Notes of a War Correspondent

III—THE NIGHT BEFORE THE BATTLE

The Boer “front” was at Brandfort, and, as Lord Roberts was advancing upon that place, one already saw in the head-lines, “The Battle of Brandfort.”But before our train drew out of Pretoria Station we learned that the English had just occupied Brandfort, and that the Boer front had been pushed back to Winburg.

We decided that Brandfort was an impossible position to hold anyway, and that we had better leave the train at Winburg.We found some selfish consolation for the Boer repulse, in the fact that it shortened our railroad journey by one day.The next morning when we awoke at the Vaal River Station the train despatcher informed us that during the night the “Rooineks” had taken Winburg, and that the burghers were gathered at Smaaldel.

We agreed not to go to Winburg, but to stop off at Smaaldel.We also agreed that Winburg was an impossible position to hold.When at eleven o’clock the train reached Kroonstad, we learned than Lord Roberts was in Smaaldel.It was then evident that if our train kept on and the British army kept on there would be a collision.So we stopped at Kroonstad.In talking it over we decided that, owing to its situation, Smaaldel was an impossible position to hold.

The Sand River, which runs about forty miles south of Kroonstad, was the last place in the Free State at which the burghers could hope to make a stand, and at the bridge where the railroad spans the river, and at a drift ten miles lower down, the Boers and Free Staters had collected to the number of four thousand.Lord Roberts and his advancing column, which was known to contain thirty-five thousand men, were a few miles distant from the opposite bank of the Sand River.There was an equal chance that the English would attempt to cross at the drift or at the bridge.We thought they would cross at the drift, and stopped for the night at Ventersburg, a town ten miles from the river.

Ventersburg, in comparison with Kroonstad, where we had left them rounding up stray burghers and hurrying them to the firing-line, and burning official documents in the streets, was calm.

Ventersburg was not destroying incriminating documents nor driving weary burghers from its solitary street.It was making them welcome at Jones’s Hotel.The sun had sunk an angry crimson, the sure sign of a bloody battle on the morrow, and a full moon had turned the dusty street and the veldt into which it disappeared into a field of snow.

The American scouts had halted at Jones’s Hotel, and the American proprietor was giving them drinks free.Their cowboy spurs jingled on the floor of the bar-room, on the boards of the verandas, on the stone floor of the kitchen, and in the billiard-room, where they were playing pool as joyously as though the English were not ten miles away.Grave, awkward burghers rode up, each in a cloud of dust, and leaving his pony to wander in the street and his rifle in a corner, shook hands with every one solemnly, and asked for coffee.Italians of Garibaldi’s red-shirted army, Swedes and Danes in semi-uniform, Frenchman in high boots and great sombreros, Germans with the sabre cuts on their cheeks that had been given them at the university, and Russian officers smoking tiny cigarettes crowded the little dining-room, and by the light of a smoky lamp talked in many tongues of Spion Kop, Sannahspost, Fourteen Streams, and the battle on the morrow.

They were sun-tanned, dusty, stained, and many of them with wounds in bandages.They came from every capital of Europe, and as each took his turn around the crowded table, they drank to the health of every nation, save one.When they had eaten they picked up the pony’s bridle from the dust and melted into the moonlight with a wave of the hand and a “good luck to you.”There were no bugles to sound “boots and saddles” for them, no sergeants to keep them in hand, no officers to pay for their rations and issue orders.

Each was his own officer, his conscience was his bugle-call, he gave himself orders.They were all equal, all friends; the cowboy and the Russian Prince, the French socialist from La Villette or Montmartre, with a red sash around his velveteen breeches, and the little French nobleman from the Cercle Royal who had never before felt the sun, except when he had played lawn tennis on the Isle de Puteaux.Each had his bandolier and rifle; each was minding his own business, which was the business of all—to try and save the independence of a free people.

The presence of these foreigners, with rifle in hand, showed the sentiment and sympathies of the countries from which they came.These men were Europe’s real ambassadors to the Republic of the Transvaal.The hundreds of thousands of their countrymen who had remained at home held toward the Boer the same feelings, but they were not so strongly moved; not so strongly as to feel that they must go abroad to fight.

