" Bring him in! Bring him in! " he cried, waving his hands like a maniac. " He's a spy. He's a Japanese. See that he has got no weapons. A revolver. He's sure to have a revolver. Search him carefully. Hold his hands tight. He's a dangerous fellow."
A soldier now got on each side of me and held my arms, at the same time guiding me along a narrow passage which ran between two deep trenches. I saw that I was being brought into a covered work with parapets, traverses and bomb-proofs. A sentinel casually waved a lantern towards a row of black yawning trous de loup with sharpened stakes at the bottom. I felt all the terror of a man being led into an oubliette. The rear was brought up by the excited captain, who kept gesticulating and ejaculating all the time.
As we passed over a narrow plank traversing a deep ditch, and descended into a small court beneath the surface of the ground, I felt that my life was in great danger, and I was confirmed in my worst fears when, in the light of the dark lanterns that were flashed in my face, 1 saw the captain. He was a thin, nervouslooking man, with a sparse, sandy-coloured beard and grey eyes that bulged in his head as he looked at me. I realised that long-continued fatigue and excitement, combined with want of food and sleep, had reduced him to a condition of nervousness little removed from lunacy; and unfortunately his nervousness had evidently infected the ignorant soldiers, who formed a ring around me, and on whose white, scared faces I
could read no more trace of pity than a tiger might see on the faces of a ring of hunters.
Fortunately, a different type of officer happened to be in the fort at the time. This was the chief of staff of the Second Army Corps, as well as I can remember, an urbane, highly-refined, cool-headed officer, speaking French and German as fluently as he spoke his mother tongue. It took me about three minutes to satisfy this officer that I was what I pretended to be; and then, over a glass of wine and some biscuits, he informed me that all Englishmen were mad for exposing themselves to danger when there was no necessity for it, and explained to me, in a tone of philosophic aloofness, the greatness of the risk I had run.
M These soldiers," said he, waving his biscuit in a semicircle, " are from Europe and have not been long here, so that they know nothing of correspondents. Then, your dress and the fact that you are a foreigner found in the heart of a Russian encampment on the night after a battle and while the enemy are expected to make an attack at any moment, might well have cost you your life.
"lam surprised," he added, in a dreamy, meditative tone, "that you were not shot, especially as two Japanese officers accompanied by some Chinese did actually enter our camp last night and were killed. Hullo! What's that?"
At this moment the silence of the night was brusquely torn by a volley of musketry, followed instantly by another and another. Outside, it was as black as pitch, the rain was falling fast, but the continual flash of the rifles lit up white faces which gleamed in the distance like foam on the crest of a breaking n wave. The Japanese were coming on, coming on, coming on.
Between the startling r-r-r-rip! r-r-r-r-rip! r-r-r-r-rrip, r-r-r-r-r-r-rip! of the volleys there comes to us faintly the notes of a distant, savage chant of banzai! banzai! banzai!
It is like the cry of wild, invulnerable tribes! It is like the defiant shriek of Dervishes! It swells on the air like a fierce Oriental Marseillaise. In this abrupt, staccato roar is something foreign, repugnant, disquieting. It does not belong to the European brotherhood. It does not come from Christian lips. It does not even seem to come from human beings. It reminds me of the fierce Allah il Allah! Allah il Allah! that I used to hear in Mahommedan cities. It recalls the mad monotonous chant of Hosein el Hosa! Hosein el Hosa! on the anniversary of Kerbela. It evokes memories of India. It recalls the horrors I had heard in my cradle of Nana Sahib and the mutineers of Lucknow. With a start I recollect that these faces, which shine white in the flash of the Russian rifles, are the faces of Orientals, that this cry is for the blood of white men. It is not the cry of Frenchmen or Germans. It is something infinitely more disquieting and significant. It is the cry of that strange and monstrous Asia with which Europe has been at feud for thrice a thousand years. It demands vengeance not only for Port Arthur but for Kagoshima and Shimonoseki, nay, more, for Salamis, for the Pink Forbidden City, for the Red River, for Plassy, for Kandahar, for Mindanao.
Oh, England! Oh, my country! What deed is this thou hast done?