It were nothing if the disgrace had been fictitious, temporary, but it was real and eternal. Some sixteen months before, General Wogack had told the statesmen of Peking that, if Japan dared to attack Russia, she would be crushed like a fly on the wheel of a warchariot. During their sullen retirement from Liaotung and the Valu, the Russians had declared that they were only enticing the Japanese to their doom, and that very soon they would roll down like a tidal wave, not only on Port Arthur, but on Tokio. Yes, the Russians were now rolling swiftly towards Port Arthur and Tokio, but not exactly in the manner of a tidal wave.
The man who had borne the White Man's burden, to the easternmost limits of the Asiatic Continent, the lineal successors of Alexander, Crassus, and Heraclius in their revenge — Greek, Roman and Byzantine — on Asia, was now being borne along himself by some of the fluttered folk and wild whom he had come to civilise, while I, much to my astonishment, found myself guarded by Japanese soldiers and figuring prominently as one of the new-caught, sullen peoples.
We were an army of long-bearded patriarchs escorted by a handful of smiling, chubby-cheeked school-boys. Truly the Russians are a docile folk. If we had been all English or American captives, I am inclined to think that we should have made short work of the handful of Japs who were guarding us, and immediately afterwards have made tracks westward for the Liao river, only a day's march distant. But what did these poor Russians know of the Liao river or of Chinese neutrality? As little as a sheep being led to the slaughter knows of the Habeas Corpus Act.
We could now see of what enormous value to Japan were her three lines of communication, the line from the Yalu which Kuroki had opened up and in which Kawamura had worthily trod, the line from Dalny, and the line from Yinkow. Over the two last lines came an enormous quantity of supplies, not only by train but by road. This advantage alone would have been almost enough to secure the victory for Japan.
It was war — or at least the memory of war and the preparations for war — all the way down to Dalny. Enormous stores of supplies at Liaoyang, Ta-shihchiao and elsewhere along the line. Japanese soldiers at every station, Japanese soldiers convoying transports, the Chinese seeming to exist only for the purpose of working on the railway or of driving waggons.
What, I wonder, will these lads from Niigata and Kagoshima and Aomori think of the boasted white man when this war is over? Forty years ago the white man was a mysterious being in Japan, an objectionable being perhaps, but one possessed of diabolical powers and therefore to be cultivated. The Japanese have pretty well analysed him now. Half a century ago the " black demon-ships " of the American Admiral Perry excited awe and terror as, spouting smoke, they steamed into Yedo Bay. Some Japanese who — like Admiral Togo — were boys of ten years old then, know a thing or two about these " black demon-ships " now.
Later still, we find England bombarding Shimonoseki simply because Shimonoseki had not behaved with proper respect to white men, although these particular white men were not Britishers. In those days England believed in making common cause with her white brethren against the yellow race, and that feeling has scarcely died out yet among the English in Japan. Many of these people used, after the Japan-China War, to complain of the overbearing, I'm-as-good-as-you-are style of the Japanese officers, meaning that the white race was treated as if it were not superior to the yellow. What reputation is now left to the white race in Japan?
On went the train with its load of captives. Station after station it passed. As the names of some stations were cried out, the Russians raised their heads with the air of men who, in a foreign land, hear familiar
words. They had heard the names of Russian defeats — Haicheng, Ta-shih-chiao, Telissu, Kinchow.
It was midnight when we passed Ta-shih-chiao, with its long line of provision stores which Mishchenko's Cossacks might so easily have destroyed on the previous January. It was morning when we came to Telissu, with its broken bridges and overturned locomotives — the only relics of the great battle that remained.