These foreigners were not the exception in opinion, they were only exceptionally adventurous, exceptionally liberty-loving.They were not soldiers of fortune, for the soldier of fortune fights for gain.These men receive no pay, no emolument, no reward.They were the few who dared do what the majority of their countrymen in Europe thought.

At Jones’s Hotel that night, at Ventersburg, it was as though a jury composed of men from all of Europe and the United States had gathered in judgment on the British nation.

Outside in the moonlight in the dusty road two bearded burghers had halted me to ask the way to the house of the commandant.Between them on a Boer pony sat a man, erect, slim-waisted, with well-set shoulders and chin in air, one hand holding the reins high, the other with knuckles down resting on his hip.The Boer pony he rode, nor the moonlight, nor the veldt behind him, could disguise his seat and pose.It was as though I had been suddenly thrown back into London and was passing the cuirassed, gauntleted guardsman, motionless on his black charger in the sentry gate in Whitehall.Only now, instead of a steel breastplate, he shivered through his thin khaki, and instead of the high boots, his legs were wrapped in twisted putties.

“When did they take you?”I asked.

“Early this morning.I was out scouting,” he said.He spoke in a voice so well trained and modulated that I tried to see his shoulder-straps.

“Oh, you are an officer?”I said.

“No, sir, a trooper.First Life Guards.”

But in the moonlight I could see him smile, whether at my mistake or because it was not a mistake I could not guess.There are many gentlemen rankers in this war.

He made a lonely figure in the night, his helmet marking him as conspicuously as a man wearing a high hat in a church.From the billiard-room, where the American scouts were playing pool, came the click of the ivory and loud, light-hearted laughter; from the veranda the sputtering of many strange tongues and the deep, lazy voices of the Boers.There were Boers to the left of him, Boers to the right of him, pulling at their long, drooping pipes and sending up big rings of white smoke in the white moonlight.

He dismounted, and stood watching the crowd about him under half-lowered eyelids, but as unmoved as though he saw no one.He threw his arm over the pony’s neck and pulled its head down against his chest and began talking to it.

It was as though he wished to emphasize his loneliness.

“You are not tired, are you?No, you’re not,” he said.His voice was as kindly as though he were speaking to a child.

“Oh, but you can’t be tired.What?”he whispered.“A little hungry, perhaps.Yes?”He seemed to draw much comfort from his friend the pony, and the pony rubbed his head against the Englishman’s shoulder.

“The commandant says he will question you in the morning.You will come with us to the jail now,” his captor directed.“You will find three of your people there to talk to.I will go bring a blanket for you, it is getting cold.”And they rode off together into the night.

Two days later he would have heard through the windows of Jones’s Hotel the billiard balls still clicking joyously, but the men who held the cues then would have worn helmets like his own.

The original Jones, the proprietor of Jones’s Hotel, had fled.The man who succeeded him was also a refugee, and the present manager was an American from Cincinnati.He had never before kept a hotel, but he confided to me that it was not a bad business, as he found that on each drink sold he made a profit of a hundred per cent.The proprietress was a lady from Brooklyn, her husband, another American, was a prisoner with Cronje at St.Helena.She was in considerable doubt as to whether she ought to run before the British arrived, or wait and chance being made a prisoner.She said she would prefer to escape, but what with standing on her feet all day in the kitchen preparing meals for hungry burghers and foreign volunteers, she was too tired to get away.

War close at hand consists so largely of commonplaces and trivial details that I hope I may be pardoned for recording the anxieties and cares of this lady from Brooklyn.Her point of view so admirably illustrates one side of war.It is only when you are ten years away from it, or ten thousand miles away from it, that you forget the dull places, and only the moments loom up which are terrible, picturesque, and momentous.We have read, in “Vanity Fair,” of the terror and the mad haste to escape of the people of Brussels on the eve of Waterloo.That is the obvious and dramatic side.

