This American witnessed the epoch-making events in the Far East, within the lines of the Japanese Army, through a permit granted by General Kamio, Commander of the Allied Forces at Tsingtau. He describes the events with the understanding of one who has resided for many years in Japan and China, asserting that "one of the most remarkable changes to be wrought in Christendom by the greatest of wars will be found, not in Europe or in Europe's dependencies, but in the Far East"; recalling the words of Napoleon, "There lies a sleeping China. Let him sleep: for when he moves he will move the world." He has recorded his observations in a volume entitled: "The Fall of Tsingtau," in which he describes the advance of the Japanese Army; the beginning of the siege; the fleet bombarding the city; the surrender. He also discusses analytically the political and economic situations. His description of Tsingtau "After the City's Fall" is here retold by arrangement with his publishers, Houghton, Mifflin and Company: Copyright 1915, by Jefferson Jones.
I—STORY OF THE CONQUERED TEUTON FORT
Scenes of havoc met the eyes of the Japanese staff officers when they entered the fallen forts of Tsingtau. With dynamite and nitro-glycerine the German defenders had destroyed the guns and demolished all that might be taken by the captors as trophies of war. Along the casemate walls of the forts still lay the German and Japanese soldiers who had been killed in the final assault, while the concrete forts themselves were just a mass of shale and twisted steel rods where dynamite or falling shells had done their work.
Into the forts the Japanese filed and, collecting all the German soldiers together in lots, marched them to the barbed-wire entanglements in the rear of the city and after a short rest took them to the foot of Prince Heinrich Berg, where a prison camp had been improvised. The German officers, however, through the courtesy of the Japanese commander, were allowed to remain in Tsingtau.
The courtesy of the Japanese, for which the Orient is already famous, received an excellent demonstration in the surrender of Tsingtau. General Kamio, commander-in-chief, realizing that to march his victorious troops through the city of Tsingtau would throw the residents into much confusion and disorder, made the direct surrender appear like a capitulation on terms. All German officers, including Governor-General Meyer-Waldeck, were allowed to go about Tsingtau at their freedom after the surrender, and General Kamio at once posted orders that only the Japanese staff officers would be allowed to enter the city for several days. Japanese pickets were placed along the roads outside of the city to see that this regulation was enforced.
For several days, then, while the Japanese troops were quartered in Moltke and Bismarck Barracks in the rear of Tsingtau, and the British force was also in German barracks, the residents of Tsingtau were given free opportunity to recover from their besieged life without being ruffled by the sight of marching and quartered troops.
During that period between the surrender of the Tsingtau forts and November 16, when the British and Japanese expeditionary forces made their triumphal entry into the city, the Japanese officers busied themselves in the final preparations for the transfer of the German possessions into the hands of Dai Nippon. The rest of the troops spent the days in examining the Tsingtau forts and gradually the "whyfore" of their surrender was answered.
On Iltis Fort were mounted six twelve-centimeter guns, two of which had been captured from the French in the siege of Paris in 1871. On the left of this battery and toward the rear of the fort had been placed four twenty-eight-centimeter mortars, while two 10.5-centimeter guns cast in 1889, which had seen service in the siege of Taku in 1900, made up the remainder of the fort's equipment.
Bismarck Fort, to the left of Iltis, seemed to be the most strongly fortified of any of the Tsingtau defenses. Besides four twenty-eight-centimeter howitzers and two twenty-one-centimeter guns, it contained the Tsingtau battery of four fifteen-centimeter guns.
At Moltke Fort, on the bay side of the city, the German garrison had mounted two fifteen-centimeter guns stripped from the Austrian cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth, a field battery of ten pieces, three field howitzers, and several small guns taken from the second-class German gunboats and cruisers that had been allowed to be bottled up in the Bay of Kiaochow.