There were about twenty trucks in the train and fifty men in each truck. For every fifty prisoners there was one armed Japanese, who sat stiff and upright on the side of the vehicle, his black eyes shining brightly above the high, fur-lined collar of his pepper-coloured overcoat, his rifle between his knees, the sinking sun glinting red on his broad naked bayonet, whose point and edge were as sharp as a razor. The Russians were all littered in the bottom of the trucks, only their heads and shoulders projecting. Personally, I felt like one of the conquered in a Roman triumph. I had touched the lowest deep of abasement. Chains would not have added materially to my humiliation.
After having passed one night, without covering, in an open field, the Russians were now to pass the next night without covering in open trucks. The Japanese evidently meant to test the boasted ability of the Muscovites to withstand cold. There was a moderatesized crowd of Japanese and Chinese at the station, but they did not cheer or make any demonstration. The Japanese never cheers even when the "Tenno Haiku " (whom foreigners call the Mikado) passes by, and now he looked on with a grave smile at the loud undignified uproar of the Russians, among whom tins of hard biscuits were being divided. The Japanese guard in each truck had the task of distribution, and he threw the stuff among his prisoners as a man throws bread to dogs. Like dogs, too, the Russians scrambled for the food, with shouts of M Vozmee syuda! " and " Dai khleb! " that were not unlike barks. The decorous station precincts echoed to the roars of one big fellow who had got nothing, but the sentinel's only reply was gravely to raise the empty tin to show that there was no more. Some wounded Japanese officers in white " kimono " with a red cross on the shoulder, stood on the platform and looked on in contempt. They knew that had they been in the position of the Russians they would have starved to death sooner than raise such an unseemly clamour.
To appreciate the significance of this historic scene, one should have lived for a long time in the Far East, and fully entered into the spirit with which the white settlers there regard the yellow inhabitants. When, seven years ago, I first travelled from Tientsin to Peking, a Chinese attendant on the train ceremoniously ushered me into a car in which only white men were allowed to travel. Mandarins, coolies, Chinese princes and Chinese prostitutes were all piled together in dirty third-class carriages. They were all yellow; why make any distinctions between them?
No Chinese guest ever desecrated the sacred precincts of the Shanghai Club (which, up till a couple of years ago, would not allow a Japanese to cross its threshold — no, not even if that Japanese bore the name of Togo or Kuroki), and no European, unless he were mad or drunk, would ever dream of asking a Chinese gentleman to dinner.
The Japanese were tarred with the same brush, and the language anent " yellow monkeys " in which Port Arthur used to indulge was tame in comparison with what one heard in the bar-rooms of the Yokohama hotels even after the outbreak of the recent war.
I could hardly therefore realise that I was awake when I found myself at Liaoyang station surrounded by examples of Russian architecture, in a train drawn by an American engine; but, nevertheless, one of a crowd of broken white men whom the despised little slanteye had compelled, by the keen logic of the bayonet point, to travel in trucks which might have been useful for carrying coal or ballast, but in which, at that season of the year, no cattle-dealer would care to send cattle any considerable distance. Although the events of a year might have prepared my mind for it, this turning of the tables was so sudden and so complete that I looked on dazed and thunderstruck. It was like going into Calcutta and finding all the white men of that city acting as street-sweepers, coolies, syces, shoeblacks and in other menial capacities, while the obese Bengalee lolled back in the best places on the trains and in the hotels. In making this comparison, I do not wish to offend the Japanese. My only object is to give the reader an accurate idea of the impression made on the mind of one who has lived half his life among the conquering whites of Asia.
Nor do I wish to accuse the Japanese of having deliberately selected open trucks for the Russians in order that all Liaoyang and all the country between Liaoyang and Dalny could see their shame, for perhaps they had not got a sufficient supply of closed carriages; but a more efficient way for destroying the prestige of the white race and dragging the renown of Russia in the dust could hardly be conceived.