That is the picture of war you remember and which appeals.As a rule, people like to read of the rumble of cannon through the streets of Ventersburg, the silent, dusty columns of the re-enforcements passing in the moonlight, the galloping hoofs of the aides suddenly beating upon the night air and growing fainter and dying away, the bugle-calls from the camps along the river, the stamp of spurred boots as the general himself enters the hotel and spreads the blue-print maps upon the table, the clanking sabres of his staff, standing behind him in the candle-light, whispering and tugging at their gauntlets while the great man plans his attack.You must stop with the British army if you want bugle-calls and clanking sabres and gauntlets.They are a part of the panoply of war and of warriors.But we saw no warriors at Ventersburg that night, only a few cattle-breeders and farmers who were fighting for the land they had won from the lion and the bushman, and with them a mixed company of gentleman adventurers—gathered around a table discussing other days in other lands.The picture of war which is most familiar is the one of the people of Brussels fleeing from the city with the French guns booming in the distance, or as one sees it in “Shenandoah,” where aides gallop on and off the stage and the night signals flash from both sides of the valley.That is the obvious and dramatic side; the other side of war is the night before the battle, at Jones’s Hotel; the landlady in the dining-room with her elbows on the table, fretfully deciding that after a day in front of the cooking-stove she is too tired to escape an invading army, declaring that the one place at which she would rather be at that moment was Green’s restaurant in Philadelphia, the heated argument that immediately follows between the foreign legion and the Americans as to whether Rector’s is not better than the Café de Paris, and the general agreement that Ritz cannot hope to run two hotels in London without being robbed.That is how the men talked and acted on the eve of a battle.We heard no galloping aides, no clanking spurs, only the click of the clipped billiard balls as the American scouts (who were killed thirty-six hours later) knocked them about the torn billiard-cloth, the drip, drip of the kerosene from a blazing, sweating lamp, which struck the dirty table-cloth, with the regular ticking of a hall clock, and the complaint of the piano from the hotel parlor, where the correspondent of a Boston paper was picking out “Hello, My Baby,” laboriously with one finger.War is not so terribly dramatic or exciting—at the time; and the real trials of war—at the time, and not as one later remembers them—consist largely in looting fodder for your ponies and in bribing the station-master to put on an open truck in which to carry them.

We were wakened about two o’clock in the morning by a loud knocking on a door and the distracted voice of the local justice of the peace calling upon the landlord to rouse himself and fly.The English, so the voice informed the various guests, as door after door was thrown open upon the court-yard, were at Ventersburg Station, only two hours away.The justice of the peace wanted to buy or to borrow a horse, and wanted it very badly, but a sleepy-eyed and sceptical audience told him unfeelingly that he was either drunk or dreaming, and only the landlady, now apparently refreshed after her labors, was keenly, even hysterically, intent on instant flight.She sat up in her bed with her hair in curl papers and a revolver beside her, and through her open door shouted advice to her lodgers.But they were unsympathetic, and reassured her only by banging their doors and retiring with profane grumbling, and in a few moments the silence was broken only by the voice of the justice as he fled down the main street of Ventersburg offering his kingdom for a horse.

The next morning we rode out to the Sand River to see the Boer positions near the drift, and met President Steyn in his Cape cart coming from them on his way to the bridge.Ever since the occupation of Bloemfontein, the London papers had been speaking of him as “the Late President,” as though he were dead.He impressed me, on the contrary, as being very much alive and very much the President, although his executive chamber was the dancing-hall of a hotel and his roof-tree the hood of a Cape cart.He stood in the middle of the road, and talked hopefully of the morrow.He had been waiting, he said, to see the development of the enemy’s attack, but the British had not appeared, and, as he believed they would not advance that day, he was going on to the bridge to talk to his burghers and to consult with General Botha.He was much more a man of the world and more the professional politician than President Kruger.I use the words “professional politician” in no unpleasant sense, but meaning rather that he was ready, tactful, and diplomatic.For instance, he gave to whatever he said the air of a confidence reserved especially for the ear of the person to whom he spoke.He showed none of the bitterness which President Kruger exhibits toward the British, but took the tone toward the English Government of the most critical and mused tolerance.Had he heard it, it would have been intensely annoying to any Englishman.

“I see that the London Chronicle,” he said, “asks if, since I have become a rebel, I do not lose my rights as a Barrister of the Temple?Of course, we are no more rebels than the Spaniards were rebels against the United States.By a great stretch of the truth, under the suzerainty clause, the burghers of the Transvaal might be called rebels, but a Free Stater—never!It is not the animosity of the English which I mind,” he added, thoughtfully, “but their depressing ignorance of their own history.”

