“But it wouldn’t be the real thing,” said he, as he started off. Then I saw why he is Ricalton and not some faker at his ease over a chemical tray in the city. Just now, looking out of the window under which I write, I can see the battery where he has gone. It lies snug among the hills, two great guns cocked on concrete and flanked by howitzers aloft on peaks. The Russians have the range and are pumping shells in, two or three a minute. It looks as if nothing could live there, but I know that probably not a man is injured, for I was there yesterday and saw how safe the dugouts are. Villiers looks up from his sketching and watches the firing through his glasses. A ten-incher plunges into the hillside and the earth boils up as if the foundations were ripped away.
“I hope dear old Ricalton is out of that,” he exclaims.
“Don’t fear for him. He has gone through too much to be rapped by that,” I reply. I remember how he walked there yesterday, his eye always on a dodgehole. A ten-incher came just as this one to-day. He threw himself flat on his stomach, hugging his machine, tenderly as though it were a baby, in a ditch by the roadside. Ten yards off the shell exploded. The pieces flew over and clods of earth fell on him. Hardly had the pieces stopped before he was up and after them, for he is as great a curio hunter as he is a photographer, and he has a house in Maplewood, New Jersey, converted into a museum, which the natural history experts declare is the finest private collection in America. But enough of Ricalton.
Along a deeply rutted road in front of our village we gaze in awe at the big guns and their accouterment spread beside a narrow-gauge track. A pile of empty shells with points like needles and thick as a telephone pole, so heavy two men can hardly lift one, lies scattered down the slopes. A recoil vamp lumbers a truck. An ungainly steel thing nestles belly deep in the sand while a company of human ants sweats and wrestles with it. Then suddenly we come upon the beautiful breech, delicate as clockwork, dazzling as a jeweler’s case, gleaming in the sun, and Ricalton exclaims:
“The only thing that gives one respect for man—his achievement—is to look at such a piece of mechanism. It has the power of a jungle of elephants, yet is as sensitive as a little girl!”
Some days we take trips off to the various divisions and get close in for a big battle, feel the pitch and pallor of war, see heights assaulted, won and lost, hear the adventure of conflict from heroic mouths and get in close upon the red anathema. Then we visit the hospitals and know the slow agony of it—the suffering, endurance, silent sacrifice. Two weeks ago I saw the same operation that was performed on President McKinley—laparotomy. A soldier’s stomach was pierced, as McKinley’s was. The surgeons took it out, sewed it up and replaced it. To-day I was told the man would recover. He is a strong, hardy chap, a peasant boy, who lives on rice, fish and tea, which was not McKinley’s diet. The soldier at the same time lost his right arm by amputation. Visiting him again yesterday I asked how he was getting on.
“Well enough,” he replied. “The hard thing is not to think about it. You’re all right if you only don’t think. It’s the mind that rips one up, sir, the doctor says.”
Our village shelters most of the impedimenta that an army headquarters must carry. Band-musicians are our neighbors. The interpreters, next door, swap tea, cigarettes and news with us. The Russian interpreter, who lived in Moscow three years, sketches so well, Villiers says he will take him to Paris and make him the fashion. Behind us are the Japanese correspondents, so clandestine in their ways that even a Manchurian farmer must know they are yellow journal reporters. Of a morning we see a curious pair strolling off over the hills, one with a fowling-piece, looking for snipe, the other with a camera watching for a chance to get a shell as it explodes. One is Mr. Arriga, the expert on international law, who will adjudicate all property rights as soon as Port Arthur falls; the other is the official photographer.
Then there are the war correspondents, who have a camp three miles off. In bargaining for junks to take the news out, two of the cable men have become so bitter in rivalry that they go around with Mauser pistols, each threatening to shoot the other if he tells how the censor was evaded. There is the Norwegian nobleman with the eyes of a viking who is writing serials for one of Harmsworth’s London dailies. Finally, there is what Villiers calls “The Bartlett pair”—A. Bascom Bartlett, Esq., son of the Hon. E. Bascom Bartlett, M. P., who came out to see the fun and what Villiers calls the Tossup, because it was a toss-up whether or not he should come, and who is here to make fun. It was he, who recently, after hearing a general tell of the desperate charge of a brigade, patted the officer on the back and said: “A very noble act, sir. I shall relate that in Tossup Hall.”
The elder Tossup is a country brewer in Yorkshire. The younger insists that he is an officer and a gentleman and knows how to conduct himself. But a few days ago he was caught, while visiting an outpost with an officer, in a crossfire, and ducked into a trench. The officer tried to reassure him by following into the trench. There, while a battle was raging beyond, and in the presence of all the sublime panorama that surrounds us here the Tossup said: “I hope you will come and visit me in England. We will go to the autumn maneuvers.”