Thus the name rose over me as a symbol of power and hauteur. Three days ago I started to Dalny from the front to lay in stores. There was a four- or five-mile walk to Cho-ray-che, the field base where acres are covered with rice and ammunition cases and where a shattered Russian station is being used by the Japanese commissary. On the siding lay the train of flat cars we were to take. In the center was the first coach seen on the Liaotung since the battle of Nanshan, May 26th. It was an ordinary Japanese third-class coach, with paneled doors for each compartment, and hard seats. Out of the corner chimney rose a whirl of smoke and it was easy to see what an improvement even those hard seats would be over the tops of ammunition cases where there was a three-hour ride to be made in the face of a sleet Manchurian wind.
“Back to civilization,” I cried.
“Not for us,” said Gotoh, my interpreter. “That is General Kodama’s coach. It was transported especially for him and he has just brought it down from Liaoyang.”
Then I saw him, with his salient, pointed chin, and his goatee like a French noble, bent over an improvised table, scanning papers. Five or six members of his staff gazed lazily out at a company of soldiers doing fatigue duty with the empty ammunition cases, swarming up over the track and back again, human ants. They had heard the captain say the eyes of Kodama were upon them and they worked feverishly, with rhythmical precision. The General never saw them. His staff did, but he had work to do, and he knew the men were doing theirs.
As we lay shivering on that jolty ride into Dalny, day dying out with bursts of grand color and night coming in to the orchestral music of battle opening in our rear, Gotoh snuggled among the empty cases at my feet, pulled his overcoat about his head, and hummed a song composed by the biwa players of Kioto:
“As a slender boat alone in a great storm,” it ran, “so Japan sails the sea of modern civilization; does she not then need great leaders for her forty million souls!”
The mudflats of the bay were chocolate brown in late sunset as we turned south and slid into the city, shivering, crouched low on the pouches kept huge for bullets anon. Two kerosene lamps in the coach and the sparks from the engine streaked the night as we tooted into the revamped station of spruce and corrugated tin which stands where the hole in the ground was out of which the Russians blew their beautiful Byzantine architecture. We slipped to the ground, cold, hungry, tired, and slouched under the two arc lights that make Dalny a brilliant metropolis after our six weeks around camp fires and tallow dips.
Hurrying along I suddenly found myself in a group of officers bound the same way. All but one instinctively fell back and left me ahead with a tub of a man in a fur coat and a red cap with two braid stripes which told him to be a lieutenant-general. Swathed to his ankles in an overcoat of thick martens he looked huge, but the two red braids and the star of Nippon were level with my armpit. When he shook hands he lost all the clumsiness of the fur. As his fingers grasped mine in real earnest there passed from them the spirit of the island empire—its tininess, its audacity, its febrile intensity—for the grip was sinuous and sure as the clasp of a wild thing, hearty and elegant as a comrade’s. He walked with the stately swing of a star actor, poised his cigar with the air of a gentleman of leisure and smiled roguishly on me as he talked. A word brought a thin man in spectacles—his secretary—from the group behind. Through him the General said he had not seen a foreigner in three months, he remembered me from a chance word over a tiffin in the Shiba detached palace last May, and would I be kind enough to call on him to-morrow when he would have a day of rest before his trip north toward the Shaho. We parted at the first corner and he walked on with his stately swing, which his enemies call the strut of a turkey cock, his staff grouped artistically behind.