We lay under the searchlights, which were turning the night valley into a noontide halo, as Villiers spoke. Every light came from the Russian side, which lay wary and restless beyond us. From the Japanese side came no light, no sound. All was secrecy and silence. Yet we knew those hills were alive with toiling brown figures, that a ten-mile line of rifle pits was guarded at every rod by a sleepless soldier watching for the Rising Sun and that the tents of those Generals blinked unceasingly with the steady glow of the oiled silk lanterns, quivering cabalistically with ideographs.
As I looked upon swaying and heavy searchlights, I could think only of the Indian cobra and his mortal enemy, the mongoose. Silently, rolled in a ball, alert for a fatal spring, the little mongoose watches, and the hooded cobra swings ponderously, more nervous with each move. All other enemies he can crush; none other he fears; his body is murderous, his fangs deadly, his stealthy glide noiseless and sure. How well he knows his power! Despot of the jungle, why should he fear? And yet, since the world dawned his tribe has done well to avoid the mongoose.
Steadily swings the cobra; viciously he lunges. Now look! In the folds of the cobra’s neck those incisive teeth, those death-dealing claws! With the fury of whirlwinds lashes the cobra. With eternal calm cling the teeth and claws. Hour after hour goes the unequal struggle. The huge coils relax, the great head falls. Then the beady eyes twinkle. The mongoose slips off in the darkness; prone lies the cobra. Who sheds tears?
[Chapter Three]
TWO PICTURES OF WAR—A GLANCE BACK
Tokyo, June 1st:—Who pays for the war? Here are a few telling one another that they are the bankers. It is at a Sunday concert in the fifth city of the world, a wilderness of sheds flimsy over two million human beings. In the midst rise vast acres of country solitude and rest. A tangle of cryptomeria and fir shade puzzled paths winding through furse of elderberry and hawthorn. Haze and vista spread away past hills and forests, past hothouses and lawns of firm packed earth. A lake dimples a vale, as a smile the cheek of a lovely woman, and its pebbly bed reflects the laughter of the sun. About it fluttering flags, new and gay, festoon the sentiment of all nations, one—Russia—excepted. Thousands, tens of thousands, dot the paths, are merry with the lake, instill from the greenery a quiet joy. Hundreds of voices, atune with instruments, filter the fragrant air with music. Beyond the fence is squalor so dense three sen a month pays for a dwelling; here is leisure so luxurious the senses float in dreams. In a corner a moldy Diabutsu, the calm of Nirvana on his face, nods on a leaf of lotus; “out of the slime itself spotless the lotus grows.”
Tokyo is beautiful—brunette and beautiful. This first day of June she has risen past the cherry blossom, past the wistaria, through the freshness of spring to the full radiance of summer. Pink, like the fleece of clouds in the sky, and heliotrope, like the first flush of sunrise, are past. Now green, rich and deep from a soil of winnowed sustenance, mantles her in Oriental splendor—a splendor simple and elegant with the wealth of the east, shadowy and sunny with the blow of Japan. It folds her about with the assuring clasp of a lover, and she responds with the shy, voluptuous acceptance of a maid o’erwon.
This is a summer of content, a dream of gayety, of insouciance. A million babies gurgle with the baby glory of it. A million mothers coo and coddle at the eternal freshness of it. But here, to-day, in this wilderness of terraced garden, in this bouquet of smiling East, have assembled the daintiest mothers in the land—the peeresses. The son of one is a major-general. Others have captains, colonels, aides-de-camp to tug their heartstrings with fear, to inflate their pulses with pride. Have we not penetrated to the very viscera of war’s nature when we find the mothers of its heroes thus assembled?