T... It is 6 P.M. of the third day now and we are at Wa-fang-tien. We left Pa-lien-tan this morning and made thirty-two miles. We took lunch in a stinking Chinese village, and the chicken—well, it was a question which was the more disturbing conjecture—how long it had lived or how long it had been dead. Oh, Yokoyama! Fuji has not improved. He kicked the Italian on the leg today and I've just helped to bandage it. Again to-day I had to let him go. I tried to tire him out by riding him through mud-holes and see-sawing him across deep wagon-ruts. But it was no use. If a horse, bullock, man, woman, child, cat, or dog is visible 500 yards away, Fuji with a squeal makes for it. When the object is overtaken, Fuji pays no attention to it, but looks for something else toward which he can start his squealing way. For brutal, insensate curiosity give me Fuji, or rather give him to anybody but me. 'Tis an Eveless land for Fuji, but hope springs eternal for him. Dinner is just over—tinned soup, half-cooked tinned sausages, prunes and rice from Yokoyama's larder—which we are stocking at 12 yen per day. Hundreds of coolies are squatting along the railroad track. In front of us a group of Japanese soldiers has stood for five minutes staring at us with the frank curiosity of children. They began to move away when I pulled this note-book. Leaning against the tallest telegraph-pole, with hands bound behind him, his pigtail tied to a thick wire twice twisted, stands a miserable Chinese coolie. An hour ago I saw him on his knees across the track, held down by four men, while the littlest Japanese soldier in the group beat him heavily with a stick much thicker than the thumb. Then they led him praying, howling, and limping to the telegraph-pole, where he stands as an awful example to his fellows. He had stolen some coal and it was his second offence. It was all right, of course, but it was strange to see the apparent joy with which the Japanese did it and stranger still to see the other coolies grinning, chatting, and making fun of the culprit. I wonder whether they were crooking the pregnant hinges of the knee or what on earth it did mean. We were hung up here at 3 P.M., and allowed to go no farther. There is no order for us to remain—only a "strong desire" that we should—which is the Japanese way. Davis and I had a great bath to-day in a pool which somebody had dammed up—for what purpose I know not. What I do know is that it was not meant for us.
... Sitting on the sand, we are this August 5th under birch saplings and by the side of a running stream. Davis and Lewis are asleep in the sand. Fifteen miles only is our métier to-day and Brill is anxious to go on. The roads are bad farther on, say the Japanese, and transportation difficult: the only satisfactory reason yet given for this hideous delay, and this, I'm afraid, not the true one. They simply don't trust us—that's all. The body of the dragon is naturally getting bigger and his vertebræ are distinctly more lumpy. For instance, he gathered in a train of thirty freight-cars this morning and he had six hundred coolies pulling it for him. The button of him dropped back to-day toward the tip o' tail that is his anatomical place. Brill passed him on the road. His bicycle-tire was punctured and he was trying to mend it, Brill says, with 25-cent postage-stamps. He evidently succeeded, for he has just arrived. He seems to have had a high old time on the way. At the last Chinese village he halted long enough to offer a prize—what I don't know—to the Chinese child that could display the prettiest embroidered stomacher. He had them lined up in a shy, smiling row, and was about to deliver the prize when the winner was suddenly thrust forward with a wonderful piece on his chubby tum-tum. The wild Irishman gave him the prize, hoisted him on the bicycle and circled the compound swiftly to the delight of the village. I asked him how he communicated with these isolated heathens and he said he talked Irish to them. I'm quite sure he does and he seems to make himself understood.
It's sunset now at North Wa-fang-tien and all of us are out in a hard-packed, sand-floor yard under little birch trees. It was a hot ride to-day—the last mile being over a glaring white road and through glaring white sand. That glare of a fierce sun made the head ache and the very eyeballs burn. I almost reeled from Fuji, who for that mile was, for the first time, almost docile.
We had a shock and a thrill to-day—Brill, Lewis, Davis, and I. It was noon, and while we sat on a low stone wall in a grassy grove, a few carts filled with wounded Japanese passed slowly by. In one cart sat a man in a red shirt, with a white handkerchief tied over his head and under his chin. Facing him was a bearded Japanese with a musket between his knees. The man in the red shirt wearily turned his face. It was young, smooth-shaven, and white. The thrill was that the man was the first Russian prisoner we had seen—the shock that among those yellow faces was a captive with a skin like ours. I couldn't help feeling pity and shame—pity for him and a shame for myself that I needn't explain. I wondered how I should have felt had I been in his place and suddenly found four white men staring at me. It's no use. Blood is thicker than water—or anything else—in the end.
