M. AND I stood on the platform of Mukden station.
The scene, outwardly, was a gay one. The Japanese ladies (and these predominated) were wearing their best clothes. So were their children. Commemorative fans, specially manufactured for this occasion, fluttered ubiquitously. At the windows of the troop train the soldiers lolled and were facetious. Another flying column was leaving Mukden on anti-bandit operations.
It was a normal occurrence. There was nothing in the history of these recurrent expeditions to suggest that there would be a firm tone in either death or glory. I was rather surprised to see how tragically, behind their gaily agitated fans, the seers-off were taking it. Beside me a Japanese lady wept silently, and with a touching dignity. All up and down the platform there was a deeper undercurrent of emotion than seemed to me warranted.
A whistle went. M. and I took our places. The train pulled out.
All that we knew of the plan of campaign was this: The worst bandit country in Manchuria was in the mountains east of Mukden. On this area a number of small, swiftly-moving units were about to converge. Each had as its first objective a village inside the area, on reaching which it would go into garrison for a time and carry out intensive pacification measures in the district. The second stage of the campaign depended on developments and had not yet been formulated.
The unit to which M. and I were attached was a mixed force of Japanese and Manchukuo troops, under the command of a Japanese major. The Japanese, who numbered about 175, were men of the Independent Railway Guard, which is a force roughly equivalent to a division, with its headquarters at Mukden. (Officially, as its name suggests, it does not count as part of the regular army. This was one of its most useful characteristics in the days when Japan’s forces in Manchuria were limited by treaty.) There were also about 400 Manchukuo troops, controlled, though not nominally commanded, by a Japanese captain. We saw very little of these, for they marched always in the rear, and accompanied the column, I think, as much for training as for anything else.
Our jumping-off point was Fushun, which for the benefit of those who like to think in household words may be called the Sheffield of Manchuria. The men were detrained and marched off to barracks on the outskirts of the town. M. and I and our interpreter were directed to a Japanese inn.
Our interpreter was a private soldier called Takani. To those not familiar with the Japanese system of conscription it may seem incongruous that a private soldier should be also a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was the case with Takani. He came of a good middle-class family and had returned from America to take up an excellent engineering job in Tokyo for which he was qualified by his foreign training. But he, like every other young man who was not debarred from doing so by physical or moral disability, had to serve his two years in the army. He had been nine months in Manchuria, and he did not much care for it.
His was rather a special case. He was twenty-six years old. Every recruit had to submit to the rigorous discipline, the monotony, and the minimum allowance of leave which are the lot of the Japanese soldier. But most of them begin their term of service before the age of twenty, and the two years involved are no serious loss to their career. Takani, however, brought into barracks a mind to some extent emancipated from the simple unquestioning traditions of his contemporaries, and moreover the necessity of putting in his period of conscription had lost him a good job, hardly won. Besides which, he found that after his life abroad he had little in common with the comparatively callow boys who were now his companions. So, although he made an admirable soldier, being quick-witted and handy, he was a little discontented. To us he was invaluable.
We were an odd trio. M. was – and still is, as far as I know – a member of the House of Lords. He was twenty-nine years old and tall for his age. He had some sort of journalistic pretext for his presence in Manchukuo, but it was a thin one, for during a prolonged stay in the Far East he was never known to put pen to paper. Really it was the hope of adventure that had brought him. As a companion he had numerous advantages besides his native charm: among them a capacity for enduring discomfort without complaint, an inexhaustible fund of conversation on a variety of topics, and a courtesy towards the Japanese which was more flowery and more appropriate than anything which I – a rather boorish individual – could hope to sustain for long. Also he was well equipped.
How well equipped I only realized when we made an inventory of our belongings in the inn at Fushun. I had interpreted literally our instructions to travel light by putting into a rucksack a shirt, shorts, two pairs of socks, a bottle of whisky, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and half a pound of cheese, the sole, indomitable survivor of my Trans-Siberian victuals. This, with blanket, camera, films, field-glasses, and water-bottle, made a load which in case of necessity could be carried on foot.
M. was far better provided. A large suitcase and a haversack were found to contain, amongst other things, twenty-three different sorts of medicine, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a prismatic compass, a solar topee, eight pencils, a ground sheet, pyjamas, a pair of goggles, a cummerbund, and a slide-rule. M. was armoured against almost every contingency, from leprosy to long division.
We had been issued by the Japanese Consulate-General with automatic pistols, but these we had left behind, partly on the principle that it never rains if you wear a mackintosh, and partly because these weapons are – except as local colour – more trouble than they are worth to those not expert in their use.
Horses, we had been told, would be provided. We were to move off at dawn. The inn was a pleasant place, cooler and more commodious than the one at Chinchow, and we went to sleep early. I felt very content. This expedition was an opportunity which it had taken several weeks and much cunning to wangle. Previous dabblings in what other people insist on calling adventure had forewarned me that the yield in excitement would probably not be high; but at the least we could rely on plenty of fresh air and exercise, commodities to the pursuit of which our fellow-countrymen devote so much of their spare time and money.
Next day, before it was light, a car whirled us out to the barracks through a still sleeping town. Our headlights flicked the irregular flanks of the Manchukuo column, which was already on the move from its more distant quarters: a soft-footed river of little slouching men in grey, the officers barking shrill commands from the backs of shaggy and recalcitrant ponies. The darkness was full of a stimulating last-minute bustle. As usual in China, bugle-calls were almost incessant. The intoxicating effect of our preconceptions had not had time to wear off, and the atmosphere seemed to me pleasantly theatrical.
Outside the barracks we found our mounts. Huge, gaunt, and apathetic, two Siberian chargers of uncertain age contemplated with ill-disguised foreboding the preparations for a forced march. There was a Russian in charge of them, an attractive figure in a black blouse and a flamboyant slouch hat made of straw. While M. and Takani went off to stow our belongings on one of the transport wagons, I inspected the horses dubiously. They did not look as if they were up to hard work, and I felt that they would be clumsy and uncertain in the hills, where the cat-footed Mongolian ponies are at home. But the Japanese, knowing the gigantic stature of foreigners, had thought that we would prefer horses; and these Rosinantine ghosts were the only horses available. I asked the Russian how old they were.
‘The mare is ten years old.’
‘And the other?’
‘Twenty-one’
M. being half as heavy again as I am, had to have the ingénue. I started out on her elderly companion, but at the first halt changed mounts with the Russian, who had a little white pony, a very pretty, wise, and completely tireless animal. She carried me wonderfully, and I grew very fond of her. The horses, as a matter of fact, instead of collapsing as I had expected, did extraordinarily well, though they were tiring, lifeless creatures to ride.
Presently M. reappeared with Takani, and we mounted. (Takani had no horse, and in any case could not ride. He alternately marched or rode on the carts with the transport.) The column was moving off.
Through the gates they came, feet and hoofs and wheels: an intricate and perplexing rabble which was to sort itself out during the next few days into a pattern as familiar and significant as a pack of cards. Now, as they strung out down the road in the grey light before dawn, one had no framework to fit them into and grasped only here and there some striking detail – the carrier-pigeons in cages strapped to the backs of men, the two little mountain guns on pack mules, the Major’s big dapple-grey pony with its ugly head.
M. and I fell in behind Headquarters, the Russian’s Chinese wife waved to her husband from the roadside, and the march began.