In the afternoon I was brought to the station, and on the way I saw a sight that moved me more than anything I had seen during the whole war. In front of the Liaoyang railway depot there is a large fencedin space, and this space I found to be crammed with Russian prisoners who had passed the whole night there on the bare ground without any kind of covering. They were cold, hungry, dirty and miserable, to such an extent that their worst enemy might have wept for pity; and, all round, Japanese and Chinese pressed against the railings and grinned at the unhappy captives inside.
There were eight tents for officers — for a time I occupied one of them myself — but, as far as I could see, there were no latrines, no decent privacy, and the natives watched the white men discharging the offices of nature with a critical and disgusted air. The unfortunate Russkies were exactly on the level of a collection of gorillas that had just been captured and rendered harmless. Poor devils! they had hardly room to turn round in, and as they had not washed for weeks, and as no soap or water was now given them, it is not surprising that the neat little Japanese soldiers, spruce as if they had just stepped out of a band-box, with shining cheeks and glistening white teeth, sometimes held their noses, and that even the dirtiest Chinese coolies seemed to regard this Russky nuisance as something too great to be borne in silence. It was a fall indeed; a fall so tremendous that words fail to convey a just idea of it. To be captured and driven into a cage by the yellow soldiers whom, at the beginning of the war, they had only one designation for — "makaka" (monkeys) — was a come-down in the world for the haughty Muscovites. To be driven into an enclosure like cattle, and allowed to stand or lie there, on a night when a considerate man would scarcely like to let his horse or his dog sleep out in the open,
was bad enough; but what made it worse was the fact that in the neat houses which the Russians had built for themselves years ago all around the station, the Japanese were now very snug and comfortable.
Some of the Russians tried to converse with the Chinese whom they had formerly known in Liaoyang, while others accepted cigarettes which good-natured Japanese soldiers passed to them through the bars of the fence, the same as you would pass biscuits to a caged monkey at the Zoo. It was pathetic to watch the vain attempts of one or two to light a fire with a handful of twigs and dried grass they had collected in order to boil water in the few sooty and dented old mess-tins that still remained to them, for the purpose of making their beloved "chai" (tea). Some prayed, with faces turned towards the sun and with the frequent crossings which the Orthodox Catholic employs. Japanese soldiers occasionally imitated them out of a spirit of fun, but the Russians did not take this unconscious irreverence in bad part. They only smiled, and taught the Japs how to cross themselves properly.
I cannot say that the Russians were dignified in their misfortunes. They " bummed " around the limits of their cage, fraternising quite affably with the few Japanese who allowed them to become familiar, and begging piteously for food, Tor tobacco, for anything their keepers would condescend to give them. None of them seemed by his conduct to feel that he represented Europe and must behave accordingly. It cannot be said that any of them stood gloomily apart like a Byronic hero in the hands of his enemies. On one occasion, however, when a young Russian private began to tell me how his party had been surrounded,
an elderly comrade interrupted him with the angry exclamation: M What's the use of talking about these things now? Can't you wait till we get back to Russia? "
Late in the afternoon the Russians were led from their cage to the railway-station, where they were driven like cattle into open trucks. This long line of tall, patriarchal-looking, bearded men marched between two grinning rows of Chinamen and Japanese. As they did not march fast enough to please their masters, the latter made them run, and then laughed the silent, Asiatic laugh — at the " bashleeks " and the "papakhas" bobbing up and down as the big, docile men raced obediently towards the railway.