The story in a nutshell is this:
"After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden, where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in modern history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Kuropatkin retreated in fairly good order about a hundred miles north of Mukden."
So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles of snowy trenches.
I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at one time the Japanese thought themselves beaten in the battle and had ordered a retreat, when, a Russian force giving way, they turned quickly to press the advantage and snatched victory from what they had thought was ruin. There are many stories, too, of the inefficiency of the Russian officers, stories made all the more probable in the light of the Russian Commander Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect. "Why, the English would put one of their admirals against the wall and shoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of duty as went entirely unpunished among Russian generals," was one man's comment as he talked with me. "The Rooshians were good fighters--fought 'and to 'and with the butt of their muskets--and if they 'ad 'ad good commanders the Japs would never have won," said an Englishman who had seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the debauchery and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable women travelling regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness being also common. About the same charges were reported to me by a Japanese officer. In fact, it is said that the Japanese contrived to get a very considerable quantity of champagne to the Russian headquarters one day, and the next day made a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossack commanders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much drinking!
The truth is that the Japanese, from camp-followers to commander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians were not. From the day that Russia, aided by France and Germany, forced Japan to cede back to China some of the fruits of her victory over the Chinese, from that hour Japan nursed and fed fat her rankling grudge and bided her time as deliberately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was in Japan an Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced Japan {72} to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see the tremendous interest in the military drills in all the Japanese schools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank answer: "We are getting ready to lick Russia."
It should also be observed that when the war came on the Japanese were not only in a state of preparedness so far as battleships and army drill and munitions of war were concerned, but they were also prepared in the vital matter of proper medical attendance.
"When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba the army was utterly without proper medical corps and equipment, and the death-rate was disgracefully high. But the first Japanese who fell in crossing the Yalu were taken at once to the best of Japanese surgeons and cared for in the most approved of modern military hospitals." So said a frank Scotchman to me yesterday, and in the light of the official statistics I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasant allusion to America. When the war with Russia ended, Baron Takaki, Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, boasted that whereas in the Spanish-America War "fourteen men died from preventable diseases to one man killed on the field of battle," the Japanese had lost only one man from disease to every four from bullets. Now the Japanese, as usual, had not worked out any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable record, but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the white man's inventions and getting as much or more--more in this case--out of them than the white man himself.
The Japanese record, showing in such amazing fashion what a wisely directed health organization may accomplish, is worth remembering not only in connection with plans for military efficiency, but also in connection with plans for general public health activities at home. Every State should spend five times as much for this public health work as at present.
In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces {73} of the fierce contest that only five or six years ago scarred its bosom, and the serried shocks of newly harvested corn, kaoliang (sorghum) and millet--in some infrequent instances fertilized by the dead men's bones--are seen on fields where contending armies struggled. Let it be so for a little while; let the Manchurian peasant sow and garner in peace while he may; for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China's Three Eastern Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's blood may redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended is to me perfectly clear. By reason of the Japanese railroad monopoly through the very heart of Southern Manchuria, and her leased territory on the coast, Japan has obtained power bordering on control, and everything goes to show that she has fully made up her mind to complete and retain that control.
Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire, it is easy to understand how it has now roused the covetousness of Japan just as the temptation a few years ago proved too strong for Russia. Immense farming areas are only thinly settled; some of the richest of the world's mineral resources have only been touched.