Passing on this day a collection of dug-outs, Hara began calculating the force of Russians it had contained. He also used every opportunity of enlarging his vocabulary of English military terms, taking care to jot down in his notebook every unfamiliar word that he heard me use. As I was equally keen, however, on enlarging my Japanese vocabulary, there was a fair exchange on both sides. He had got three books in his knapsack, one Colonel Churchill's M Japanese Military Terms," the second a little Anglo- Japanese dictionary, and the third a Sino-Japanese gazetteer of Manchurian geographical names. When with the Russian army, I had^ometimes heard privates reading novels aloud for the delectation of comrades who could not read, but I never knew any of them to possess even as much as a map.
But in the Japanese army the First Soldiers, as they are called, had always maps, and so had even ordinary privates sometimes.
A Chinese countryman joined us in the evening and enlarged for a long time, in his own language, on the oneness of the Japanese and Chinese peoples. According to him they were "yeega yang" (all the same) — same eyes, same black hair, same absence of beard, same rice, chopsticks and character writing. I realised that the occasion was a solemn one. I was watching the birth of the Yellow Peril. But Hara tactfully discouraged this conversation.
In regard to the treatment of Chinese, I think the
Japanese are ahead of the Russians, but there is in general as little fraternisation between the Celestials and the Japanese soldiers as if the latter were the troops of some civilised Malay empire which had adopted Chinese character writing. Contrary to my expectations, the Japanese do not speak Chinese any better than the Russians, but they have the advantage of being able to communicate with the Chinese in writing.
In the evening I reached Kandalusan, about a day's journey to the south-east of Mukden, and formerly the headquarters of General Zassulitch, commanding the First Siberian Army Corps. As my next day's journey was to take me to the Yentai coal mines it will be seen that I was sent around in a semicircular sweep, so as not to be able to see anything of what was going on in the vicinity of Mukden.
I found Kandalusan so little changed that I almost expected to hear the merry music and the sound of dancing which had proceeded from it when I had last visited it, several months before. But, alas for worldly grandeur, it had fallen from its high estate, and, instead of being the headquarters of a General, was now a mere communications station. Never again shall the voice of Muscovite harpers and musicians be heard in Kandalusan.
The very house in which General Zassulitch had given me a frosty welcome and a frostier dinner was desecrated by the presence of a commissariat officer of low degree. This functionary received me almost as coldly as if he had been an English postmistress and I a customer coming to buy a stamp. He gave me good quarters, however, and got the servants to make several attempts to light a fire in the " kang," but these attempts were all failures, and I woke up very cold at a quarter past 2 a.m. to find one soldier sleeping on the " kang " alongside me and another sitting at my feet with his rifle between his knees and his bayonet fixed to the rifle, watching me intently by the uncertain flicker of a new candle which he had just lighted, the first one having burned out. The guard over me was relieved every half-hour, the relieved always saying "Yoroshii!" ("All's well!") to the relievee, in the bated breath of a man guarding incalculable treasures.
Next morning I asked Hara for an explanation of this singular watchfulness.
" Oh, sir!" said he, "that guard is simply there to do you honour as correspondent."
I thereupon thanked God that I was not a general, for in that case they would probably have taken it into their heads to have a brass band playing all night in my bedroom.
Early on the morning of Tuesday, March 14, we started for Tanko, near the Yentai mines.
An instinctive fear that the Japanese batteries would fire on us seized me as soon as we left Kandalusan, for, the last time I had been there, it was dangerous to wander to any considerable distance south of the Russian lines. But at length we passed what had long been the Land Debatable and reached what had long been the Japanese outposts. On one side of the Shaho (which was then, like the Hunho, almost free from ice and difficult to cross) the outermost Russian posts, with their palisades, their barbed wire fences and their pitfalls; on the other side, the simpler Japanese dug-outs and trenches. The Russians seem
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