Before dawn I had some food in the Colonel’s room. While I was there, he sent for the doctor. “I hear,” he said, “that you used our bandages for the wounded who came in last night.” The doctor said this was so. “You had no business to do that,” said the Colonel. “I am expecting severe fighting to-day, and if my men are wounded I shall have no bandages for them.” The doctor said nothing. He knew this was true; every bandage had been used. “I strictly forbid you to do anything of the kind again,” said the Colonel. The doctor saluted and went out. He at once rode to the nearest Red Cross Station, and came back with a provision of bandages later in the morning.
At dawn we started for Lonely Tree Hill, trotting all the way. The road was covered with bandages; the dead were lying about here and there; but when we arrived at the hill the spectacle was appalling. I was the only foreigner who was allowed to visit the hill that day. As the Colonel rode up the hill we passed the body of a Japanese soldier which lay waxen and stiff on the side of the road, and suddenly began to move. The hill was littered with corpses. Six hundred Japanese dead were buried that day, and I do not know how many Russians. The corpses lay in the dawn, with their white faces and staring eyes like hateful waxwork figures. Even death seemed to be robbed of its majesty and made hideous and bedraggled by the fingers of war. But not entirely. Kislitski, who was with me, pointed to a dead Japanese officer who was lying on his back, and told me to look at his expression. He was lying with his brown eyes wide open and showing his white teeth. But there was nothing grim or ghastly in that smile. It was miraculously beautiful; it was not the smile of inscrutable content which we see on certain statues of sleeping warriors such as that of Gaston de Foix at Milan, or Guidarello Guidarelli at Ravenna, but a smile of radiant joy and surprise, as if he had suddenly met with a friend for whom he had longed, above all things, at a moment when of all others he had needed him, but for whose arrival he had not even dared to hope. Near him a Russian boy was lying, fair and curly-headed, with his head resting on one arm, as if he had fallen asleep like a tired child overcome with insuperable weariness, and had opened his eyes to pray to be left at peace just a little longer.
The trenches and the ground were littered with all the belongings of the Japanese: rifles, ammunition, bayonets, leather cases, field-glasses, scarlet socks, dark-blue greatcoats, yellow caps, maps, painting-brushes, tablets of Indian ink, soap, toothbrushes, envelopes full of little black pills, innumerable notebooks, and picture postcards, received and ready for sending. Some of the Japanese dead wore crosses. One had a piece of green ribbon sewn in a little bag hanging round his neck. One had been shot through a postcard which he wore next to his heart.
I saw a Russian soldier terribly wounded just as he had begun to eat his luncheon in the shelter of the hill. So many men were buried that day that the men were faint and nauseated by the work of burying the dead. The battle was over, and now there were only daily short periods of mutual shelling. We lived all day on the hill, and we slept in a broken-down house at the foot of one end of it. There were no windows in this house, and the doors had to be used for fuel. The nights were piercingly cold. The place was full of insects, and we were covered with lice. I lived for a week on the top of this hill without anything of particular interest happening, and on the 30th of October I left with Colonel Philemonov, who had been ordered to Russia by the doctors. He had been getting worse, and could scarcely move from his bed. In spite of this he would get up from time to time and, muffled in a cloak, go up to the top of the hill.
He was given the St. George’s Cross for the battle of the Sha-ho.
As we rode away he told me how he had lived with his men and regarded them as his children, and that it broke his heart to go away. He was a man of forbidding exterior, with rather a grim manner; he frightened some people, but he was refined and cultivated, with a quiet sense of humour, the embodiment of unaffected courage and calm devotion to duty. The men worshipped him. The officers admired him, but I remember one day when I rejoined the battery the following year a discussion at the Mess, when the doctor said that although he admired Philemonov immensely, he thought a good-natured officer, whom we had all known, who used frankly to go to the base whenever there was a chance of fighting, was superior as a man, a better man, and to my astonishment most of the officers agreed with him.
One curious trait about Philemonov was that he was infinitely indulgent to clever scamps, if they amused him, and rather unfair towards conscientious dullards. He punished, as some poet says somewhere, the just unwise more hardly than the wise unjust, and he liked being bluffed, and although he wasn’t really taken in, he was indulgent, more than indulgent, to a successful piece of bluff. I arrived at Mukden on the 31st of October, and the battery returned on the 4th of November to repair the guns. We lived once more in the temple outside the city walls. The autumn had come and gone. It was winter. There had been no autumn, but a long summer and an Indian summer of warm, hazy days. One day the trees were still green, and the next the leaves had disappeared. The sky became grey, the snow fell, and the wind cut like a knife. The exquisite outlines of the country now appeared in all their beauty. The rare trees with their frail fretwork of branches stood out in dark and intricate patterns against the rosy haze of the wintry sunset, softened with innumerable particles of brown dust, and one realised whence Chinese artists drew their inspiration, and how the “Cunning worker in Pekin” pricked on to porcelain the colours and designs which make Oriental china so beautiful and precious. In the meantime I heard from the Morning Post that they no longer wanted a correspondent in Manchuria, so I decided to go home. Had I waited a few days longer, I could have remained correspondent for the Standard, but this I did not know till it was too late. I stayed at Mukden till the 1st of December, when I started for London.