wag and actor, and made beautiful poses while the village laughed in toto. This would not have been possible in a Japanese town. Nearly all of them followed us out of the village, and they seemed sorry to have us go.

Soon I tried a Chinese cart for a while, and in spite of its jolting I almost went to sleep. As I drowsed I heard a voice say:

"You'd better tell him to keep awake." Another voice answered:

"I will take care of him," and I lifted my hat, to see the ever-faithful Takeuchi stalking along through the deep mud by me, with a big stick in his hand. But we saw no bandits. It was the middle of the afternoon now, and we began to meet column after column of Japanese troops moving toward the front from the new point of disembarkation—Newchwang. Somehow, on the wind, a rumor was borne to us that there was a foreign hotel in Newchwang which had bath-tubs and beer and tansan; even a wilder rumor came that the Russians had left champagne there. We held a consultation. If all those things were there, it were just as well that some one of us should engage them for the four as quickly as possible. The happy lot fell to me, and I mounted Dean Prior's great white horse and went ahead at a gallop. That horse was all right loping in a straight line, but if there was a curve to be turned or a slippery bank to descend, his weak back drew mortality for the rider very near. Then he had an ungovernable passion for lying down in mud-holes and streams, which held distinct possibilities for discomfort. Twice he went down with me on the road, though he walked over a stream on a stone arch that was not two feet wide in perfect safety. In one river, too, he went down, and we rolled together for a little while in the yellow mud and water; but I ploughed a way through columns of troops, and, led by a Chinese guide, reached Newchwang at sunset. I went to the Japanese headquarters, but could learn nothing about that hotel. I asked directions of everybody, and when, going down the street, I saw coming toward me through the dust a boy with a tennis-racquet over his shoulder and a real white girl in a white dress, with black hair hanging down her back, I asked directions again, merely that I might look a little longer upon that girl's face. It seemed a thousand years since I had seen a woman who looked like her. I found the hotel, and I got rooms for ourselves and quarters for our servants and horses. Looking for a stable in the dark, I turned a corner, to see a Japanese naked bayonet thrust within a foot of my breast. Naturally, I stopped, but as it came no nearer, I went on, and not a word was said by the sentinel nor by me. None of my companions came in, and I ate dinner in lonely magnificence, put beer, champagne, and tansan on ice, gave orders that the servants should wait until midnight, and sent guides out to wait for Davis and Prior and the Irishman at the city gates. Then I went to bed. About two o'clock there was a pounding on my door, and a little Japanese officer with a two-handed sword some five feet long came in and arrested me as a Russian spy. He said I would have to leave Newchwang by the earliest train the next morning. Now, if I had had wings I should have been cleaving the Manchurian darkness at that very minute for home, and with a little more self-control I should have hung out the window and laughed when he made that direful threat. But I had ridden into that town on the biggest white horse I ever saw, and I looked like an English field-marshal without his blouse. I had gone to the Japanese headquarters. I had registered my name and the names of my three friends on the hotel-book. I had filled out the blank that is usual for the passing stranger in time of war. I had added information that was not asked for on that blank. I had engaged four rooms, had ordered dinner for four people, and had things to eat and things to drink awaiting for the other three whenever they should come. I had my war-pass in my pocket, which I displayed, and yet this Japanese officer, the second in command at Newchwang and a graduate of Yale, as I learned afterward, woke me up at two o'clock in the morning, and in excellent English put me under arrest as a Russian spy. I was robed only in a blue flannel shirt and a pair of "Bonnie Maginns," but I sprang shamelessly from out that mosquito-netting, and I said things that I am not yet sorry for. Over that scene I will draw the curtain quickly—but just the same, a Japanese soldier sat at my door all through the night. The next morning I heard a great noise, and I saw our entire train in the street below. I called my sentinel to the window and pointed out to him four carts, twelve horses and mules, eight coolies, and eight interpreters and servants, and I asked him if Russian spies were accustomed to travel that way—if they did business with a circus procession and a brass band? He grinned slightly.

Half an hour later Davis and I went down to see the Yale graduate, and he apologized. He said graciously that he would remove the guard from my door, and I did not tell him that that intelligent soldier had voluntarily removed himself an hour before. We told him we were very anxious to get back to Yokohama to catch a steamer for home. He said that we probably would not be allowed to go home on a transport, and that even if we had permission we could not, for the reason that no transports were going.

