THE SUN ROSE as we moved off down the road. There was no breath of wind, and above the tall chimneys and the slag-heaps of the steel-works smoke from the furnaces hung in curious horizontal layers. Cooking fires began to glimmer through the doorways of mean houses. Women, bucket in hand, paused to stare on their way to the wells. Feet and hoofs made hardly any noise at all in the thick dust, which sprang up and hung round us in a grey cloud and lent the marching men a ghostly air as they wound eastwards through the outskirts of Fushun. Nobody talked. Only, from the tail of the column, came the screaming of the transport wagons’ axles, the faint crepitation of their drivers’ whips.
At six o’clock we halted. The men breakfasted off cold rice and pickles, issued in neat, flimsy little baskets. Already the officers with whom we rode began to stand out as individuals. The Major, an unsmiling, laconic little man, rather bow-legged; the Adjutant (whose duties Takani aptly defined by calling him ‘the Major’s wife’), a full-bodied forceful warrior, who looked alternately very fierce and very merry: the Doctor, slim, handsome, bespectacled, the only man except for M. and me whose head was not cropped. None of them spoke English, but they were very good to us in an off-hand way. If they looked on our presence as a nuisance they did not show it. Rather they regarded us with a certain perplexity. They felt that we were a joke, but they could never be quite certain that they saw what the joke was.
After breakfast we rode on to a village which marked the eastern boundary of that patch of civilization of which Fushun was the centre. The column, winding its way through the narrow streets, would have filmed well. Smoke rising from the cooking-shops mingled with our dust to form a haze, athwart which the shafts of sunlight came down between the houses to pick out our banners and the bobbing coolie hats which all the men wore as a protection against the heat. The inhabitants gaped and quickly raised their prices.
After a brief halt we marched out of the village, forded a river, and found ourselves in a shallow valley innocent of habitations. At the end of this the hills stood up like a wall. The road had dwindled to a track. The sun was high now, and the heat intense. We moved slowly along the floor of the valley and up into the mountains, a long disjointed file of men and animals and carts. Cuckoos called from the wooded slopes above us. The country was very beautiful.
About noon we passed through a tiny scattered village. I had waited behind to photograph the transport crossing a river; when I had finished I found a hiatus in the column, so I was making up lost ground and came on the little village at full gallop. I had my eyes on the ground, which was broken and needed watching, and I was only dimly aware of the cluster of poor houses ahead of me. I was accordingly startled to find myself greeted with an ovation.
The entire village was lined up in a single rank beside the track, cheering wildly. Children waved flags. The local militia (a proverbial force of two men and a boy) presented arms. I was given a civic welcome.
It was an embarrassing moment. Clearly they took me for one of the more eminent of their country’s saviours. There would perhaps have been no harm in this had I only been able to keep a straight face. Alas, I was not. Roaring with laughter, I made a vague and ludicrous gesture of appreciation and, giving my pony her head, was carried for ever out of the lives of that demonstrative community.
In the afternoon we came to another village and camped there. We had been going since three o’clock in the morning, and the men’s uniforms were dark with sweat. Headquarters were established in the yamen, the seat of justice and a centre of insect life. A wireless section installed its transmitter in a corner of the courtyard and got into touch with Mukden; the next most modern object in the courtyard was a pair of blunderbusses ten feet long, the backbone of the local defence organization.
M. and I did rather less than justice to a meal of boiled rice, pickled mushrooms, and tinned fish, washed down with a local tea-substitute made of kaoliang. (Practically everything in Manchuria is made of kaoliang. It serves as raw material for many manufactured articles, from hats to houses; also as fodder and fuel. Men eat it as a form of flour, and drink a spirit distilled from it. Its political significance as a stimulus to banditry in the summer and autumn I have already indicated.)
Japanese army rations are the same for officers and men (and special correspondents, too, for that matter). Their Spartan simplicity is one of the secrets behind the amazing mobility of the Japanese army; it thrives on a few bowls of rice and a piece of sorry-looking fish, a menu in comparison to which the British soldier’s minimum needs seem Lucullian. The stomach on which the Japanese army marches requires no field kitchens to fill it.
