All Of This We
Guessed, What We Were Told Was Very Different, What We Saw Was
Nothing.
In all, four hundred thousand men were not farther from us
than four to thirty miles - and we saw nothing.
We watched as the
commissariat wagons carrying food to these men passed us by, the
hospital stores passed us by, the transport carts passed us by, the
coolies with reserve mounts, the last wounded soldier, straggler, and
camp-follower passed us by. Like a big tidal wave Oku's army had
swept forward leaving its unwelcome guests, the attaches and
correspondents, forty lonely foreigners among seventy thousand
Japanese, stranded upon a hill miles in the rear. Perhaps, as war,
it was necessary, but it was not magnificent.
That night Major Okabe, our head teacher, gave us the official
interpretation of what had occurred. The Russians, he said, had
retreated from Liao-Yang and were in open flight. Unless General
Kuroki, who, he said, was fifty miles north of us, could cut them off
they would reach Mukden in ten days, and until then there would be no
more fighting. The Japanese troops, he said, were in Liao-Yang, it
had been abandoned without a fight. This he told us on the evening
of the 27th of August.
The next morning Major Okabe delivered the answer of General Oku to
our round-robin. He informed us that we had been as near to the
fighting as we ever would be allowed to go. The nearest we had been
to any fighting was four miles.
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