The Mukden Nichevo published articles in French and in English; notes, poems, a short story, and had an illustrated cover.
Afoo and his fellow-servitors were in their glory when there was a dinner-party. Their organisation was as sure as their service was swift and dexterous. They were quite imperturbable, and if one suddenly said a few moments before dinner: “There will be four extra to dinner to-night,” they would calmly say: “Can do.” Directly he came into my service Afoo asked for a rise of wages. He thought soldiers and fighting in general, and especially war, vulgar. Once I told him he was stupid. “Of course,” he said, “I am stupid. If I were not stupid I should not be your servant, but a Mandarin.”
From Mukden we went to Liaoyang, where we arrived on the 22nd of June. Liaoyang was a smaller town than Mukden, and even dirtier and more picturesque. I lived at the Hôtel International, which was kept by a Greek. It was a Chinese house converted into an hotel, and had about twenty rooms, as small as boxes, each containing a stool, a small basin, and the semblance of a bedstead. The building was incredibly dirty and squalid; the rooms opened on to a filthy yard; there was a noisy and dirty buffet, where one had food if one waited for hours; and also a hall open to the sky, which was covered by an awning of matting during the hotter hours of the day. The railway station was the general rendezvous and the centre of Liaoyang life. There, too, was a buffet and its ceiling was black with flies, so black that you could not see a single white spot in it. I fell ill at this hotel and had a bad attack of dysentery. I spent the first day and night of my illness at the hotel, in the fly-haunted squalor of the Hôtel International, in a high, delirious fever. My Chinese servant disappeared for two days, as there was a feast going on, and when he returned I dismissed him. But I was rescued by Dr. Westwater, who had lived at Liaoyang for years, and had a clean, comfortable house with a beautiful garden. In those clean surroundings and comforts I soon recovered, and in July, Brooke and myself, with two Montenegrin servants, left for Tashichiao. We had been attached to a cavalry brigade of the First Siberian Army Corps, which was commanded by General Samsonoff. We went by train to Tashichiao, with the two Montenegrins, two mules, and five ponies, which it took twelve hours to entrain. The night I arrived at Tashichiao I met Count Bobrinsky, a St. Petersburg friend, and he took me into General Kuropatkin’s train and gave me tea in his mess, and while I was there General Kuropatkin came in himself and drank tea. Brooke and I spent the night in the presbytery of the Catholic church in the village.
I rode to a village a few miles south-west of Tashichiao, and there I found the headquarters of the Brigade established in the kitchen garden of a Chinese house. This was the beginning of a new life in a new world.
That year in Manchuria the rainy season, instead of coming at its proper times and lasting as long as it should have lasted, came in sections and by fits and starts. So the country was either a baked desert or a sea of mud. Looking back on that time now, I see, on the horizon, a range of soft blue mountains. In the foreground, there is a Chinese village built of mud and fenced with mud, and baked by the sun, yellow and hard. There is, perhaps, a little stream with stepping-stones in it; a delicate temple, one-storied and painted red like lacquer, on the water bank, and round it, as far as eye can see, fields of giant millet. The women, dressed in dark blue, the blue of blue china, stand at the doorsteps, smoking their long-stemmed pipes, and there is a crowd of brown, fat, naked children with budding pig-tails.
Then I see the battlefield of Tashichiao: a low range of soft blue hills in the distance; to the west a large expanse of the most brilliant vivid green, from which the cone of an isolated kopje arose; to the east some dark green hills, with patches of sand, and at their base a stretch of emerald-green giant millet; in the middle of the plain a hot, sandy road; blazing heat and a cloudless sky, and Japanese shells bursting in puffs of brown and grey, as if someone was blowing rings of tobacco smoke across the mountains. This battle was a long artillery duel, which went on from early morning until nine in the evening. Colonel Gaedke, who was looking on, said the Russians were shooting well. I wondered how he could tell.
In the evening, after that day’s battle, I rode back to Tashichiao to the presbytery of the Catholic church, where the French correspondents had been living.
It was nine o’clock in the evening when I got home. Two Chinamen had just arrived to rebuild the church. They had pulled down the altar, and at the top of the ladder were working quietly at a new frieze. My two Montenegrin servants were quarrelling fiercely in the yard and throwing brushes and pans at each other. My Chinese boy had prepared a hot bath in the middle of the yard. A Russian gunner, grimy with dirt and sweat, and worn out with fighting, staggered into the yard and said a prayer, when he noticed the building was a church. The day after this, the first of many long retreats began, ending at Haichen station, where the buffet was full of people and where I managed to do a difficult thing—difficult in Manchuria, that is to say, where the trains waited sometimes eighteen hours at a station—to miss the train, and I slept on the platform.
After that, I remember a train journey to Liaoyang, and a soldier crying in the train because another soldier, after using strings of blood-curdling language and startling obscenities, which did not produce any effect, as they were like worn-out counters, called him a sheep; and another soldier dropping his rifle from the train, and jumping from the train to pick it up.