A youth in a " kimono " and with a startling extent of bare leg sauntered home from the village bath, singing like a lark. In a month's time, I said to myself, that youth may be one of the iron legionaries of Nogi. Gentle girls with eyes turned up towards the temples, looked at us with infinite sadness. A young man passed by, carrying in his arms, without the slightest trace of self-consciousness, his own tiny baby; and the Russians did not know whether to wonder most at so boyish a person being a father or at so small a baby being capable of independent existence.
Often we passed southward-bound trains of soldiers, trains of ammunition, trains full of horses. The soldiers were young, hardy, filled with youthful enthusiasm; the stations were gaily decorated in their honour with Rising Sun flags and lanterns, and crowded with friends come to see them off.
Afar, on the hillsides, we could see new troops drilling, advancing cautiously against an imaginary enemy, carrying off " wounded," going through all sorts of military evolutions with the zest of born soldiers, and at the same time with the solemnity of priests engaged in some solemn rite. Imperial Guardsmen pranced about like fierce dolls on horseback. Formerly I used to laugh at them when they came a cropper. On this occasion I didn't. Groups of demure " nesan," groups of bare-legged boys with children on their backs watched them seriously.
A very young soldier with a very new uniform, made of fine cloth and evidently by a good tailor, also with a painfully new sword attached to his person by straps and buckles that seemed to have come out of the harness-maker's hands only the day before, came into our carriage, followed at a respectful distance by his old father, who had probably come to see his son off to the wars, and who, after the lapse of an hour or two, offered him rice, lighted his cigarette and attended on him generally as if he were a god. So might the father of Marcus Curtius have treated his son before his departure for that yawning chasm in the forum;
t and such a reversal of the relations usually existing between parents and their children would be no less remarkable in ancient Rome than it is in modern Japan.
All the officers who from time to time accompanied us as ordinary passengers had been wounded, most of them in that Place of Death, Port Arthur. Every one of the young soldiers who mounted guard over us in the little Japanese house wherein we were confined at Shizuoka had been wounded in Manchuria, some of them repeatedly wounded; but all were intensely anxious to start again for the front.
One brisk young fellow, who had got permission to go, was as envied by his comrades as a schoolboy who gets home before the holidays. He came to me in my picturesque little lath-and-paper prison to bid me goodbye, and I remember that he was accompanied by a bright-eyed companion somewhat older than himself, with whom he was on such terms of joyful intimacy that I thought they were merely "pals."
But the companion turned out to be his father! 11 Isn't he young? " said the son to me later on, looking after the retiring form of his parent, his eyes glistening with filial pride and affection.
In this extraordinarily strong desire of the private to get to the front lay the secret of Japan's success. The meanest soldiers and coolies in her army were mad to win, while the Russians were generally indifferent. But it would, of course, be a mistake to suppose that in this respect the Japanese are unequalled in the history of the world. The conscripts of Montmirail, the Americans who fought at Bunker Hill, the British tars of Nelson, the Germans of 1870, were all quite as fanatic and probably more capable than the Japanese soldier of to-day. But it is too much to expect that the French, British, Americans or Germans will display, in defence of their respective possessions in the Far East, the same fanaticism as they displayed in fighting for their national existence and their homes. So far as I can see, therefore, the Japanese are bound to have it all their own way in the Far East for a long time to come. But I question whether, at the apex of their prosperity, they will enjoy anything like the national happiness which is theirs to-day. Success will bring satiety. Knowledge will bring disillusionment. They will learn, alas! that Matsuhito is the last Mikado who is divine. Time and wealth and factory servitude, the great corroders of all martial virtue, will gradually take the fine edge from off their valour.
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