Notes of a War Correspondent

by Richard Harding Davis

  The only proposition before us was this: There was small chance of any immediate fighting. If there were fighting we could not see it. Confronted with the same conditions again, I would decide in exactly the same manner. Our misfortune lay in the fact that our experience with other armies had led us to believe that officers and gentlemen speak the truth, that men with titles of nobility, and with the higher titles of general and major-general, do not lie. In that we were mistaken.

  The parting from the other correspondents was a brutal attack upon the feelings which, had we known they were to follow us two weeks later to Tokio, would have been spared us. It is worth recording why, after waiting many months to get to the front, they in their turn so soon left it. After each of the big battles before Liao-Yang they handed the despatches they had written for their papers to Major Okabe. Each day he told them these despatches had been censored and forwarded. After three days he brought back all the despatches and calmly informed the correspondents that not one of their cables had been sent. It was the final affront of Japanese duplicity. In recording the greatest battle of modern times three days had been lost, and by a lie. The object of their coming to the Far East had been frustrated. It was fatuous to longer expect from Kodama and his pupils fair play or honest treatment, and in the interest of their employers and to save their own self-respect, the representatives of all the most important papers in the world, the Times, of London, the New York Herald, the Paris Figaro, the London Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Morning Post, quit the Japanese army.

  Meanwhile, unconscious of what we had missed, the four of us were congratulating ourselves upon our escape, and had started for New-Chwang. Our first halt was at Hai-Cheng, in the same compound in which for many days with the others we had been imprisoned. But our halt was a brief one. We found the compound glaring in the sun, empty, silent, filled only with memories of the men who, with their laughter, their stories, and their songs had made it live.

  But now all were gone, the old familiar faces and the familiar voices, and we threw our things back on the carts and hurried away. The trails between Hai-Cheng and the sea made the worst going we had encountered in Manchuria. You soon are convinced that the time has not been long since this tract of land lay entirely under the waters of the Gulf of Liaotung. You soon scent the salt air, and as you flounder in the alluvial deposits of ages, you expect to find the salt-water at the very roots of the millet. Water lies in every furrow of the miles of cornfields, water flows in streams in the roads, water spreads in lakes over the compounds, it oozes from beneath the very walls of the go-downs. You would not be surprised at any moment to see the tide returning to envelop you. In this liquid mud a cart can make a trail by the simple process of continuing forward. The havoc is created in the millet and the ditches its iron-studded wheels dig in the mud leave to the eyes of the next comer as perfectly good a trail as the one that has been in use for many centuries. Consequently the opportunities for choosing the wrong trail are excellent, and we embraced every opportunity. But friendly Chinamen, and certainly they are a friendly, human people, again and again cheerfully went far out of their way to guide us back to ours, and so, after two days, we found ourselves five miles from New-Chwang.

  Here we agreed to separate. We had heard a marvellous tale that at New-Chwang there was ice, champagne, and a hotel with enamelled bath-tubs. We had unceasingly discussed the probability of this being true, and what we would do with these luxuries if we got them, and when we came so near to where they were supposed to be, it was agreed that one of us would ride on ahead and command them, while the others followed with the carts. The lucky number fell to John Fox, and he left us at a gallop. He was to engage rooms for the four, and to arrange for the care of seven Japanese interpreters and servants, nine Chinese coolies, and nineteen horses and mules. We expected that by eight o’clock we would be eating the best dinner John Fox could order. We were mistaken. Not that John Fox had not ordered the dinner, but no one ate it but John Fox. The very minute he left us Priory’s cart turned turtle in the mud, and the largest of his four mules lay down in it and knocked off work. The mule was hot and very tired, and the mud was soft, cool, and wet, so he burrowed under its protecting surface until all we could see of him was his ears. The coolies shrieked at him, Prior issued ultimatums at him, the Japanese servants stood on dry land fifteen feet away and talked about him, but he only snuggled deeper into his mud bath. When there is no more of a mule to hit than his ears, he has you at a great disadvantage, and when the coolies waded in and tugged at his head, we found that the harder they tugged, the deeper they sank. When they were so far out of sight that we were in danger of losing them too, we ordered them to give up the struggle and unload the cart. Before we got it out of dry-dock, reloaded, and again in line with the other carts it was nine o’clock, and dark.