"There is none going to-day?"

"No."

"Nor to-morrow?"

"No."

"Nor the day after?"

"No."

We said good-by. Just outside the door we met another Japanese officer who had been sent into Manchuria with a special message from the Emperor, and had been told incidentally to look in on the correspondents. He had looked in on us above Haicheng, and he was apparently trying to do all he could for us. He was quite sure if we saw the Major in Command there, that we should be allowed to go. "Is there a transport going to-day?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "I am taking it myself." I kept my face grave.

"And to-morrow?"

"Yes."

"And the next day?"

"Yes."

Three of them—all useless—nailed within five minutes from the lips of a brother-officer and within ten steps of the Yale graduate's door! It was to laugh.

I took a Chinese sampan, and with sail and oar beat up that yellow river for an hour to find the Major in Command. When I got to his office, he had gone to tiffin. Where did he tiffin? The answer was a shake of the head. Nobody could disturb the gallant major while he was tiffining, no matter how urgent the caller's business was. When would he return? Within one hour and a half. Well, we would have just a little more than another hour in which to catch that transport, even if we got permission to take it. And somehow cooling heels in the ante-chamber of the Major while he tiffined had no particular charm for me just then, so I decided very quickly to start back by Chefoo and Shanghai, even if it did take five extra days and perhaps cause us to lose the steamer for home.

So we gathered our things together and took passage on a British steamer for China. A Chinese sampan took the ever-faithful Takeuchi and me with our luggage to the ship. I handed Takeuchi two purple fifty-sen bills that the army issues in Manchuria as scrip—to give to the Chinaman—and started up the gangway toward the Captain's cabin. Takeuchi thought I had gone, but I looked around just in time to see him thrust one of the bills in his own pocket, give the Chinaman the other, put his right foot against the Chinaman's breast, and joyously kick him down the gangway into the sampan. Selah!

The joy of being on a British ship with the Union Jack over you and no Japanese to say you nay! Never shall I forget that England liberated the slave. She freed some of the White Slaves of Haicheng.

To avoid floating mines we anchored that night outside the bar, but next morning we struck the wide, free, blue seas, with an English captain, whose tales made Gulliver's Travels sound like the story of a Summer in a Garden. Without flies, fleas, mosquitoes, or scorpions, we slept when and where we pleased and as long as we pleased. Once more we wore the white man's clothes and ate his food and drank his drink, and were happy. In the afternoon we passed for miles through the scattered cargoes of Chinese junks that had been destroyed by the Japanese while on their way to supply the Russians at Port Arthur, and that night we saw the flash of big guns as once more we swept near the fortress we had hoped to see. A sunny, still day once again and we were at Chefoo, where in the harbor we saw—glory of glories!—an American Man-of-War. Ashore Chefoo was distinctly shorn of the activities that lately had made the town hum. There were only a Russian or two there from a destroyed torpedo-boat, a few missionaries in rickshaws and dressed like Chinese, a few queer-looking foreign women in the streets, and a lonely, smooth-shaven young man from Chicago, who ran a roulette-wheel and took in more kinds of Oriental currency than I knew to exist.

"I am sorry the Russians have gone," he said; "they were great gamblers."

There we learned that fighting was going on at Liao-Yang—real, continuous fighting; and a melancholy of which no man spoke set in strong with all of us. But there was that American Man-of-War out in the harbor, and Davis and I went out to her and climbed aboard. We saw nice, clean American boys again, and pictures of their sisters and sweethearts, and we had dinner and wine, and we made that good ship shake from stem to stern with song.

