Port Arthur

by Richard Barry

The public men sent Kodama to Formosa to get rid of him, as Napoleon was sent to Italy, as Grant was sent to Pittsburg Landing, as Von Moltke was shipped from Metz. Kodama went and raised Formosa from savagery to commerce and prosperity. He could have been Prime Minister. “No,” he said. “I would rather pull strings than be one of the strings to be pulled. Russia is peeking up over the border. Let us prepare. Give me a desk in the War Office.”

The public men shook hands, grateful that the unsafe upstart was out of the way. Only soldiers and seers foresee war. Kodama is not a seer. The public men reveled in peace and wondered occasionally that Kodama should bury himself in that dry hole of a war office. They were grateful because the unsafe upstart kept out of the way.

Then the war came and what a scrimmage there was as the public men scrambled for place! One had his finger on things; this only one knew just where, when and how to strike. He alone knew where every merchant steamer in Japan was and how quick each could be turned into a transport. He alone knew the points in the Korean coast where an army could be landed and how quick it could be gotten there. Above all he had audacity—the audacity of genius. His name was Gentaro Kodama, sometime military governor of Formosa, sometime chief of the etape bureau.

From Stereograph, Copyright by H. C. White Co., N. Y.

How shameful for the upstart to command! He had never left his native land. He spoke only Japanese. He had a most vulgar way of pitching into things, of living on the tick of the watch, of showing people in and out minus ceremony, of laughing as a boy might at the things he liked and of frowning ingenuously at what displeased him. More horrors! He scorned a frock coat for ordinary wear and stuck to a kimono. Only upstarts defy the fashions. Sometimes, however, the upstart happens to be a great man—a Socrates barefoot, a Grant without his shoulder straps. Now there were plenty of men who had been abroad, who could speak French and English perfectly, who could crease their trousers and who could add the proper dignity to a function. Besides, Kodama was only a lieutenant-general, of whom the realm had a dozen others, to say nothing of four full generals, two field marshals and an emperor. Why should he run the war?

But Yamagata and Oyama knew and the Emperor knew. They were too keen not to see and they were too patriotic to let Japan suffer. They could not give Kodama the place, but they crowned him with power. So to-day he has the only coach on the Japanese end of the Trans-Siberian railway and is the first to pass over the rebuilt road from Liaoyang to within sight of Port Arthur.

Yamagata stays in Tokyo, one foot in the grave, holding himself to work with will and prayer, snowed with seventy years, in counsel with the Emperor; Oyama, loved by the people, always a figurehead, goes to command the northern armies, and Nogi is given the glory of reducing the “Gibraltar of the East,” but Kodama, with his hands on everything, the brains of all, unifies the whole. I saw him leave Tokyo, cheered by the coolies of the streets, who, like the Emperor and his marshals, know. Already the campaign was in his hands. He went straight to Liaoyang and saw the first great blow struck at Kuropatkin. Then he came here, stayed two days, saw his plans being effected to his satisfaction and got back to Liaoyang before the battle of the Shaho. It was on his way back, during the day’s rest in Dalny, that I saw him for the second time, when he granted me an interview, in which he made his first public utterance.

Certain names flash across an age as meteors across a sky. Cæsar and Napoleon are such names to the student of history, Bernhardt and Irving to the lover of the stage, Shakespeare to the man of books. Their mere pronouncement has a mysterious power, some occult influence to startle and make dumb. Like a searchlight’s flare they throw one into a hopeless sense of insignificance and awe. So it was with me, a student of the war, when Villiers uttered that word, “Goddama,” two weeks ago. I recalled the months in Tokyo when we stormed the war office in vain, how London, Washington and Berlin brought their influences to bear, how the cabinet was assembled, how the ministers pleaded that correspondents, creators of that vast, indefinable power called “public opinion” have some rights. Kodama said they had no rights; they might have privileges, but no rights. One day a grave-faced official announced: “I am very sorry, gentlemen, but you will have to wait the pleasure of General Kodama. We have done all we could for you. The question now is, shall the ministers or Kodama run the war? I much fear Kodama is the man of the hour.”