Republic." A whistle sounded, and hundreds of khaki-clad soldiers, with thirty and three pounds of impedimenta, which included everything from tent poles to spare boots, from a paper fan to a rice pannier, bowed stiffly among little groups of equally ceremonious relatives, and scrambled into a train whose porters were even then slamming the carriage doors.
A final toot, a re-echoing "banzai," and a forest of waving arms and fluttering flags, and only the rear-end buffers of a military train were seen at the platform's end. The thirty-fourth regiment had started for the front.
The House of the Stork was quiet when I returned — it is a dusty ride from the station. The samisens were laid away and the geisha, who had seen their dear ones go dry-eyed, wept behind the paper-screened partitions. Haru San was saddest of them all.
"Honorably pardon," she said, when I asked her why she wept. "It is for shame; Tanaka San is a coward."
From Toyo San I heard all. In this land of bravery and fatalism, of duty and death, of a patriotism that is the embodiment of self-sacrifice, who would have thought to find a temple so prostituted as this disgraced Nakao-mura on Nakao hill? In all this land there was, doubtless, but one other such abhorrent place — that shrine near Kyoto where the cowardly Heimen of Osaka prayed to the gods of peace to aid them evade the conscription.
Nakao-mura is a lonely temple, deserted and with high-grown weeds hiding its once pretty courtyard with the rows of well-made, but now crumbled, lanterns; its gratings, age-worn and covered with dust, were thick with papers and offerings — amongst which was the prayer-paper with the written plea of Tanaka San, the deserter, who called upon the gods to save him from the army which sought him. He had deserted from the regiment I had seen leaving, even as it was being en- trained. He had, in his ignorance, gone to the temple in the woods of Nakao hill, where the gods of his fathers would save him, and he would go back to Haru San.
Toyo San told me of how he came back, at dead of night, and of how, with lashing tongue, Haru San had told him she would have none of a coward.
The rest I did not hear until long afterward, when I sat at the edge of the "kowliang" on a Manchurian field watching the guns coming up for the battle of the morrow.
It was Tanaka, the coward, who told it to me. He had fled from the police who sought him, and hid in the confines of a city's yoshiwara with the courtesans, until, remorseful and sad, he put on the uniform they had given him and went to the barracks at Aoyama to rejoin the colors. He was a coward no more, he said, and he cursed the fishermen who had told him of the temple on Nakao hill as he waited the expected punishment.
All these things he told me — and more. He had snatched the captain's sword from its scabbard when the officer berated him for his desertion, and he would have committed "seppuka" and let his life's blood wash out his offense, but the officer sta3'ed his hand.
"No, not thus," the captain had said. "Your life is forfeit ; you should give it, but give it to the Emperor in battle, not worthlessly."
He would give it, and Haru San would see that he was no coward.
I had given him a tin of corned beef; he had given me rice, and we ate as
ho told me these things. Then I left him, for the camp of the correspondents was
afar, and it was night.
- * *
The battle had been waged for two full days, and it was eventide. Scattered over five hills, serried with trenches and covered ways, broken with gun pits and shelter galleries, were eighty thousand Russians, and a hundred thousand Japanese were hidden in a great plain, grown thick with giant millet. From the millet, as day dawned on August 29, a party of engineers crept into wire entanglements at the foot of a grassy hill and sought to cut the wires in the face of a rain of lead. Only a score returned; the others lay twisted and inanimate among the wires.