Two days later we were threading a way through a wilderness of ships of all the nations of the earth into Shanghai. Shanghai—that "Paris of the East"—with its stone buildings and hotels and floating flags; its beautiful Bund bordered with trees and parks and paths, its streets thronged with a medley of races and full of modern equipages, rattling cabs, rattling rickshaws, and ancient Chinese wheelbarrows each with one big wooden wheel, pushed by a single Chinaman with a strap over his shoulder, and weighted, sometimes, with six Chinese factory-girls, their tiny feet dangling down—and all this confusion handled and guarded by giant, red-turbaned Sikh policemen—each bearing himself with the dignity of a god. There was gay life in Shanghai—good and bad; town clubs and country clubs, with tennis, cricket, and golf. There were beautiful roads, filled with handsome carriages and smart men and women on smart horses, and there were road-houses with men and women who were not so smart seated around little tables all over the verandas, with much music coming from within. Along that Bund at night were house-boats anchored, on the decks of which people dined among red candles to the music of a brass band in a park near by—brilliantly lit. And there was a Chinese quarter not far away, thronged with strange faces, with narrow, twisting streets, some murky and some gay with lanterns that hung from restaurants, theatres, opium dens, singing and gambling halls, while through those streets coolies bore high on their shoulders gayly dressed Chinese singing-girls from one hall to another.

On the ship for Nagasaki were many young Chinese boys and girls going to other lands to be educated, and I was given two significant bits of information: "Ten years ago," said a man, "a foreign education was a complete bar to political preferment over here. Things have so changed and a foreign education is now such an advantage that rich Chinamen who have political aspirations for their sons purposely send them abroad to be educated."

"On this ship," said another, "and the two ships that follow her, many hundred young Chinamen are going over to Japan to get a military training. And yet, according to some observers, there is nothing doing in China—even on the part of Japan."

We landed at Nagasaki and had a three nights' ride to Yokohama in a crowded car in which it was possible to sleep only when sitting upright. On the third day the long train came to a stop at daybreak and every Japanese soul in it—man, woman, and child—poured out, each with a towel, scrubbed vigorously at a water-trough and came back, each sawing on his teeth with a wooden tooth-brush. Such a scene could be paralleled nowhere else. I suppose the Japanese are the cleanliest people in the world.

Tokio at last—and a request from the Japanese: Would we consider going back to Port Arthur? We would not.

"Please consider the question." We considered.

"Yes," we said, "we will go."

"You can't," said the Japanese.

Right gladly then we struck the backward trail of the Saxon. The Happy Exile went aboard with me, and so did Takeuchi, who brought his pretty young wife along to say, "How d'ye do?" and "Good-by." Takeuchi brought a present, too—a little gold mask of a fox, which he thought most humorously fitting—a scarf-pin for Inari-sama, which is the honorific deistical form of my honorable name in Japanese. Later, in this country, I got Takeuchi's photograph and this card: "I wish you please send me your recommondation which is necessary to have in my business." He shall have it.

All my life Japan had been one of the two countries on earth I most wanted to see. No more enthusiastic pro-Japanese ever put foot on the shore of that little island than I was when I swung into Yokohama Harbor nearly seven months before. I had lost much—but I was carrying away in heart and mind the nameless charm of the land and of the people—for the charm of neither has much succumbed to the horrors imported from us; Fujiyama, whose gray head lies close under the Hand of Benediction; among the foot-hills below the Maid of Miyanoshita—may Fuji keep her ever safe from harm; O-kin-san the kind, who helps the poor and welcomes the stranger—her little home at the head of the House of the Hundred Steps I could see from the deck of the ship; the great Daibutsu at Kamakura, whose majestic calm stills all the world while you look upon his face and—the babies, in streets and doorways—the babies that rule the land as kings. I did have, too, for a memory, Shin—my rickshaw man—but Shin failed me at the last minute on the dock. Yes, even at that last minute on the dock, Shin tried to fool me. But I forgive him.

Of this war in detail I knew no more than I should have known had I stayed at home—and it had taken me seven months to learn that it was meant that I should not know more. There can be no quarrel with what was done—only with the way it was done—which was not pretty. Somehow, as Japan sank closer to the horizon, I found myself wondering whether the Goddess of Truth couldn't travel the breadth of that land incog.—even if she played the leading part in a melodrama with a star in her forehead and her own name emblazoned in Japanese ideographs around her breast. I think so. I wondered, too, if in shedding the wrinkled skin of Orientalism, Japan might not have found it even better than winning a battle—to shed with it polite duplicity and bring in the blunt telling of the truth; for if the arch on which a civilization rests be character, the key-stone of that arch, I suppose, must be honesty—simple honesty.

Right gladly we struck the backward Trail of the Saxon.