Liaoyang had now the sober and settled tranquillity of a prosperous little market-town in England. Five pairs of rails glistened in the lamp-light, the buffet had become a traffic managers office, and the station was divided into compartments wherein prosaic, sedentary little men worked patiently and noiselessly. There was no crowd on the platform. Several people crossed it hurriedly with luggage. A few porters walked along it swinging their lanterns. Like one in a dream I issued from the train and passed through the wicket. Outside was no crowd of loud, abusive "jinriksha" men wanting three or four roubles to bring you a few hundred yards, no long line of pure-breds held by patient orderlies, no crowd of privates competing with Chinamen for the few kopecks the holding of a horse would bring them.
The lofty tower of Liaoyang rose above me; the houses of the Russian settlement twinkled with lights; afar off the triple summit of Shushan looked as calm as if it had never known shrapnel. I passed over a road hard as iron, and after visiting several offices wherein pale, studious, polite young men, in semi-military costume and with spectacles and hollow cheeks were still writing patiently, sadly and silently, I was finally led into the gendarmerie quarter, a quadrangular block of buildings situated at the base of the old pagoda. Here also, despite the lateness of the hour, sallow, sartorial-looking clerks were still at work. But there were others. At a sign from the chief clerk, to whom Hara had, with his usual swing and vim, told the whole story and handed his documents, two sturdy little soldiers, with rifles and fixed bayonets, came from somewhere or other and quietly but firmly attached themselves to me.
CHAPTER XVII
When I got up at 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, March 15, I found everybody had already breakfasted and gone out to work, that the kitchen fire was cold, and had to be lighted again in order to prepare my breakfast, that the commandant of the gendarmerie had already been twice to see me. When I found this out and thought of the old Liaoyang, which regarded ten o'clock in the morning as scandalously early, I began to realise that there is something, after all, in that saying about the early bird.
The commandant was very polite. He said that it would have been a dreadful thing if an English or American correspondent on the Russian side had fallen by a Japanese bullet, that it was an honour for me to have been captured as I was, and that it was an honour for him to be my host. But on learning that I had been in Liaoyang before and knew the lie of the ground perfectly, his jaw fell, and, immediately after, my guards began watching me intently, evidently under the impression that I was a kind of Irish leprecaun that was liable to disappear the instant its captor took his eyes off it. I was also refused permission to visit the city, to take a walk, to send a note to my old friend, Dr. Westwater of Liaoyang, or to do anything save remain all day in my room. I was treated, however, with much courtesy, and supplied with enough food and drink for two men.
Despite his suspicious nature, the commandant of Liaoyang pleased me by the paternal interest he took in his involuntary charges. He consulted with me anxiously as to what the Russians got to eat when at home, and seemed surprised when I told him that, even in their worst times in Manchuria, they had always got plenty of black bread, thick soup, meat, " kasha " (porridge), and tea. He had evidently imagined that in their own country they lived exclusively on dog biscuits. He was a minute, conscientious, scrupulous man, however, and begged anxiously to know if four pieces of a hard cabin-biscuit kind of production per meal were not sufficient for each man. He was visibly disappointed and distressed when I told him that I hardly thought this sufficient. The Russian soldiers themselves were decidedly of opinion that it was insufficient, and in conversation with me they contrasted the warm " zeemlyankee," abundant " borsh," and huge chunks of fresh black bread supplied to the Japanese prisoners by the Russians with the treatment meted out them by the Japs.
Finally I rather put my foot in it by telling the old commandant that, when the next Russo-Japanese wa broke out, I would again join the Russians. " Then," said he sharply, " next time you are my guest it will be in St. Petersburg."