On the War-Dragon’s Trail
By John Fox, Jr.
here was the dean of the corps—one Meiton Prior who, in spite of his years—may they be many more—is still the first war artist in the world. He was mounted on a white horse, seventeen hands high and with a weak back that has a history. Prior sold him in the end to a canny Englishman, who sold him to the Japanese—giving Prior the price asked. “Why, didn’t you know that he wasn’t sound?” said a man of another race, who wondered, perhaps, that in a horse-trade blood should so speak to blood even in a strange land.
“Yes,” said the Englishman, “but the Japanese won’t know it.” They didn’t. There was Richard Harding Davis who, for two reasons—the power to pick from any given incident the most details that will interest the most people and the good-luck or good judgment to be always just where the most interesting thing is taking place (with one natural exception, that shall be told)—is also supreme. Mounted on another big horse was he—one Devery by name—with a mule in the rear, of a name that must equally appeal. Quite early, after purchase, Davis had laid whispering lip to flapping ear.
“I’ll call you Williams, or I’ll call you Walker just as you choose,” he said.
There was no response.
“Then I’ll call you both,” said Davis, and that wayward animal was Williams and Walker through the campaign. A double name was never more appropriate, for a flagrant double life was his. There was Bill the Brill of the gentle heart, on a nice chestnut; Burleigh, the veteran, on a wretched beast that was equally dangerous at either end; Lionel James with cart and coolies of his own and the Italian on a handsome iron-gray. There were the two Frenchmen—Reggie, the young, the gigantic, the self-controlled and never complaining—so beloved, that his very appearance always brought the Marseillaise from us all—and Laguerié, the courteous, ever-vivacious, irascible—so typical that he might have stepped into Manchuria from the stage. There was Whiting, artist, on the cutest beast with the biggest ambition that I ever saw navigating on legs; lanky Wallace, whose legs, like Lincoln’s, were long enough to reach the ground—even when he was mounted—and there were the two Smiths—English and American—and Lewis, gifted with many tongues and a beautiful barytone who, his much boasted milky steed being lame, struck Oku’s trail on foot. On Pit-a-Pat, a pony that used to win and lose money for us at the Yokohama races, was little Clarkin the stubborn, the argumentative, who, at a glance, was plainly sponsor for the highest ideals of the paper that, in somebody’s words, made virtue a thing to be shunned: and, finally and leastly, there were “Fuji and me.”
These were the men who thought they were going to Port Arthur and who, with the sound of the big guns at that fortress growing fainter behind them, struck Oku’s trail, up through a rolling valley that was bordered by two blue volcanic mountain chains. The sky was cloudless and the sun was hot. The roads were as bad as roads would likely be after 4000 years of travel and 4000 years of neglect but the wonder was that, after the Russian army had tramped them twice and the Japanese army had tramped them once, they were not worse.
The tail of the War-Dragon, whose jaws were snapping at flying Russian heels far on ahead, had been drawn on at dawn, and through dust and mire and sand, we followed its squirming wake. On the top of every little hill we could see it painfully crawling ahead—length interminable, its vertebra carts, coolies, Chinese wagons, its body columns of soldiers, its scales the flashes of sword-scabbard and wagon-tire—and whipping the dust heavenward in clouds. The button on that tail was Lynch the Irishman on a bicycle—and that button was rolling itself headwards—leading us