Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

This day netted nothing in so far as the real battle color was considered. That night he closed up on Oku’s rear, crossing a big valley and climbing a lesser range. Daylight found him in a densely thicketed slope overlooking the city and the Japanese command. In that hot red dawn, he beheld the bivouac of the Islanders—a crowded valley stretching away miles to the east in the fast lifting gloom; leagues of stirring men, the faint smell of wood-smoke and trampled turf, the gray, silent city over the reddened hills, the slaty coil of the river behind.

The mighty spectacle gripped the heart of the watcher; and there came to him, with an awful but thrilling intensity, the whole story of the years which had prepared this amphitheatre for blood on this sweet last summer day.... Oppression in Tyrone; treachery in India; the Anglo-Japanese alliance; the Russo-Japanese war—a logical line of cause and effect running true as destiny, straight as a sunbeam through all these huge and scattered events—holding all Asia in the palm of history! Farther back, to the Kabul massacre, was to be traced the red history of this day—the mad British colonel; Shubar Khan!... And what did the future hold? If Russia called the French and Germans to her aid, England, by treaty, was called to the aid of Japan. America might be drawn by the needs of England, or for the protection of her softening cluster of Philippine grapes. Famine in a Tyrone town; a leak in one Tyrone patriot’s brain—and a world-war!...

The click of a rifle jerked Routledge out of his musings. A Japanese lieutenant and a non-commissioned officer were standing twenty paces away. The enlisted man had him covered.

TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
ROUTLEDGE STRIKES A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE JAPANESE EMPEROR AND THE JAPANESE FIGHTING-MAN, WHILE OKU CHARGES INTO A BLIZZARD OF STEEL

Queerly enough, Routledge’s first thought was that the moment of the wound had come, but this was out of the question. These men would not fire at him. They would send him to the rear under a guard; or, worse, escort him to the command where the other correspondents were held. The Englishmen would then suggest to the Japanese that their captive had once proved a traitor to England, and that it would be well to look deep into his present business, lest he repeat.... He would miss the battle, be detained for a Russian spy—and Noreen would hear.

Routledge was ordered to approach, and obeyed, swallowing Failure. The lieutenant spoke English, but disdained to look at proffered credentials. The sergeant gripped Routledge’s arm, and his superior led the way down the slope through the lines of troops. Many of the little soldiers of Oku were eating rice and drinking tea from bowls; some were bathing their bodies, others cleansing their teeth with great zeal, using soaps and pointed sticks. These meant to be gathered unto their fathers that day with clean mouths. Down and forward, the American was led, no word being spoken until they were in the midst of Oku’s front. Here was the field headquarters of some high officer of the left wing. Routledge breathed a hope that action would be joined before he was ordered back. The unknown commander stood in the centre of a thick protecting cordon of men. Evidently he was too rushed at present to attend the case of the detained civilian. Aides and orderlies spurred out with dispatches, and others riding in took their places.

Three or four minutes had passed when certain commands went ripping down the unformed lines and action was indeed joined. The lieutenant was brushed away in the torrent of infantry which just now swept over them, but the sergeant held grimly to his prisoner’s arm. Oku had ordered the first charge of the day. This was the reeking red splash on the map of all the world.

The soldiers leaped over Routledge and his captor. Shielding his head from their boots and rifle-butts, the American looked deep into the sweating brown faces that rushed past—red, squinting eyes, upper lips twisted with a fury they could not have explained, the snarling muscles drawn tight—and not a zephyr of fear in the command! Some of the men still had their eating-sticks and bowls and paper napkins. One stuffed the contents of a dish of rice into his mouth as he ran—an eight-pound rifle clapped between his elbow and ribs.

The correspondent warmed to the human atoms hurtling by and to the sergeant who stuck so fast to his arm. There was something tremendous in the delusion of these poor pawns who were doing their cruel work so well. There was an infernal majesty in the huge gamble for the old gray walls of Liaoyang on this gorgeous morning.... War is immense and final—for the big devil-clutched souls who make it—an achievement, indeed, to gather and energize and hurl this great force against an enemy, but what a rotten imposition upon the poor little obscure men who fight, not a tithe the richer if they take all Asia! So the thoughts of Routledge surged. Into the havoc, from time to time, he threw a sentence, wrung from the depths of his understanding:

“... Once a father threw his children out of the sleigh to hold back a wolf-pack—as he whipped his horse to the village. Would you call such a man ‘father’?... Yet you call a nation ‘fatherland’ that hurls you now to the wolves!... Oh, ye of mighty faith!... Pawns—poor pawns—of plague, famine, war around the world—God, tell us why the many are consumed to ashes at the pleasure of the few!... Oh, glorious Patriotism—what sins are committed in thy name!”