I found the rations adequate if unappetizing. Rice is not a bad thing to live on, but it is difficult without practice to get into the habit of eating the large quantities which the body needs. It is still more difficult if the rice is not boiled with some fat in it, which for some reason makes a lot of difference. M. had a thin time of it, being unable to stomach the rice. It was something of a mystery to me how he kept himself alive at all. His dietetic difficulties were increased by his courageous insistence on the use of chopsticks. I had basely brought with me a spoon and fork, knowing that we might have sometimes to eat in a hurry, and also that when it required an effort to eat at all it was better not to increase that effort by complicating the processes involved. But M. stuck gallantly to his belief that in Rome one should do as the Romans do, and I think the Japanese admired him for it. I certainly did.
Although the rations were the same for all, the officers displayed none of that solicitude for their men’s welfare which in the British army prevents an officer from having his meal until he has seen that his men have got theirs. The Japanese officer is by tradition much more aloof than the British. He does not mix with the men in sports or in anything else, and rarely speaks to them except, so to speak, in the way of business. There is more of formality – and therefore, to my mind, of artificiality – in their relations than there is in this country; the assumption, implied by most forms of military discipline, that officers and men are two different sorts of animal is interpreted both more consistently and more literally in Japan. Whether the fabric of their relationship is designed in the best possible way to withstand the stress of emergency I do not know; but it certainly produces faultless discipline in times of peace.
Towards evening I went out in quest of a bath, and presently found a shallow stream of water which, though it ran swiftly, had acquired a startling degree of warmth from the sun. Here I wallowed for an hour in company with Takani and the Russian (whose name was Davidoff) and the Japanese captain who was the power behind the throne of the Manchukuo contingent. He was a pleasant, effective-looking man; his independent command made him freer in his speech and less constrained in his manner than any of the officers with Headquarters. He had been campaigning up in the north, near the Mongolian border, and told us wild stories of men there who ride down hares and shoot them from the saddle with a revolver. He also said that we were certain to see fighting before we reached Sinpin (our objective). The hills were stiff with bandits; we were marching by a route never before followed by troops, and our departure had been kept so successfully secret that the bandits would have no time to decamp into another area. It was pleasant to lie on one’s back in the shallows, staring up at the small but jagged peaks which overlooked our valley, and listen to this warlike talk.
We scrounged two eggs for dinner and ate them raw in rice. M. and Takani and I had a little room in the yamen to ourselves, and as soon as it was dark we spread our blankets on the boards of the k’ang and courted sleep. The moon, nearly full, rode high up over the mountains, making the dusty courtyard silver and stamping on it the horned black shadows of Chinese eaves. On the outskirts of the village a dog was howling. Ponies stamped and jerked their head-ropes under the compound wall; mule-bells jingled softly. The thick-wheeled wagons stood loaded for an early start; we should be off again in five hours’ time.
The officers were talking in the next room, and I noticed as I have often noticed before the strange effect of going to sleep to the sound of foreign words. You do not know the language. You are not listening. But perhaps a speaker raises his voice, and your mind, sliding luxuriously into unconsciousness, involuntarily catches a sequence of sounds and, dragging you back from the happy frontiers of oblivion, translates them automatically into some fantastic English sentence with a corresponding cadence. So you are suddenly awake again, and there is ringing urgently in your ears some such altogether unaccountable phrase as ‘John said all my sea-lions were glass’ or ‘Why go to Crewe, Barabbas?’ The tone, the vowel-sounds, of the speaker who disturbed you are exactly reproduced; but your fuddled mind has adapted them, with great rapidity and a kind of wild ingenuity, to the word-medium in which it works.
But perhaps it is only I who am cursed with this automatic gift. Sometimes, when you are tired, its involuntary exercise has an infuriating effect. You long to go to sleep. Yet you are perpetually being woken up by the challenge of words which were never spoken. It is as though your mind were making a series of apple-pie beds for your body, to deny it rest. You feel a fool.