Colonel Gaedke stood aloof in his military technical knowledge. He was stiff in opinions, and, as it happened, always in the wrong. He was one of those people who are wrong from the right reasons. He saw at once that people talked nonsense about the Russian Army, and this led him rashly to prophesy they would win the war. He was indignant with the strategy of the higher command. He used to arrive in a great state of excitement and say: “Kuropatkin has again made a mistake.” And on one occasion he told me that if the Russian Generals went on waging war in such a fashion, he would go home, he simply could not look on at so many glaring errors in tactics and strategy.
Of the correspondents the most extraordinary character was Archibald. He wore about four rows of medals on his tunic. In fact, he went to war to collect medals, and he had been with the Boers and with the English during the South African War. He was the despair of the press censors. He wanted to go home after he had been at Mukden a certain time and had taken a number of photographs; but he wanted to go home via Japan and not across the Trans-Siberian railway. This correspondents had promised not to do, but Archibald had determined to do it. He took one of the press censors with him to Pekin, and arranged for his party to be kidnapped and subsequently rescued. When he came back, he used the adventure as a lever, and obtained the permission he wished. His imagination was unlimited, and his power of statement unrivalled. When he came back from Pekin he said he had interviewed the Emperor of China and the Empress, and he had been made a Mandarin of the highest class. During the European War, I believe he got into trouble by bringing Austrian papers into England.
M. de Jessen was the most amiable of Danes, a shrewd observer and a vivid writer. But the most interesting of all the correspondents I knew was a Russian I met later, called Nicholas Popoff, who was destined to be one of the pioneers of flying in Russia, and one of the first pilots to accomplish daring feats in the air. Alas! he paid for his temerity with a bad crash, which disabled him for life.
We led a restless but amusing life. Everyone wanted to go to the front, and nobody was allowed to go.
Mukden would have been an ideal spot to spend the summer in, if there had been no war going on. The climate was warm; the air fresh; the place full of colour, variety, and interest. Mukden is a large, square town surrounded by a huge, thick, dilapidated, and mouldering wall, on the top of which you can go for a long walk. Inside the wall, the closely packed one-storied houses are intersected by two or three main streets and innumerable small alleys. The shops in the main streets are gay and splendid with sign-boards: huge blue-and-red boots covered with gold stars hang in front of the bootmakers; golden and many coloured shields and banners hang in front of other shops; gongs clang outside the theatres to attract the passers-by; every now and then a Mandarin rides by, gorgeous in navy blue and canary-coloured satin, on a white fast-trotting pony, and behind him, at a respectful distance, his servant follows him on a less elegant piece of horse-flesh; or large carts lumber along with prehistoric wheels, and with the curtains of their closed hoods drawn, probably conveying some Chinese ladies. Add to all this, sunshine and the smell of life and brilliant colour. There is nothing modern in the town. It is the same as it was a thousand years ago, and at Mukden you could live the same life as a contemporary of Julius Cæsar lived. One of the most curious features of Mukden is the palace. It is deserted, but it still contains a collection of priceless art treasures, jewels, china, embroidery, and illuminated MSS. These treasures are locked up in mouldering cupboards. Its courtyards are carpeted with luxuriant grass, its fantastic dilapidated wooden walls are carven, painted, and twisted into strange shapes such as you see on an Oriental vase. The planks are rotten, the walls eaten with rain and damp, and one thanks Heaven that it is so, and that nothing has been restored.
In Mukden no house had more than one story, and the houses of the well-to-do were divided into quadrangles like an Oxford College. Life at Mukden, without the complicated machinery of European modern life, without any of the appliances that are devised for comfort and which so often are engines of unrest, had all the comforts one could wish. There were no bathrooms; on the other hand, if you wanted a hot bath, a Chinaman would bring you an enormous tub, long and broad enough to lie down in, and fill it with boiling water from kettles. There was no question of the bath being tepid because something had gone wrong with the pipes or the tap.
Mukden reminded me of a Chinese fairy-tale by Hans Andersen. The buildings, the shops, the temples, the itinerant pedlars, the sounding gongs, the grotesque signs seemed to belong to the realm of childish trolldom or to some great pantomime. It was in the place of Mukden, one felt, that the Emperor of China, whom Andersen tells of, sat and sighed for the song of the nightingale, when his artificial metallic singing bird suddenly snapped and ceased to sing. Still more enchanting in the same way were the tombs of Pai-Ling and Fu-Ling. Here the delicate and gorgeous-coloured buildings, red as lacquer and curious in design, which protect the remains of the Manchurian dynasty, are approached by wild wood-ways, paths of soft grass, and alleys of aromatic and slumber-scented trees.
The high, quaint towers and ramparts which surround the tombs are half dilapidated, the colours are faded, the staircases rotten and overgrown with moss and grass, and no profane hand is allowed to restore or repair them.
While I was at Mukden I had an interview with the Chinese Viceroy, and one day I was invited to luncheon at the Chinese Foreign Office. The meal was semi-European. It began with tea. Large uncut green tea leaves floated in delicate cups; and over the cup and in it a second cup put upside down made a cover. There followed about seventeen courses of meat entrées, delicately cooked. I thought I would give one of the courses a miss, and refused a dish. The meal immediately ceased. The plan was evidently to go on feeding your guests till they had had enough, and then to stop. On the following day, the Mandarins, who had been present, left large red slips of paper, covered with elegant characters, on us; these were visiting-cards to say they would call the same afternoon, and in the afternoon they paid us a visit in person.
Here at Mukden we lived, and here we fretted, and I fretted more than anyone, as I was so inexperienced in journalism that I thought it was impossible to write to the newspaper unless something startling happened. Now I know better. Had I had more experience then, I should have known that Mukden was a mine of copy. One night we gave a dinner-party at the Der-Lung-Den and invited all the correspondents and the Press censors as well. We edited a newspaper for the occasion, of which one copy was written out by hand.