This is distinctly a human country—a country of cornfields, beans and potatoes, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, goats, and no freaks in tree-trunk, branch, or foliage. But I can't get over seeing a Chinaman in a cornfield. It is always a shock. He doesn't seem to have any right there—somehow nobody does except a white man or a darky. There are tumble-bugs in the dusty road and gray, flying grasshopper-like things that rise from the dust, flutter a few feet from the earth and drop back again, just as they do at home. And the dragon-flies—why, they are nothing in the world but the "snake-doctors" that I used to throw stones at when I was a boy in the Bluegrass. The mountains are treeless and volcanic, but it's a human country and I don't feel as far from home as I did in Japan. Brill says it all looks like a lot of Montana hills around Ohio cornfields: only the corn is millet that grows twelve feet high. The people eat the top, they feed the blades to live-stock, and the stalk serves almost every purpose of bamboo and for firewood as well. You can ride for hours between two solid walls of it, and you wonder how there can be people enough in the scattering villages to plant and till, or even to cut it. A richer land I never saw. It looks as though it would feed both armies, and yet there was no sign—no burned house or robbed field or even a cast-off bit of the soldier's equipment to show that an army had ever passed that way. One fact only spoke significantly of war. No woman—except a child or a crone—was ever visible. This struck me—when I recalled the trail of the Massachusetts volunteers from Siboney to Santiago and the thousands of women refugees straggling into Caney—as very remarkable. I suppose both Japanese and Russians are trying to keep the good-will of the Chinaman as well as of the rest of the world. I don't wonder that the Russians are fighting for that land, nor shall I wonder should the Japanese, if they win, try to keep it. But how it should belong to anybody but the Chinaman who has tilled it in peace and with no harm to anybody for thousands of years—I can't for the life of me see.
Next morning there was a sign of war. At daybreak some red flecks from the dragon's jaws drifted back from the mist and dust through which he was writhing forward. It looked, some man said, like the procession of the damned who filed past Dante in hell. Each man had a red roll around him. They uttered no sound—they looked not at one another, but stared vacantly and mildly at us as they shuffled silently from the mist and shuffled silently on. The expression of each was so like the expression of the rest that they looked like brothers. A more creepy, ghost-like thing I never saw. I knew not what they were, but they fascinated me and made me shudder, and I found myself drawing toward them, step by step, hardly conscious that I was moving. I do not recall that any one of us uttered a word. Yet they were only sick men coming back from the front—soldiers sick with the kakke, the "beriberi," the sleeping sickness. It was hard to believe that the face of any one of them had ever belonged to a soldier—-hard to believe that sickness could make a soldier's face so gentle. That man in the red shirt and those gray ghosts that shuffled so silently out of one mist and so silently into another are the high lights in the two most vivid pictures I've seen thus far.
The beriberi comes from a diet of too much fish and rice, I understand. It numbs the extremities and has a paralyzing effect on body and mind. Summer is its time and snow checks its course. A man may have it a dozen times and sometimes he dies. The young and able-bodied are its favorite victims, old men its rare ones, and women and foreigners it wholly spares. It made great havoc among Japanese soldiers in Korea, but the Japanese now conquer beriberi as though it were a Russian metamorphosis.
Shung-yo-hing is the place now and the time is 2 P.M. The heat was awful and the dust from thousands of carts, coolies, and beasts of burden choked the very lungs. I have the bulge on Fuji now. I knot the reins and draw them over the pommel of a McClellan saddle, thus holding his muzzle close to his chest. It seemed to puzzle Fuji a good deal.
"He can't even neigh," I said to Brill in triumph, and Brill cackled scorn. Fuji neighed five times in the next ten yards. I should say that his record in six hours to-day was about this: stumbling with right forefoot—300 times; stumbling with left hind-foot—200 times; neighs—1,000.
There are about twenty miles more to Kaiping. Haicheng has been taken by the Japanese. Somebody has just come in with cheering news—we can get back to Yokohama by water. Gently we all said: