The crowd of " jinrikshas " that wait outside reminds one of Shimbashi station at Tokio. There is a big detachment of soldiers going north, for a body of Japanese cavalry has just blown up a railway bridge at Changchun, 160 miles north of Mukden, and a brigade of the 41st Division has been sent to intercept them. Two regiments of Cossacks have also marched into Mongolia on the same fruitless mission, and, when they return, they will find that the battle of Mukden has been fought and lost.
The streets of the city are as crowded as the streets of a flourishing market town in England during the
Christmas season. Sometimes, indeed, the congestion of traffic would do credit to the Strand.
Interminable lines of transport-carts and horses get locked together at the gates and block the street traffic for hours together.
M Jinrikshas," pedestrians, horsemen, and Chinese carters try to make their way through the swaying mass of cursing men and rearing horses with the result that they only render the confusion worse confounded. What a mixture of races and variety of types one now meets in the streets! Here a Buriat Cossack sits in an "arba" (cart) on the side of the street, bargaining with a placid Chinese shopkeeper, who, patiently, smilingly, insistently demands five hundred per cent, above the market price. This Buriat has to take supplies to his " sotnia," which is fifty miles off to the south-east, and to-night he will sleep in his cart outside the walls, wrapped in his capacious but dirty " shuba," or sheepskin coat, with his purchases under him and his horse tethered to the shafts of the vehicle.
Alas! here comes a melancholy crowd of Chinese refugees — the inhabitants of some once prosperous village. Clad in rags and scarcely able to walk from hunger, they present a pitiable sight, and, strange to say, it is not the Russians but their own countrymen and countrywomen who jeer at them as they stagger past.
Half a dozen magnificent horses, half of them Arab horses, half English, are held by orderlies outside a small place which calls itself an hotel. These horses belong to officers who had volunteered from the Guards at the beginning of the war. They — the officers — had heard of the parade into Pekin in 1900 and thought
THE SOUTH GATE OF MUKDEN
that there was going to be a similar parade into Seoul and Tokio in 1904. They had therefore promised their friends souvenirs from the Mikado's capital, and had all been careful to provide themselves beforehand with handy little Russo-Japanese phrase-books.
One of the greatest surprises in Mukden is the cosy little "interior" belonging to Dr. and Mrs. Ross, of the Scotch Presbyterian Church. It is a perfect British home, with library, drawing-room, clock ticking in the hall, warm blazing fire, everything complete. A supper with Dr. Ross after one has come in from some Cossack raid is enough to make one imagine that he has never left the English shore, and that all his recent experiences are only unpleasant dreams.
Throughout the meal, the doctor, whose medical work among the Chinese poor has made him respected by every one in Mukden, speaks about China — on which country he has written several valuable books; after supper is over and grace has been said, young Miss Ross plays the piano; but it remains for the baby to add by its artless prattling the last touch needed in order to make one imagine oneself back in the old country. There are not many English folk in Mukden, but, nevertheless, English influence is strong there. The Chinese postal and telegraph officials are under Sir Robert Hart, and therefore pro-English. This is useful in many ways to the correspondents. For instance, we not only pick our own mail out of the mail-bags at the post office, but pick out all the newspapers addressed to the censor as well. As these newspapers sometimes contain uncensored articles their seizure saves trouble, but some correspondents go too far. One of them, for instance, an American,
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
has had the audacity to intercept for a year or so all the English papers and periodicals that come to Admiral Alexeieff, the Viceroy of the Far East! The censor, who has arranged to get two copies of each of our papers, is amazed sometimes at their nonarrival. He always manages to get hold of the New York Herald, however, and I was very proud of this fact until I discovered that it was not my articles which attracted him, but a series of coloured cartoons in the Sunday edition representing the career of an American enfant terrible called Buster Brown.