  In the meantime, Lynch, his sense of duty weakened by visions of enamelled bathtubs filled with champagne and floating lumps of ice, had secretly abandoned us, stealing away in the night and leaving us to follow. This, not ten minutes after we had started, Mr. Prior decided that he would not do, so he camped out with the carts in a village, while, dinnerless, supperless, and thirsty, I rode on alone. I reached New-Chwang at midnight, and after being refused admittance by the Japanese soldiers, was finally rescued by the Number One man from the Manchuria Hotel, who had been sent out by Fox with two sikhs and a lantern to find me. For some minutes I dared not ask him the fateful questions. It was better still to hope than to put one’s fortunes to the test. But I finally summoned my courage.

  “Ice, have got?” I begged.

  “Have got,” he answered.

  There was a long, grateful pause, and then in a voice that trembled, I again asked, “Champagne, have got?”

  Number One man nodded.

  “Have got,” he said.

  I totally forgot until the next morning to ask about the enamelled bathtubs.

  When I arrived John Fox had gone to bed, and as it was six weeks since any of us had seen a real bed, I did not wake him. Hence, he did not know I was in the hotel, and throughout the troubles that followed I slept soundly.

  Meanwhile, Lynch, as a punishment for running away from us, lost his own way, and, after stumbling into an old sow and her litter of pigs, which on a dark night is enough to startle any one, stumbled into a Japanese outpost, was hailed as a Russian spy, and made prisoner. This had one advantage, as he now was able to find New-Chwang, to which place he was marched, closely guarded, arriving there at half-past two in the morning. Since he ran away from us he had been wandering about on foot for ten hours. He sent a note to Mr. Little, the British Consul, and to Bush Brothers, the kings of New-Chwang, and, still tormented by visions of ice and champagne, demanded that his captors take him to the Manchuria Hotel. There he swore they would find a pass from Fukushima allowing him to enter New-Chwang, three friends who could identify him, four carts, seven servants, nine coolies, and nineteen animals. The commandant took him to the Manchuria Hotel, where instead of this wealth of corroborative detail they found John Fox in bed. As Prior, the only one of us not in New-Chwang, had the pass from Fukushima, permitting us to enter it, there was no one to prove what either Lynch or Fox said, and the officer flew into a passion and told Fox he would send both of them out of town on the first train. Mr. Fox was annoyed at being pulled from his bed at three in the morning to be told he was a Russian spy, so he said that there was not a train fast enough to get him out of New-Chwang as quickly as he wanted to go, or, for that matter, out of Japan and away from the Japanese people. At this the officer, being a Yale graduate, and speaking very pure English, told Mr. Fox to “shut up,” and Mr. Fox being a Harvard graduate, with an equally perfect command of English, pure and undefiled, shook his fist in the face of the Japanese officer and told him to “shut up yourself.” Lynch, seeing the witness he had summoned for the defence about to plunge into conflict with his captor, leaped unhappily from foot to foot, and was heard diplomatically suggesting that
all hands should adjourn for ice and champagne.

  “If I were a spy,” demanded Fox, “do you suppose I would have ridden into your town on a white horse and registered at your head-quarters and then ordered four rooms at the principal hotel and accommodations for seven servants, nine coolies, and nineteen animals? Is that the way a Russian spy works? Does he go around with a brass band?”

  The officer, unable to answer in kind this excellent reasoning, took a mean advantage of his position by placing both John and Lynch under arrest, and at the head of each bed a Japanese policeman to guard their slumbers. The next morning Prior arrived with the pass, and from the decks of the first out-bound English steamer Fox hurled through the captain’s brass speaking-trumpet our farewells to the Japanese, as represented by the gun-boats in the harbor. Their officers, probably thinking his remarks referred to floating mines, ran eagerly to the side. But our ship’s captain tumbled from the bridge, rescued his trumpet, and begged Fox, until we were under the guns of a British man-of-war, to issue no more farewell addresses. The next evening we passed into the Gulf of Pe-chi-li, and saw above Port Arthur the great guns flashing in the night, and the next day we anchored in the snug harbor of Chefoo.

