To me, fresh from the Russian camp, everything about these Japanese officers is as striking as if they came from another planet, but two things especially strike me: one is their youth, the other is their gentleness. Accustomed for over a year to married, middle-aged Russian lieutenants and captains, I feel it odd to find myself among a shipful of officers most of them not over twenty-three years of age, and not one of whom is married. It is like being in a boys' school or in the warrant officers' mess on board a British gunboat, say the Espiegle. Russia sent to this war her old, grey-bearded, grandfatherly reservists. Japan sent the cream of her manhood. The result is clear for all men to read. It is also, like everything else in the topsy-turvy world, paradoxical. The enthusiastic youth, with strong limbs and with a long life before him, throws that life away with a laugh; the fretful, pessimistic grey head, with only a few sordid years to live, hugs his life as if it were valuable.
The gentleness of the Japanese officers is hard to describe. In no other country is there such an officer. America, England, France, Germany, Russia, have all in their armies men of much the same type — but it is a type which is not found in Japan. Some drink more than others, but all of them drink. Some are gayer than others, but all of them are gay. It is only a question of degree.
A timid, girlish youth who enters the British or American army soon changes his character or leaves the army. An ocean of tradition, old as Julius Caesar, sweeps away either him or else his little sand-heap of principle or prejudice. Missionaries and strict parents may deplore this state of things, but men of the world recognise that ample allowance must be made for the overflowing vitality required in one who embraces the military profession. Gordon may be enshrined in the British Nonconformist heart, and even military men may like him, now that he is dead; but the language British officers use about living comrades of the Gordon type is not fit for publication.
You cannot both eat your cake and have it. If you want an army you must nerve yourself to stand a lot. You cannot expect it to be a Sunday-school. Oldfashioned parents sometimes imagine that they can find for their little Francis Xavier a holy regiment. They can never find it. They could not have found it among the Crusaders or in the Papal Guards. It does not exist. It never existed. It is a contradiction in terms.
In the Japanese army, however, there seems to be no tradition of boisterousness. I noticed this during my residence in Japan; I noticed it in Manchuria; and now again I noticed it on the Awa Maru. It would almost seem as if the Japanese army borrowed asceticism from their enemies the Jesuits, even as the Jesuits borrowed some points in their organisation from the army.
If the Azva Maru had been a Russian boat you could not have heard yourself speaking for the noise in the dining saloon. Orderlies in top boots would be tumbling over one another in their haste to execute the orders of their respective masters. Cold ham, novels by Danchenko, spilt beer, the Novoe Vremya, smashed match-boxes, somebody's revolver (loaded), a number of cigar ends, a half empty box of cigarettes, and a bottle of vodka, would be inextricably mixed together on the table.
But the dining-room of the Awa Maru is like a Trappist refectory. White-robed figures glide in, eat sparingly of the simplest Japanese food, converse in subdued tones and then glide out again. It is not that they are in a low state of health, for all belong to the " slightly wounded " class, the greater number of them suffering from simple bullet wounds in the arms or legs. It is the Japanese custom.
After dinner some of them play the game of "go," while one, with some musical pretensions, gently murders various simple European melodies on the piano, always winding up with the " Kee Mee Gai Yo," the national hymn of Japan.
They are extraordinarily clean. As they go barefooted, save for their sandals, one can see that their toe nails have evidently been washed and polished and pared as thoroughly as a fashionable lady's finger nails.
Their teeth are so white and their mouths so well washed that one is inclined to believe that their saliva consists exclusively of soap suds. Their only drawback is their high Mongolian cheek-bones and their wide nostrils. It is a trifling drawback, but