"Swine!" she cried. "Son of a foreign swine!"—and struck the piece of gold that he extended towards her out of his hand.
2
The railway terminus at Tokyo was gay with bunting and thronged by a great crowd of people. A brass band somewhere out of sight broke into crashing martial music. "Banzai!" roared the khaki-clad figures in the closely packed carriages, and in response the women and children waved little hand-flags that bore the national emblem on a white ground.
Japan had declared war on Germany, and the occasion was the departure of a Reserve Division which was shortly to operate against the German fortress of Tsingtau. The windows of the carriages were blocked by grim, fighting faces: men from the North. Among them was Tani, sometime maker of sandals; and on the platform beneath his window, like a painted butterfly hovering round the cannon's mouth, stood Su Su O, eyes suspiciously bright.
"Return if the gods will it!" she whispered, echoing the murmured farewells of mothers, wives, and lovers. The grim memories of ten years ago still lingered. The vaulted roof of the terminus had echoed so many farewells; so few who parted amid the roars of "Banzai!" had greeted one another again. "If the gods will," said the women now, and the younger men still shouted "Banzai!" in reply. But at the last, as the long train steamed slowly out of the station, the finite human heart held sway. The oft-repeated "Banzai!" changed to "Sai-onara! Sai-i-onara!"—the saddest, most plaintive-sounding farewell yet fashioned by the human tongue.
A month later found Tani leading a moist and somewhat precarious existence in a trench before Tsingtau. His recollection of the siege since he took part in it had been a series of blurred impressions, mud being predominant throughout. It had seemed an eternity of mud, of ceaseless rifle and artillery fire, of being soaked to the skin, of cold, hunger, and fatigue. Once or twice there had been moments of ferocious hand-to-hand fighting. They were good moments, those; and as he sat in the bottom of a trench cleaning the bolt of his rifle with a piece of oily rag, his thoughts recurred to them with a certain grim enjoyment.
By clearing away the earth at the top of the trench he was able to catch an occasional glimpse of his surroundings. An amphitheatre of barren hills, with the gleam of the sea in the far distance; a small, slow-moving speck upon it that was a Japanese or Allied warship shelling the fortress. Elsewhere, as far as he could see, the ground was scarred by bursting shell, and herring-boned by wire entanglements. Ahead, where the picric shells were pitching, a yellow cloud hung low, as the mists sometimes cling to the slopes of Fujiyama. There were intermittent points of jagged fire beneath the cloud; shrapnel bursting about the German redoubts.
It all represented to Tani a certain amount of uphill ground to be covered under fire: how soon he did not know, but the rest was familiar enough. The inferno of shell-fire that was bursting ahead would redouble till the mere contemplation of it almost stunned the senses. Then the order rippled along to advance: you leaped out of your trench and ran as well as you could across the debris of the last attack and the chaos of barbed wire till the next trench was reached. Sometimes you just dropped into it and panted; sometimes you met other men there, fierce, blue-eyed men who had to be bayoneted. Bullets would shriek and whimper overhead, or hit something with a sullen "Zip!" Men grunted and seemed to fall asleep, or rolled over and lay twitching in a novel and rather ludicrous fashion. And there was the ceaseless rain, the smell of cordite smoke, the bewildering roar of the howitzers.
That was War, as understood by Tani, sometime maker of sandals.
Early one morning a flask of raw saki was passed along the advanced trench. Tani drank deep and tightened his belt, for he was hungry; the spirit ran through his veins like fire. "It is the end," said the man next to him, a battle-scarred veteran of Nogi's Army, with a queer note of exultation in his voice. There, was a sudden lull in the firing. Whistles sounded shrilly.