Dalny bristled with the military. The base now of all the armies, it had become a huge supply depot through which passed the food and ammunition for a third of a million men, and to which poured the dribble of wounded. Every house in the Russian quarter, including two magnificent churches and the fine hotel, were used for hospitals, in which four thousand patients then were. A hospital ship left every day for Japan, carrying from 200 to 1,000 wounded and prisoners. Each day a transport came in bearing twice as many fresh troops. A brigade had just landed and was to be sent north at dawn to take the place of the lost in the Liaoyang battle. There was no barrack room, and though the general wore a fur coat his men stacked arms on the curbs and slept on the pavements. It was two days after the arrival of the advance guard of the civic invasion of Manchuria. Fifteen Tokyo and Osacca merchants had left home with all their fortunes to try luck in a new land. In a Chinese restaurant that night I met one of them, an old Tokyo friend who spoke English. It was a great moment in his life, he said, this parting with the old and taking on of the new. He had already been given a house in the old Russian quarter at a nominal rental, which he expected later to acquire from his government at a low figure. In a few days he expected to open a store. He asked me to call on him and gave me his card with an address in “Nogimachi.” Thus I learned that all the town has been re-christened. The old Russian names attached to the elegant streets which looked more like roads among fashionable English villas were changed. Japanese generals had been honored. The chief hospital was in Oyamamachi, the etape office on Yamagatamachi, the reserve detail bivouacked on Fukishimamachi and I slept on Kurokimachi.
In Kodamamachi Gotoh and I the next day called on General Kodama, who was living in the Russian Mayor’s house. In a side room where the secretary ushered us we waited for the General, then in his bath. This gave us time to examine the house. The Mayor was the engineer who laid out Dalny, and, naturally, he spread himself on his own home. Three stories high, with a wide balcony, a yard full of flowers and a big brick fence, it looks out on the convergence of the two main streets. It is built like the early palaces on what is now Tar Flat in San Francisco, with casements two feet thick, buttressed by solid masonry. The walls are thick enough to harbor great Russian stoves and bear evidence to the coming cold. The ceilings are enormously high, the double windows stained glass, the balustrades massive, the flooring of matched hardwood polished, all conveniences in the latest modern style. I know of no house in all Japan so fine. The panels were scratched in places where the Chinese bandits had sacked, and there was little furniture. Otherwise, all was in good condition. In scorn of the place the Japanese guard had slipped his neat, low futon into an alcove, but in respect he stood at “present arms,” his rifle loaded, to prevent outlawry. The silence was deep, the dispatch of business swift. Occasionally a messenger passed through the hall, with no hurry and with no dignity. It would have been difficult to persuade Sherlock Holmes that the army was about.
Presently the secretary announced that the General was ready, and led us down a corridor to a side room on the west, which the sunlight, falling through the stained windows, dyed purple and gold. As we advanced I could not but think of the superb setting Mansfield gave the throne room scene in “Richard III,” and how he knelt by the dais as the light died out, whispering to himself, “Richard, to thy work!”
Here there was no false splendor, only the light of purple and gold—and a great character. I felt his presence before he advanced to meet me with a lithe stride. He shook hands with the intensity of the night before and again I felt that clasp as of a palm all sinew and nerves. But there was gayety in his gesture as he threw his hands out, palms up, like a Frenchman, and bade me welcome. He wore a kimono and slippers—nothing more. I could see the bare V sloping in to his chest, thin and skin-drawn, and it was plain where the brown of sun-tan shaded into the clothes-covered white. He stepped back around a table and, dropping the slippers, climbed into a great chair, against whose russet leather he nestled the kimono and became lost, curling his bare toes under, whence, from time to time, they peeked and wiggled.
Overwhelmed by his littleness, for the swivel armchair could easily have held three generals like him and have had room left, top and bottom, for several colonels and a major, I thought of the huge overcoat of the night before and remembered what Lincoln said to Grant when the two met Alexander H. Stephens in a similar greatcoat on the River Queen in the fall of ’64: “That certainly is the littlest ear out of the biggest shuck that ever I did see.”
Gotoh and the General plunged into the labyrinths of the impossible Japanese language and left me to the joy of studying the toes and mustaches of this remarkable personality. He did not touch his mustaches, which, though long, had none of the ordinary poise and polish. No. They partook of the nature of the man and seemed the superficial ganglia of his sensitive alertness. Three single hairs from each side, twisted in a loose wisp, glimmed the air furiously like the whiskers of a cat, as the General’s salient, pointed chin chopped out the sentences. Then I noticed a phenomenon. While the body of the mustache and the whiskers on one side were as black as my coat, untouched by time, the right wisp was white with hoary snow. It was as if the Genius of his time had selected him from among the common race of men and touched him there.
“The General wishes to apologize for receiving you this way—in a kimono.” At last the interpreter spoke, after the two had been chattering several minutes. Could it really be the great General familiar with a mere man of words like Gotoh, so insinuating the smile, so comradely the gossip? Yet, doubtless, in that few minutes he got from Gotoh every pertinent rag of information the interpreter had about me. “But he has been a long time without the luxury of a good bath, and the Russian Mayor left a fine one——”
“Tell the General,” I interrupted, “that he is the first man I have met in six months who has given me the satisfaction of appearing as he is. This is his finest tribute to Western civilization—informality.”
Then they went at it again—chattering. The General, thrusting his elbows on the table, banged his chops into his palms, and, with his eyes, pierced first me, then Gotoh, a roguish twinkle lighting up his face for an instant to be replaced by the curl of irony on his lips. Could this be the man of lightning decision, and of iron will, who gave the order on February 8th to attack Port Arthur before a declaration of war? I looked at his head, round and small like a bullet, yet singularly long from nose bridge to dome. The absence of excess tissue, skin stretched tight over parietal bones and neck scrawny from spirited strain, together with a peculiar atmosphere of concentration and mastery which invested him, said it was as full of meat as an Edam cheese. Not a statesman, the ministers say, but a giant of organization, a master of detail, the brains of new Japan.
Is he not also the greatest editor in the history of journalism? Because it is he who for six months has cornered the news market of the world, so that, until the present time, not a single authentic account has come from the field except those issued in the official reports of his own generals. He has controlled the news as he has controlled the armies—noiselessly, perhaps clandestinely, but nevertheless absolutely. If the telegraph announces Japanese victories, he reasoned, the public will not listen to the wail of the special correspondent. He has substituted fact for criticism, and, like the Duke of Wellington, announces his victories first, his reverses afterward. Now that the campaign is outlined and all can see what he is driving at, the time for speech has come; so he speaks.