Many men have told me that in the confusion of battle they
always get this exaggerated idea of their own importance.
Down in
Cuba I heard a colonel inform a group of brother officers that a
Spanish field-piece had marked him for its own, and for an hour had
been pumping shrapnel at him and at no one else. The interesting
part of the story was that he believed it.
But the battle of Anshantien was in no way disquieting. It was a
noiseless, odorless, rubber-tired battle. So far as we were
concerned it consisted of rings of shrapnel smoke floating over a
mountain pass many miles distant. So many miles distant that when,
with a glass, you could see a speck of fire twinkle in the sun like a
heliograph, you could not tell whether it was the flash from the gun
or the flame from the shell. Neither could you tell whether the
cigarette rings issued from the lips of the Japanese guns or from
those of the Russians. The only thing about that battle of which you
were certain was that it was a perfectly safe battle to watch. It
was the first one I ever witnessed that did not require you to calmly
smoke a pipe in order to conceal the fact that you were scared. But
soothing as it was, the battle lacked what is called the human
interest. There may have been men behind the guns, but as they were
also behind Camel Hill and Saddle Mountain, eight miles away, our
eyes, like those of Mr. Samuel Weller, "being only eyes," were not
able to discover them.
Our teachers, the three Japanese officers who were detailed to tell
us about things we were not allowed to see, gazed at the scene of
carnage with well-simulated horror. Their expressions of countenance
showed that should any one move the battle eight miles nearer, they
were prepared to sell their lives dearly. When they found that none
of us were looking at them or their battle, they were hurt. The
reason no one was looking at them was because most of us had gone to
sleep. The rest, with a bitter experience of Japanese promises, had
doubted there would be a battle, and had prepared themselves with
newspapers. And so, while eight miles away the preliminary battle to
Liao-Yang was making history, we were lying on the grass reading two
months' old news of the St. Louis Convention.
The sight greatly disturbed our teachers.
"You complain," they said, "because you are not allowed to see
anything, and now, when we show you a battle, you will not look."
Lewis, of the Herald, eagerly seized his glasses and followed the
track of the Siberian railway as it disappeared into the pass.
"I beg your pardon, but I didn't know it was a battle," he apologized
politely. "I thought it was a locomotive at Anshantien Station
blowing off steam."
And, so, teacher gave him a bad mark for disrespect.
It really was trying.
In order to see this battle we had travelled half around the world,
had then waited four wasted months at Tokio, then had taken a sea
voyage of ten days, then for twelve days had ridden through mud and
dust in pursuit of the army, then for twelve more days, while battles
raged ten miles away, had been kept prisoners in a compound where
five out of the eighteen correspondents were sick with dysentery or
fever, and finally as a reward we were released from captivity and
taken to see smoke rings eight miles away! That night a round-robin,
which was signed by all, was sent to General Oku, pointing out to him
that unless we were allowed nearer to his army than eight miles, our
usefulness to the people who paid us our salaries was at an end.
While waiting for an answer to this we were led out to see another
battle. Either that we might not miss one minute of it, or that we
should be too sleepy to see anything of it, we were started in black
darkness, at three o'clock in the morning, the hour, as we are told,
when one's vitality is at its lowest, and one which should be
reserved for the exclusive use of burglars and robbers of hen roosts.
Concerning that hour I learned this, that whatever its effects may be
upon human beings, it finds a horse at his most strenuous moment. At
that hour by the light of three paper lanterns we tried to saddle
eighteen horses, donkeys, and ponies, and the sole object of each was
to kick the light out of the lantern nearest him. We finally rode
off through a darkness that was lightened only by a gray, dripping
fog, and in a silence broken only by the patter of rain upon the corn
that towered high above our heads and for many miles hemmed us in.
After an hour, Sataki, the teacher who acted as our guide, lost the
trail and Captain Lionel James, of the Times, who wrote "On the Heels
of De Wet," found it for him. Sataki, so our two other keepers told
us, is an authority on international law, and he may be all of that
and know all there is to know of three-mile limits and paper
blockades, but when it came to picking up a trail, even in the bright
sunlight when it lay weltering beneath his horse's nostrils, we
always found that any correspondent with an experience of a few
campaigns was of more general use. The trail ended at a muddy hill,
a bare sugar-loaf of a hill, as high as the main tent of a circus and
as abruptly sloping away. It was swept by a damp, chilling wind; a
mean, peevish rain washed its sides, and they were so steep that if
we sat upon them we tobogganed slowly downward, ploughing up the mud
with our boot heels.
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