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. Our experience had taught us that
when the Japanese promised us we would be allowed to do something we
wanted to do, they did not keep their promise; but that when they
said we would not be allowed to do something we wanted to do, they
spoke the truth. Consequently, when General Oku declared the
correspondents would be held four miles in the rear, we believed he
would keep his word. And, as we now know, he did, the only men who
saw the fighting that later ensued being those who disobeyed his
orders and escaped from their keepers. Those who had been ordered by
their papers to strictly obey the regulations of the Japanese, and
the military attaches, were kept by Oku nearly six miles in the rear.
On the receipt of Oku's answer to the correspondents, Mr. John Fox,
Jr., of Scribner's Magazine, Mr. Milton Prior, of the London
Illustrated News, Mr. George Lynch, of the London Morning Chronicle,
and myself left the army. We were very sorry to go. Apart from the
fact that we had not been allowed to see anything of the military
operations, we were enjoying ourselves immensely. Personally, I
never went on a campaign in a more delightful country nor with better
companions than the men acting as correspondents with the Second
Army. For the sake of such good company, and to see more of
Manchuria, I personally wanted to keep on. But I was not being paid
to go camping with a set of good fellows. Already the Japanese had
wasted six months of my time and six months of Mr. Collier's money,
Mr. Fox had been bottled up for a period of equal length, while Mr.
Prior and Mr. Lynch had been prisoners in Tokio for even four months
longer. And now that Okabe assured us that Liao-Yang was already
taken, and Oku told us if there were any fighting we would not be
allowed to witness it, it seemed a good time to quit.
Other correspondents would have quit then, as most of them did ten
days later, but that their work and ours in a slight degree differed.
As we were not working for daily papers, we used the cable but
seldom, while they used it every day.
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