From War to Peace in Manchuria—Peking—A New Assignment, “Russia Direct”—Shanghai.
For three days we had been congratulating ourselves that we were on the eve of the greatest battle in history. Around us in silent might, two armies slept on their arms. From the border of far Mongolia for a hundred and eighty miles eastward lay the line of the [Japanese trenches], and for forty miles deep every Manchu hut and village sheltered the soldier or coolie patriot of the Island Emperor. Above the roads for endless miles hung the heavy powdered dust of Mongol soil; like a mist unstirred by any wind, it rose from the plodding of the feet of limitless thousands of men and animals, pushing forward for the last great struggle of a mighty conflict. [Regiment after regiment] fresh from home, poured along the Japanese made arteries, for the blood of an army corps. Now and again the khaki colored battalions at the command of an officer halted at the side of the road while a battery of artillery, with [clanking chains and creaking limbers], trotted through the thickening clouds of dust that settled on one like flour. Cavalry, red cross, transport, coolies, bridge trains and telegraph corps gave place the one to the other in rapid succession. In eighteen months’ association with the Japanese [we had not seen such activity]. “The Peace Conference at Portsmouth has failed” we told ourselves, and leaving the extreme front of the army, where we had been visiting the cavalry outposts, we turned our horses’ heads for the thirty-mile ride to the headquarters of [General Nogi], to which we had been attached since May. All our talk was of the coming of the great battle and of the preparations which we must make for a three weeks’ campaign in the saddle, and more important still, how we should arrange an open line of communications from the ever-changing front of the prospective struggle to the cable office in the rear.
Covered with dust an eighth of an inch deep, we rode into Fakumen, our headquarters, late on the afternoon of September 4th. At the door of a Chinese bean mill, where for four weary months we had been awaiting the call to action, stood a Japanese orderly. As we dismounted, he saluted and respectfully handed me one of the Japanese charactered envelopes of the Military field telegraph. Turning my horse over to my Japanese boy I opened it, and read the word “Return.”
The Russo-Japanese War was over, and even before the armies themselves knew that the end had come, my chief in his office in far away Chicago had sent the word over the cable which meant as much as reams of explanation. The same night the London Times reached half around the world and ordered home its special correspondent with the Japanese armies in the field.
That night I handed in at the Chinese mudhouse, where the telegraph ticked cheerfully over the hundreds of miles of Manchurian plains and Korean mountains to Fusan, and thence by cable to Nagasaki and the civilized world, a short dispatch to my office in Chicago, “Leaving the front immediately. Wire instructions Peking.” Two days later at sunrise we took our leave. I shall not soon forget our leave-taking from the army whose fortunes we had followed off and on for nearly eighteen months. So many of the correspondents left the “front” with such bitter feelings toward their erstwhile hosts that, in justice to the Japanese, it is but fair to chronicle that in one Army of the Mikado at least the relations between the staff and the soldiers of the press were anything but unpleasant, and that we, who left the Third Army that September morning, left with only the tenderest affection toward the commander under whose shadow we had lived, slept and thought these many months—that is [General Baron Nogi]—than whom no finer gentleman, ardent patriot and gentle friend ever drew the breath of life. The night before our departure the general entertained us at a farewell banquet and in a kindly little toast bade us god-speed on our journey. That night we shook the hands of all the staff whom we had known so well, and went to our quarters thinking that we had seen them for the last time, for we were to leave at daybreak for the long ride to the railroad. The next morning as we were mounting our horses to begin our journey an orderly from headquarters rode up and said that Major General Ichinohe (Nogi’s Chief of Staff and right-hand man during the siege of Port Arthur) had requested that we stop at headquarters on our way out of town. So it was that accompanied by the small cavalry escort that had been detailed to see us to the railroad, we rode into the compound where Nogi and his staff had lived that last long summer of the war.
Mounted on a coal black horse in full dress uniform, with half a dozen of his staff about him, sat old Ichinohe, a tall, gaunt man nearing sixty, whose life typifies the ideal of Japanese chivalry. Spartan in his simplicity and endurance, fearless as a lion in battle, and gentle as a woman in time of peace, we had known him almost since the war started. At Port Arthur he had commanded the Sixth Brigade of the Ninth Division, which, more than any other, had borne the heat and burden of the day. We had known him then, when sword in hand he had led in person his brigade against one of the most impregnable redoubts on the crest of that all but unconquerable fortress. Twice his column had been thrown back shattered and bleeding, but on the third assault, and just as the light of day was breaking in the East, this redoubtable man covered with blood and powder, and with his broken sword clutched in his hand, placed the Sun Flag on a position that the Russians had regarded as beyond possibility of capture. It was impossible to realize that this kindly old gentleman, who spoke so gently to us that morning in distant Manchuria, was the desperate commander who had been decorated by the Mikado for his invincible attack on the famous redoubt before Port Arthur’s bloody trenches.
He met us with that smile which we had come to know and love, and bade his interpreter tell us that he and his staff would ride with us out of the town and see us started on our journey. So, with the staff riding about us, with clatter of saber and ring of spur, we rode through the old winding stonewall flanked street of Fakumen to the main gate of the town. Here the road winds out over a bridge that crosses the little river that wends its way down from the pass in the mountains three miles beyond and through which led our way that morning. The sun had just risen and its first copper-colored rays turned the dew on the grass to drops of brilliants. Away and away stretched the Oriental landscape with the hills standing out in the background in the clear, crisp air of early autumn. Behind us lay the town which had been our home since May, its strange, fantastic Chinese temples and maze of jumbled dwellings just catching the early sunlight; the whole scene might have been a setting snatched from the banks of the Jordan in the far away Holy Land. As we rode out of the gate and onto the old wooden bridge with its stone parapets the full strength of the Third Army Corps Military band blazed out the first notes of Sousa’s “The Stars and the Stripes,” and with the glorious swing of that martial strain taken up by drum and trumpet we crossed the river. None who has never lived for months in an alien land among a people of a different race can ever realize the throb of the heart that such music inspires. To us, in far off Mongolia, it sounded like a voice from our very own, coming across the wide Pacific.
When we reached the open country our old friend stopped his horse and his interpreter spake his last words to us. “You have been with us long,” he told us. “With us you have lived through a terrible period. For many months our paths have lain side by side. We would not, therefore, say farewell, for the Japanese never says adieu to his friends.” He had paused with the sweetest, gentlest of smiles before he uttered his last words, which the interpreter then translated to us. “I will sit here upon my horse, with my staff gathered about me. When you reach the bend in the road you will turn in your saddles and wave your hand at me and I will wave my hand to you and that, my friends, shall be our last good-by.”
Silently we wrung their hands, these hard-visaged friends on whom a cruel war had left its scars in gray hairs and furrowed faces, and rode on our way. Half a mile beyond the ancient Mongol highway turned a bluff, and wound up toward the Pass in the Hills. When we reached the bend we turned in our saddles. There below us on the outskirts of the town we could see the general, motionless in the flooding sunlight, with the little group of the staff crowded in the background. As we turned in our saddles we could barely discern the flutter of a handkerchief from the stern old figure on the black horse. Once again the faint strains of martial music drifted to us on the still morning air; we waved our hands and turned once more on our way. Who shall say that we were oversentimental if there was a little mist in our eyes as we looked our last upon the men and on the army, whose lives and ours had been so closely linked?
Forty miles we rode that day over dusty highways that wound their way through waving fields of the whispering kowliang (or millet) that bent and swayed in the breeze. A few hours’ sleep at Tieling in a deserted shell-torn Russian house, then a five hours’ pounding over rough rails in a box car and we were back once more at the Grand Headquarters of the army at Moukden.