Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

Back to lower Liaotung again, in early June. In spite of every precaution, one of Togo’s gunboats ran him down in Society Bay, and he was sent ashore under a guard. Great luck served him, inasmuch as there were no English with the Japanese at this place, Pulatien, where he was held for ten days, while the officers debated upon his credentials. It was here that Routledge encountered the prettiest feature-story of the war—the duel of Watanabe and Major Volbars, a prisoner from Nanshan. The Japanese escorted him to his junk at last, and he put off with orders from one of Togo’s ensigns to return no more to Kwantung waters. The battle of Telissu was fought on this day at sea, and he missed it entirely. With English now in Wangcheng and Chifu, Routledge ordered his Chinese to sail north, and to put him ashore at Yuenchen, a little port twenty miles to the west of the Liao’s mouth.

It was only by a squeak that the order was carried out. That was a night of furies on the yellow gulf. Bent in the hold, thigh-deep in tossing water, Routledge recalled the hovel in Rydamphur with a sorry smile. It did not seem at that moment that the storm would ever permit him to be maimed on land—or a woman to come to him. The old craft was beaten about under bare poles in a roaring black that seemed to drop from chaos. The Chinese fought for life, but the gray of death-fear was upon them. Bruised, almost strangled, Routledge crouched in the musty hold, until his mind fell at last into a strange abstraction, from which he aroused after an unknown time. His physical weariness was extreme, but it did not seem possible that he could have slept, standing in black, foaming water, and with a demoniacal gale screeching outside. Yet certainly something had gone from him and had taken his consciousness, or the better part of it.... It was this night that Noreen Cardinegh had entered at dusk her little house in Minimasacuma-cho and met by the easel the visible thought-form of her lover.

Day broke with the wind lulled, and the old craft riding monster seas, her poles still to the sky. The daylight sail brought him to Yuenchen; from whence he made his way northward by land to Pingyang. This town was but an hour’s saddle to the east of the railroad and telegraph at Koupangtze—twenty miles west of the junction of the Taitse and the Liao river, and fifty miles west of Liaoyang. Here he established headquarters completely out of the white man’s world, rested and wrote mail stories for several weeks. Toward the end of July, he set out on a ten days’ saddle trip toward Liaoyang, with the idea of becoming familiar with the topography of the country, in preparation for the battle, already in sight. It was on this trip that he was hailed one afternoon by an American, named Butzel. This young man was sitting on the aft-gunnel of a river-junk, rolling a cigarette, when Routledge turned his horse upon the Taitse river-road, four or five miles to the east of the Liao. Routledge would have avoided the meeting had he been given a chance, but Butzel gaily ordered his Chinese to put ashore. The voice was that of a man from the Middle States—and Routledge filled with yearning to take a white hand. His only friend since he had left Rawder in India was Consul Milner at Wangcheng.

Butzel had journeyed thus deep into the elder world—as natural an explorer as ever left behind his nerves and his saving portion of fear. He hadn’t any particular credentials, he said, and hadn’t played the newspaper game very strongly up to now. The Japanese had refused to permit him to go out with any of the armies; and he had tried to get into Port Arthur with a junk, but Togo had driven him off. He had very little money, and was tackling China to get to the Russian lines. It was his idea for the Russians to capture him, and, incidentally, to show him how they could defend Liaoyang. In a word, he was eluding Japan, bluffing his way through the interior of China, and about to enforce certain hospitality from the Russians. A great soul—in this little man, Butzel.

Routledge delighted in him, but feared for his life. He himself was playing a similar lone-hand, but he carried Red-beard insignia, purchased at a big price; and when he had ventured into a river or sea-junk, he had taken pains to arrange that his receipt for a certain extortion was hung high on the foremast. Thus was he ever approved by the fascinating brotherhood of junk pirates. These were details entirely above the Butzel purse and inclination. The two men parted in fine spirit after an hour, the adventurer urging his Chinese up the Taitse toward the Russian lines. He was not so poor as he had been, and he yelled back joyously to Routledge that there wasn’t enough trails in this little piker of a planet to keep them from meeting again.

His words proved true. Poor Butzel rode back in state that afternoon, his head fallen against the tiller and a bullet hole in his breast. Even his clothing had been taken. The junk was empty except for the body. With a heavy heart, Routledge attended to the burial and marked the spot. That night he rode to Koupangtze, and, by paying the charges, succeeded in arranging for a brief message to be cabled to the World-News; also a telegram to the American consul at Shanghai.

So much is merely a suggestion of the work that told for his paper that summer. For weeks at a time he was in the saddle, or junking it by sea and river. Except when driven to the telegraph, he avoided every port town and every main-travelled road. He was lean, light but prodigiously strong. A trencherman of ordinary valor would have dragged out a hateful existence of semi-starvation upon the rations that sufficed for Routledge; and none but a man in whom a giant’s strength was concentrated could have followed his travels. The old Manchurian trails burned under his ponies; and, queerly enough, he never ruined a mount. He had left Shanghai on the first of February, ill from confinement, the crowds, and his long sojourn in the great heat of India. The hard physical life at sea in the Liao gulf and afield in Manchuria, and, possibly more than anything, his life apart from the English, restored him to a health of the finest and toughest texture.

China challenged him. He never could feel the tenderness of regard for the Yellow Empire that India inspired, but it held an almost equal fascination. China dwelt in a duller, more alien light to his eyes; the people were more complicated, less placable and lovable, than Hindus, but the same mysterious stillness, the same dust of ages, he found in both interiors; and in both peoples the same imperturbable patience and unfathomable capacity to suffer and be silent. Routledge moved in towns almost as unknown to the world as the Martian surfaces; learned enough of the confusion of tongues to procure necessities; supplied himself with documents, bearing the seals of certain dark fraternities, which appeared to pass him from place to place without harm: and, with a luck that balanced the handicap of an outcast, and an energy, mental and physical, utterly impossible to a man with peace in his heart, he pushed through, up to Liaoyang, an almost incredible season’s work.

More and more the thought was borne upon him during July and August that the coming big battle would bring to him a change of fortune—if only a change from one desolation to another. He felt that his war-service was nearing its end. He did not believe that Liaoyang was to end the war, but he thought it would close the campaign for the year; and he planned to conclude his own campaign with a vivid intimate portrait of the battle. Meanwhile he hung afar from the Russian and Japanese lines, and little Pingyang had a fire lit for him and a table spread when he rode in from his reconnoissance.

Late in August, when the artillery began, Routledge crossed to the south bank of the Taitse with a pair of good horses, and left them about two miles to the west of the city with a Pingyang servant who had proven trustworthy. On the dawn of the thirtieth he made a wide detour behind Oku, nearly to Nodzu’s lines, and watched the battle from Sha peak—one of the highest points of the range. He had studied Liaoyang long through the intricate Chinese maps; and as the heights had cleared the fighting-field for Bingley, so now did Routledge grasp the topography from his eyrie during that first day of the real battle. Similarly also, he hit upon Kuroki’s flank movement as the likeliest strategy of the Japanese aggression, and he came to regard it as a fact before starting for the free cable at Wangcheng the following night.