Thanks to the kindness of one of the guardsmen I again enjoyed the luxury of a wash, after which I
returned to the house and had some tea and hard biscuit, on which spare diet I lived for fully a week afterward, practically, in fact, until I reached Dalny.
Next day more officers and soldiers came in, and the difficulty for the Japanese was to know where to put them. Some were taken in hand by a roughlooking Japanese private, who spoke Russian and had evidently been a coolie of some kind in Siberia. He ordered them into an empty outhouse, and told them they could sleep on the floor. The poor, long-bearded greycoats followed him meekly and made no remark. The main body was turned loose in a field behind General Kuroki's house. Then the Japanese soldiers were all removed from our cabin and the place given over to us entirely. A few "vestavoi" were allowed to attend us, and it was touching to see the affectionate way in which these poor lads waited on their masters, although the common disaster which had overwhelmed them might have led them to assert their independence. The Japanese privates seemed, by the way, greatly amused at the zeal with which the Russian privates discharged all sorts of menial duties for their officers. To them it seemed that their big Russian antagonists were more like nurses than anything else, for in the Japanese army all menial work is discharged by 11 styohe,"or military coolies.
The Japanese officers often bring their own servants with them, and in any case the simplicity of their life and of their food is such that their orderlies do not have to spend more than half an hour every day in what I may call personal menial attendance on them. The Russian officer, on the other hand, is always shouting for his "vestavoi, "and his "vestavoi* "spends all the day and often a considerable part of the night, cooking for him, opening bottles for him, cleaning his clothes, etc. In Russia men are cheap, in Japan the soldier is a precious object. Japan emerged in thirty years from the intensely pleasant, intensely impracticable, old clan system, in which every "daimyo" and "samurai" was attended by crowds of retainers. Russia is still in the patriarchal stage. The soldiers are little children, the officers are their " fathers/' Despite the * 'emancipation of the serfs," the agreeable, old Biblical slave system still really survives in Russia, and it will require a whole series of military disasters, and perhaps a great national upheaval, to do away with it completely. But why should you pity Russia for the pain this revolution will cause her? Do you think that it cost the " daimyo " of Japan no pain to leave their moated " yashki," to disband their faithful "samurai," to sink from gods to common men?
On this day (Sunday) I was allowed to have an interview with Kuroki, the leader whose death by dysentery I announced in October 1904 in thelVew Yoj'k Herald 'on the authority of a Japanese prisoner. Dressed in a plain black uniform, this great Asiatic captain lived in a small bare room at the back of the building occupied by his staff, and when I entered he was seated cross-legged on the " kang," just as if he were sitting on the "tatami" of his little white lath-and-paper dwelling at home. One or two small rectangular trunks, evidently containing clothing and personal effects, lay beside him on the " kang," while his sword, overcoat, and hat hung on the wall. On a small Chinese table beside him lay a Japanese map, which he had been apparently studying.