that grows twelve feet high. The people eat the top, they feed the blades to live stock and the stalk serves almost every purpose of bamboo and for fire-wood as well. You can ride for hours between two solid walls of it and you wonder how there can be people enough in the scattering villages to plant and till, or even to cut it. A richer land I never saw. It looks as though it would feed both armies and yet there was no sign—no burned house, or robbed field or even a cast-off bit of the soldier’s equipment to show that an army had ever passed that way. One fact only spoke significantly of war. No woman—except a child or a crone—was ever visible. This struck me, when I recalled the trail of the Massachusetts volunteers from Siboney to Santiago and the thousands of women refugees straggling into Caney—as very remarkable. I suppose both Japanese and Russians are trying to keep the good-will of the Chinaman as well as of the rest of the world. I don’t wonder that the Russians are fighting for that land nor shall I wonder should the Japanese, if they win, try to keep it. But how it should belong to anybody but the Chinaman who has tilled if in peace and with no harm to anybody for thousands of years—I can’t for the life of me see.
Next morning there was a sign of war. At daybreak some red flecks from the dragon’s jaws drifted back from the mist and dust through which he was writhing forward. It looked, some man said, like the procession of the damned who filed past Dante in hell. Each man had a red roll around him. They uttered no sound—they looked not at one another, but stared vacantly and mildly at us as they shuffled silently, from the mist and shuffled silently on. The expression of each was so like the expression of the rest that they looked like brothers. A more creepy, ghost-like thing I never saw. I knew not what they were but they fascinated me and made me shudder and I found myself drawing towards them, step by step, hardly conscious that I was moving. I do not recall that any one of us uttered a word. Yet they were only sick men coming back from the front—soldiers sick with the kakke, the “beriberi,” the sleeping sickness. It was hard to believe that the face of any one of them had ever belonged to a soldier—hard to believe that sickness could make a soldier’s face so gentle. That man in the red shirt and those gray ghosts that shuffled so silently out of one mist and so silently into another are the high lights in the two most vivid pictures I’ve seen thus far.
The beriberi comes from a diet of too much fish and rice, I understand. It numbs the extremities and has a paralyzing effect on body and mind. Summer is its time and snow checks its course. A man may have it a dozen times and sometimes he dies. The young and able-bodied are its favorite victims, old men its rare ones and women and foreigners it wholly spares. It made great havoc among Japanese soldiers in Korea but the Japanese now conquer beriberi as though it was a Russian metamorphosis.
Shung-yo-hing is the place now and the time is 2 P. M. The heat was awful and the dust from thousands of carts, coolies and beasts of burden choked the very lungs. I have the bulge on Fuji now. I knot the reins and draw them over the pommel of a McClellan saddle, thus holding his muzzle close to his chest. It seemed to puzzle Fuji a good deal.
“He can’t even neigh,” I said to Brill in triumph, and Brill cackled scorn. Fuji neighed five times in the next ten yards. I should say that his record in six hours to-day was about this: stumbling with right fore-foot—300 times; stumbling with left hind-foot—200 times; neighs—1000.
There are about twenty miles more to Kaiping. Haicheng has been taken by the Japanese. Somebody has just come in with cheering news—we can get back to Yokohama by water. Gently we all said:
“Hooray!” The parting from Fuji will not be sad.
… This morning I found some strange pieces of paper with strange ideographs theron in Japanese.
“What are these, Takeuchi?”
Takeuchi looked really embarrassed.
“Prayers,” he said. “I got them at a temple. If you carry them, you will get back safe.” Well, that made Takeuchi immune for days.
At Kaiping we are now and we go to Haicheng to-morrow. At least we think we do. We got here last night: Fuji being lame, I left him for Takeuchi to lead (he rode him, of course); went on afoot and later climbed aboard a freight train, drawn by 600 coolies. I told the Japanese in my