When the Russo-Japanese War broke out I was on the staff of the Novi Krai* newspaper of Port Arthur. To explain how I, a British subject, came to find myself in that singular position I shall go back a little in point of time. In 1903 I was employed on the staff of a Japanese paper, and having previously been editor of a French paper in Siam, I thought that it would not be a bad idea to complete my education in Far Eastern politics by going over to the Russian side.
Accordingly I began to take lessons in the Russian language with Father Sergius Gleboff, Chaplain of the Russian Legation in Tokio, and in August 1903 I resigned my position on the Japan Times of Tokio in order to go to Port Arthur, where we should, I expected, have war within about a month, that is on October 8, by which time the Russians had promised to evacuate Manchuria.
I must say that I found it hard to tear myself away from Japan, not only because I liked the country and its people, but also because to go to Port Arthur was to take a leap in the dark, for I did not know if I could get employment there.
True, I had arranged to send a circular letter several
* " Novi Krai " is the Russian for " New Land."
times a week to a number of Far Eastern papers, but it turned out that the money I got at irregular intervals from this source was not quite sufficient to pay for my washing. Luckily I had not been long in Port Arthur before I joined the Novi A>#z and was appointed correspondent of the New York Herald, a paper which I had represented in Siam some five or six years earlier.
I went to Port Arthur in a Japanese vessel, the Tairen Maru, and Dalny was the first Russian port we touched at. I got my first view of Dalny early one morning, when, on getting up, I found that we were approaching a quay of solid masonry, provided with all modern appliances for loading and unloading cargo, and with railway trains waiting close by to carry off that cargo, not only to Siberia, but to Europe. The length and amplitude of the quays, and the magnificent blocks of concrete used in their construction, impressed me profoundly when I went ashore. The men who were responsible for that work had evidently built, not for an age, but for all time. There was no necessity for making the quays so large and elaborate, but there was something Roman, something characteristic of the empire-builder, about this lavish waste of money; and, in view of the threatening attitude of the Japanese, the serene confidence which this vast expenditure indicated was particularly impressive. If somebody had prophesied to me at that moment that inside of eighteen months I should be a prisoner of the Japanese in a conquered Dalny, I should have been little disposed to believe him.
Dalny itself was a brand-new European town, with nothing Chinese about it save a few streets of Chinese hovels, which were only to remain temporarily; for the Australians themselves are not more resolved now to keep the Yellow Race out of Australia than the Russians then were to keep the Yellow Race out of Dalny.
Considered as a great port, Dalny's one defect was that it had practically no inhabitants. It was like a city of the dead.
The only people one met were soldiers or functionaries. A stonemason would walk slowly down the street, and the echo of his footsteps would have died away in the distance before any one else would come along. Then a Cossack would gallop! past on a hairy, unkempt Chinese pony.
Sometimes an " izvoshcheek " (carriage), with an officer in it, would tear past at a great rate. Then silence would again prevail.
Can the reader picture to himself a suburb of some European or American town which has been suddenly run up during the prevalence of a building craze, and which has almost, but not quite, left the hands of the builder? Many families are living in rows of unplastered houses, with blinds on the windows and glaringly new tiles on the roof. Other houses are completed, but are still unoccupied, and the floors are encumbered with mortar, nails and pieces of brick. Still other houses are surrounded by scaffolding, and only half completed; and, in their vicinity, planks, heaps of mortar, piles of brick, stone and slates are lying about in all directions. Imagine what such a suburb looks like at some unearthly hour in the morning, say at 4 a.m., in the summer-time, and you have a good idea of what Dalny looked like when I visited it at noon one day in September 1903. I must admit,