  I went at once to the cable station to cable Collier’s I was returning, and asked the Chinaman in charge if my name was on his list of those correspondents who could send copy collect. He said it was; and as I started to write, he added with grave politeness, “I congratulate you.”

  For a moment I did not lift my eyes. I felt a chill creeping down my spine. I knew what sort of a blow was coming, and I was afraid of it.

  “Why?” I asked.

  The Chinaman bowed and smiled.

  “Because you are the first,” he said. “You are the only correspondent to arrive who has seen the battle of Liao-Yang.”

  The chill turned to a sort of nausea. I knew then what disaster had fallen, but I cheated myself by pretending the man was misinformed. “There was no battle,” I protested. “The Japanese told me themselves they had entered Liao-Yang without firing a shot.” The cable operator was a gentleman. He saw my distress, saw what it meant and delivered the blow with the distaste of a physician who must tell a patient he cannot recover. Gently, reluctantly, with real sympathy he said, “They have been fighting for six days.”

  I went over to a bench, and sat down; and when Lynch and Fox came in and took one look at me, they guessed what had happened. When the Chinaman told them of what we had been cheated, they, in their turn, came to the bench, and collapsed. No one said anything. No one even swore. Six months we had waited only to miss by three days the greatest battle since Gettysburg and Sedan. And by a lie.

  For six months we had tasted all the indignities of the suspected spy, we had been prisoners of war, we had been ticket-of-leave men, and it is not difficult to imagine our glad surprise that same day when we saw in the harbor the white hull of the cruiser Cincinnati with our flag lifting at her stern. We did not know a soul on board, but that did not halt us. As refugees, as fleeing political prisoners, as American slaves escaping from their Japanese jailers, we climbed over the side and demanded protection and dinner. We got both. Perhaps it was not good to rest on that bit of drift-wood, that atom of our country that had floated far from the mainland and now formed an island of American territory in the harbor of Chefoo. Perhaps we were not content to sit at the mahogany table in the glistening white and brass bound wardroom surrounded by those eager, sunburned faces, to hear sea slang and home slang in the accents of Maine, Virginia, and New York City. We forgot our dark-skinned keepers with the slanting, suspicious, unfriendly eyes, with tongues that spoke the one thing and meant the other. All the memories of those six months of deceit, of broken pledges, of unnecessary humiliations, of petty unpoliteness from a half-educated, half-bred, conceited, and arrogant people fell from us like a heavy knapsack. We were again at home. Again with our own people. Out of the happy confusion of that great occasion I recall two toasts. One was offered by John Fox. “Japan for the Japanese, and the Japanese for Japan.” Even the Japanese wardroom boy did not catch its significance. The other was a paraphrase of a couplet in reference to our brown brothers of the Philippines first spoken in Manila. “To the Japanese: ‘They may be brothers to Commodore Perry, but they ain’t no brothers of mine.’”

  It was a joyous night. Lieutenant Gilmore, who had been an historic prisoner in the Philippines, so far sympathized with our escape from the Yellow Peril as to intercede with the captain to extend the rules of the ship. And those rules that were incapable of extending broke. Indeed, I believe we broke everything but the eight-inch gun. And finally we were conducted to our steamer in a launch crowded with slim-waisted, broad-chested youths in white mess jackets, clasping each other’s shoulders and singing, “Way down in my heart, I have a feeling for you, a sort of feeling for you”; while the officer of the deck turned his back, and discreetly fixed his night glass upon a suspicious star.

  It was an American cruiser that rescued this war correspondent from the bondage of Japan. It will require all the battle-ships in the Japanese navy to force him back to it.

