A big, burly Japanese pushed her back.
"What do you want?" he cried in Korean.
"I want to go in there. My husband is there," she cried in terror.
"But you will be killed if you go in there!"
"I don't care! I want to die if he is to die!"
"All right! You shall have your wish!" said the Japanese, and pulling out his sword, cut off her head, killing her instantly. She fell at his feet with her unborn child; and he laughed aloud at the spectacle.
This is Japanese frightfulness and it can be duplicated by many missionaries in Korea if they dared to speak.
But the minute they speak and tell the truth that minute they are sent home from their life work. They realize that this leaves the Koreans to the utter and awful cruelties of the barbarous Japanese, and because of this, in spite of their indignation they hold their tongues for the larger good. But they eagerly give the facts to those of us who are coming back to America so that America in turn may know what is going on in Korea. That is the only hope; that the indignation of a righteous world, without war, may bring pressure to bear on Japan to stop these terrible cruelties and tortures; this unutterable frightfulness. This is the hope of the missionaries; this is the only hope of the Koreans!
* * * * * *
I don't know whether or not it was because I had been listening for so long to the most brutal stories of Japanese treatment of Korean men, women and children; with murder, rapine, burning of homes, especially Christian homes; beating of a mother and her twelve-year-old girl from three in the morning until eight to make them reveal the hiding-place of their preacher daddy, that the crimson, blood-red sunset I witnessed on my last night in Korea seemed to me like a "sunset of crimson wounds." All I know is that it happened in Korea while I was there, and that my soul had been, for a solid month, stirred to the depths of its righteous wrath over the things that I had heard first-hand from human lips.