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MAKING FOR MANCHURIA

BY JOHN FOX, JR.

T came at last-that order for the front. On the eighteenth day of July, the Empress of China swung out of Yokohama Harbor, with eighteen men on board, who had been waiting four months for that order, almost to the very day. During those four months there was hardly a day that some one of those men was not led to believe by the authorities in Tokio that in the next ten days the order would come, and never would the authorities say that during any ten days the order would not come; so that they had perforce to stay waiting in Tokio from the freezing rains of March until the sweltering days of midsummer. Many of those men had been in Japan for five months and more, and yet knew absolutely nothing of the land save of Tokio and Yokohama, which, tourists tell me, are not Japan at all.

The matter has been passing strange. We did not come over here at the invitation of the Japanese Government, but in simple kindness the authorities might have said, with justice:

"This is the business of Japan and of Russia alone. Over here we do not recognize the Occidental God-given right of the newspapers to divulge the private purposes of anybody. We believe that War Correspondents are harmful to the proper conduct of a war. Frankly, we don't want you, and to the front you can never go.” No just complaint could have been made to this. We should have seen beautiful Japan and, our occupation gone for this war, at least, we could have struck the backward trail of the Saxon-the correspondent for some trade of peace, the artist to "drawing fruits and flowers at home." And all would have been well.

VOL. XXXVI.— 77

Or:

"You gentlemen came over here at your own risk. You create a new and serious problem for us and we don't know how we are going to solve it. If you wish to stay on at your own risk until we have made up our minds-you are quite welcome." For some this would have made an early homeward flight easy. Or again:

"Yes, we do mean to let you go to the front, but when we cannot say. While you are here, however, we shall be glad to have you see our country. Just now we are quite sure that you will not go for at least ten days: so you can travel around and come back. If we are sure that you can't go for another ten days, you may go away again and come back-and so on until you do leave."

Even this they might have said:

"You English are our allies. We are in trouble and we may draw you as allies into it. We, therefore, grant your right to know how we behave on the battle-field, where we may possibly have to fight, shoulder to shoulder. Therefore, you English correspondents, you English attachés, can go to the front, the rest of you cannot."

Nothing in all this could have given offence. All or any of it would have had at least the combined merits of frankness, consideration, honesty, and it is very hard for this Saxon to understand how any or all could possibly have any bearing on anybody's advantage or disadvantage, as far as this war is concerned.

The Japanese gave no open hint of unwillingness to have us go-no hint that we were not to go very soon. We were urged to get passes for ourselves, interpreters and servants at once. Most of the men obeyed at once, bought horses, outfits, provisions and wrote farewell letters-wrote them 689

many times.

This was the middle of which would preserve me from all bodily harm. Whither we were bound we knew not for sure, since by the same token you know nothing in this land for sure. But there were three men among us who had been guaranteed, they said, by the word of a Major-General's mouth, that they should see the fall of Port Arthur. So sure were they that they had made less important representatives of their papers stay behind in Tokio to await the going of the third column. Two others had got the same assurance indirectly, but from high authority, and the rest of us knew that where they went, there went we.

March. Ever since we have staid at the Imperial Tomb in Tokio-the Imperial Hotel is the name it calls itself-under heavy expense to curselves here and to the dear ones at home who sent us here; unable to go away; told every ten days that in the next ten days we would most likely go, and told on no day that within the next ten we should not go. Now it was soon'very soon"-in English, and then it was "tadaima"-in Japanese.

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Tadaima! That, too, meant "soon," when I first put stumbling feet on the tortuous path of Japanese thought and speech. The unwary stranger will be told to-day that it does mean soon," and as such in dictionaries he shall find it. But I have tracked "tadaima" to its lair and dragged it, naked and ashamed, into the white light of truth. And I know “tadaima" at any time refers only to the season next to come. Early in March, for instance, it means literally—"next summer about two o'clock."

All this was something of a strain in the way of expectation, disappointment, worry, wasted energy-idleness. And so with a worried conscience over the expense to the above-mentioned dear ones at home, and the hope that some return might yet be made to them; through a good deal of weakness and a good deal of reluctance to go home and get "guyed," we stayed on and on. In May came the battle of Nanshan and the advance on Port Arthur. In June followed Tehlitzu. Both battles any man would have gladly risked his life to see, and I really think it would have been well for the Japanese, granting their accounts of the two battles as accurate Russian atrocities in one, undoubted Japanese gallantry in both-if impartial observers had been there to confirm. As it stands, the Japanese say "you did "the Russians say we didn't" --and there the matter will end.

But we swung out of Yokohama Harbor at last-the Tokio slate for the time wiped clean and all forgiven. We were going to the front and that was balm to any wound. O-kin-san of the Tea House of the Hundred Steps-bless her-had made me turn my back while she struck sparks with flint and steel and made prayers for my safety, and from her kind hand I carried away a little ideographed block of wood in a wicker case

That day and that night and next day we had quiet seas and sunlight. The second night we were dining in Kobbe at a hotel to which Kipling once sang a just pæan of praise-Kobbe, which he knew at once, he said, was Portland, Maine, though his feet had not then touched American soil. He was quite right. Kobbe might be any town anywhere. The next daybreak was of shattered silver, and it found us sailing through a still sea of silver from which volcanic islands leaped everywhere toward a silver sky. We were in the Inland Sea. To the eye, it was an opal dream—that Inland Sea-and the memory of it now is the memory of a dream-a dream of magic waters, silvery light and forlorn islands— bleak and many-peaked above, and slashed with gloomy ravines that race each other down to goblin-haunted water caves, where the voice of the sea is never still. This sea narrowed by and bye into the Shimonoseki Straits, which turn and twist through rocks, islands, and high green hills. Through them we went into the open ocean once more. In the middle of the next afternoon we passed for a while through other mountain-bordered straits, and by and by there sat before the uplifted eye Nagasaki, with its sleepy green terraces, rising from water level to low mountain top-where the Madame Chrysanthème of Loti's fiction is a living fact to-day. Who was it that said, after reading that book, he or she would like to read Pierre Loti by Madame Chrysanthème? It must have been a woman-and justly a woman sure. There is an English colony at Nagasaki and a few Americans who cling together and talk about going home some day-all exiles, all most hospitable to the stranger, and all unconsciously touched

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