  A WAR CORRESPONDENT’S KIT

  I am going to try to describe some kits and outfits I have seen used in different parts of the world by travellers and explorers, and in different campaigns by army officers and war correspondents. Among the articles, the reader may learn of some new thing which, when next he goes hunting, fishing, or exploring, he can adapt to his own uses. That is my hope, but I am sceptical. I have seldom met the man who would allow any one else to select his kit, or who would admit that any other kit was better than the one he himself had packed. It is a very delicate question. The same article that one declares is the most essential to his comfort, is the very first thing that another will throw into the trail. A man’s outfit is a matter which seems to touch his private honor. I have heard veterans sitting around a camp-fire proclaim the superiority of their kits with a jealousy, loyalty, and enthusiasm they would not exhibit for the flesh of their flesh and the bone of their bone. On a campaign, you may attack a man’s courage, the flag he serves, the newspaper for which he works, his intelligence, or his camp manners, and he will ignore you; but if you criticise his patent water-bottle he will fall upon you with both fists. So, in recommending any article for an outfit, one needs to be careful. An outfit lends itself to dispute, because the selection of its component parts is not an exact science. It should be, but it is not. A doctor on his daily rounds can carry in a compact little satchel almost everything he is liable to need; a carpenter can stow away in one box all the tools of his trade. But an outfit is not selected on any recognized principles. It seems to be a question entirely of temperament. As the man said when his friends asked him how he made his famous cocktail, “It depends on my mood.” The truth is that each man in selecting his outfit generally follows the lines of least resistance. With one, the pleasure he derives from his morning bath outweighs the fact that for the rest of the day he must carry a rubber bathtub. Another man is hearty, tough, and inured to an out-of-door life. He can sleep on a pile of coal or standing on his head, and he naturally scorns to carry a bed. But another man, should he sleep all night on the ground, the next day would be of no use to himself, his regiment, or his newspaper. So he carries a folding cot and the more fortunate one of tougher fibre laughs at him. Another man says that the only way to campaign is to travel “light,” and sets forth with rain-coat and field-glass. He honestly thinks that he travels light because his intelligence tells him it is the better way; but, as a matter of fact, he does so because he is lazy. Throughout the entire campaign he borrows from his friends, and with that camaraderie and unselfishness that never comes to the surface so strongly as when men are thrown together in camp, they lend him whatever he needs. When the war is over, he is the man who goes about saying: “Some of those fellows carried enough stuff to fill a moving van. Now, look what I did. I made the entire campaign on a tooth-brush.”

  A
s a matter of fact, I have a sneaking admiration for the man who dares to borrow. His really is the part of wisdom. But at times he may lose himself in places where he can neither a borrower nor a lender be, and there are men so tenderly constituted that they cannot keep another man hungry while they use his coffee-pot. So it is well to take a few things with you—if only to lend them to the men who travel “light.”

  On hunting and campaigning trips the climate, the means of transport, and the chance along the road of obtaining food and fodder vary so greatly that it is not possible to map out an outfit which would serve equally well for each of them. What on one journey was your most precious possession on the next is a useless nuisance. On two trips I have packed a tent weighing, with the stakes, fifty pounds, which, as we slept in huts, I never once had occasion to open; while on other trips in countries that promised to be more or less settled, I had to always live under canvas, and sometimes broke camp twice a day.

  In one war, in which I worked for an English paper, we travelled like major-generals. When that war started few thought it would last over six weeks, and many of the officers regarded it in the light of a picnic. In consequence, they mobilized as they never would have done had they foreseen what was to come, and the mess contractor grew rich furnishing, not only champagne, which in campaigns in fever countries has saved the life of many a good man, but cases of even port and burgundy, which never greatly helped any one. Later these mess supplies were turned over to the field-hospitals, but at the start every one travelled with more than he needed and more than the regulations allowed, and each correspondent was advised that if he represented a first-class paper and wished to “save his face” he had better travel in state. Those who did not, found the staff and censor less easy of access, and the means of obtaining information more difficult. But it was a nuisance. If, when a man halted at your tent, you could not stand him whiskey and sparklet soda, Egyptian cigarettes, compressed soup, canned meats, and marmalade, your paper was suspected of trying to do it “on the cheap,” and not only of being mean, but, as this was a popular war, unpatriotic. When the army stripped down to work all this was discontinued, but at the start I believe there were carried with that column as many tins of tan-leather dressing as there were rifles. On that march my own outfit was as unwieldy as a gypsy’s caravan. It consisted of an enormous cart, two oxen, three Basuto ponies, one Australian horse, three servants, and four hundred pounds of supplies and baggage. When it moved across the plain it looked as large as a Fall River boat. Later, when I joined the opposing army, and was not expected to maintain the dignity of a great London daily, I carried all my belongings strapped to my back, or to the back of my one pony, and I was quite as comfortable, clean, and content as I had been with the private car and the circus tent.