to have been everlastingly preparing against attack; the Japanese to have been ever getting ready for an advance.
All the way from the Shaho to Yentai ran a trolley line of far simpler and cheaper construction than the fine narrow-gauge railways which the Russians had constructed to the east and west of Mukden and which afterward fell entirely into the hands of the conquerors.
On this day I met the usual endless stream of military coolies and Chinese carts. A Japanese soldier, asleep in one of the latter, was roused by the excited driver thereof, who shouted to him: " Quick! quick! Look! look! A white man! A hairy barbarian caught! " But, greatly to my disgust — for up to that time I had attracted as much attention as a cow with two heads — the little Jap only cursed the Chinaman and went to sleep again, without hardly condescending to favour me with a glance. In the old days our fondness for having a whole bedroom to ourselves in Japanese hotels, our dislike of the publicity which obtains in the Japanese bath, and our unaccountable repugnance to going about like them inpuris naturalibus, led the Japanese to suspect that there was about our mode of existence and our bodily form something mysterious, something of which we felt ashamed and which we wished to hide; but now that they have captured tens of thousands of us — men, women and children, including sick, wounded, naked and insane, now that they have buried our mangled dead, all the way from Port Arthur to Kaiyuan; that they have watched all sorts of specimens of us day and night with the care of a naturalist studying a new
3 s variety of beetle; that they have superintended us taking our compulsory bath, scores at a time in the quarantine stations at Ninoshima and Nagasaki, the edge must surely be for ever taken off their keen curiosity.
I dined this day at a place south of the Shaho, called Sudyaze, where there was an enormous depot of Japanese stores of rice and barley packed in gunny bags covered by closely woven straw mats, and ready to be carted or carried off at a moment's notice. The officer in charge of the dtape was hospitable and communicative. He said that he had expected one hundred thousand prisoners, and was disappointed at getting word to prepare accommodation for only ten thousand. The total number of captives was higher than ten thousand, but the balance was going southward by another route. Personally he did not dote on Russian prisoners, whose clothing was, he said, dirty. He complained that a Russian regimental doctor who had been captured three days before and whom he had treated very well, had stolen a Japanese soldier's overcoat and vamoosed in the night-time. The soldier on guard had been deceived by the colour of the coat, but this did not save him from punishment next day at the hands of his incensed superior.
While sympathising to some extent with the latter, I could not help feeling some sympathy for the unfortunate Russian also, because I had been often thinking of doing as he did. At the same time this problem of escaping from watchful guardians is one of the hardest that ever confronted any ordinary man • for, apart from the great difficulty of getting past sleeping men and armed sentinels, there is the equally great difficulty of getting across a flat, bare, wasted countrytraversed everywhere by the enemy. The more I pondered on this problem the more profound became my admiration for Jack Sheppard. In some ways Jack was a greater man than Napoleon Bonaparte.
Here and elsewhere in Manchuria, more especially in Dalny, I found in the hands of the Japanese fine Russian dogs, which, seeing that I was a white man, used to rush towards me with sorrowful whines. Although they were well treated by the Japanese, it was rather sad to see them forced to lick the hands that had perhaps shed their masters' blood.
Near Tanko we called on a friend of Hara's who had something to do with the canteen business, and in his house, strange to say, I found two Japanese servants who had been in Siberia and could speak Russian.
The Chinese inhabitants seemed to be getting on fairly well under the Japanese sway in this part of the country. They had not begun to till their rice-fields yet, but this was, I suppose, because the ground was still frozen. A handsome young Chinese woman with a baby in her arms regarded me, as I passed, with curiosity, but not with hatred; while the usual stream of Chinese carters indulged sometimes in the usual good-natured chaff, but generally confined themselves to a blank stare of wonderment.