His cheerfulness and hopefulness, even though one guessed they were assumed, commanded one’s admiration.He was being hunted out of one village after another, the miles of territory still free to him were hourly shrinking—in a few days he would be a refugee in the Transvaal; but he stood in the open veldt with all his possessions in the cart behind him, a president without a republic, a man without a home, but still full of pluck, cheerful and unbeaten.

The farm-house of General Andrew Cronje stood just above the drift and was the only conspicuous mark for the English guns on our side of the river, so in order to protect it the general had turned it over to the ambulance corps to be used as a hospital.They had lashed a great Red Cross flag to the chimney and filled the clean shelves of the generously built kitchen with bottles of antiseptics and bitter-smelling drugs and surgeons’ cutlery.President Steyn gave me a letter to Dr. Rodgers Reid, who was in charge, and he offered us our choice of the deserted bedrooms.  It was a most welcome shelter, and in comparison to the cold veldt the hospital was a haven of comfort.Hundreds of cooing doves, stumbling over the roof of the barn, helped to fill the air with their peaceful murmur.It was a strange overture to a battle, but in time I learned to not listen for any more martial prelude.The Boer does not make a business of war, and when he is not actually fighting he pretends that he is camping out for pleasure.In his laager there are no warlike sounds, no sentries challenge, no bugles call.He has no duties to perform, for his Kaffir boys care for his pony, gather his wood, and build his fire.He has nothing to do but to wait for the next fight, and to make the time pass as best he can.In camp the burghers are like a party of children.They play games with each other, and play tricks upon each other, and engage in numerous wrestling bouts, a form of contest of which they seem particularly fond.They are like children also in that they are direct and simple, and as courteous as the ideal child should be.Indeed, if I were asked what struck me as the chief characteristics of the Boer I should say they were the two qualities which the English have always disallowed him, his simplicity rather than his “cuteness,” and his courtesy rather than his boorishness.

The force that waited at the drift by Cronje’s farm as it lay spread out on both sides of the river looked like a gathering of Wisconsin lumbermen, of Adirondack guides and hunters halted at Paul Smith’s, like a Methodist camp-meeting limited entirely to men.

The eye sought in vain for rows of tents, for the horses at the picket line, for the flags that marked the head-quarters, the commissariat, the field telegraph, the field post-office, the A.S.C., the R.M.A.C., the C.O., and all the other combinations of letters of the military alphabet.

I remembered that great army of General Buller’s as I saw it stretching out over the basin of the Tugela, like the children of Israel in number, like Tammany Hall in organization and discipline, with not a tent-pin missing; with hospitals as complete as those established for a hundred years in the heart of London; with search-lights, heliographs, war balloons, Roentgen rays, pontoon bridges, telegraph wagons, and trenching tools, farriers with anvils, major-generals, mapmakers, “gallopers,” intelligence departments, even biographs and press-censors; every kind of thing and every kind of man that goes to make up a British army corps.I knew that seven miles from us just such another completely equipped and disciplined column was advancing to the opposite bank of the Sand River.

And opposed to it was this merry company of Boer farmers lying on the grass, toasting pieces of freshly killed ox on the end of a stick, their hobbled ponies foraging for themselves a half-mile away, a thousand men without a tent among them, without a field-glass.

It was a picnic, a pastoral scene, not a scene of war.On the hills overlooking the drift were the guns, but down along the banks the burghers were sitting in circles singing the evening hymns, many of them sung to the tunes familiar in the service of the Episcopal Church, so that it sounded like a Sunday evening in the country at home.At the drift other burghers were watering the oxen, bathing and washing in the cold river; around the camp-fires others were smoking luxuriously, with their saddles for pillows.The evening breeze brought the sweet smell of burning wood, a haze of smoke from many fires, the lazy hum of hundreds of voices rising in the open air, the neighing of many horses, and the swift soothing rush of the river.

When morning came to Cronje’s farm it brought with it no warning nor sign of battle.We began to believe that the British army was an invention of the enemy’s.So we cooked bacon and fed the doves, and smoked on the veranda, moving our chairs around it with the sun, and argued as to whether we should stay where we were or go on to the bridge.At noon it was evident there would be no fight at the drift that day, so we started along the bank of the river, with the idea of reaching the bridge before nightfall.The trail lay on the English side of the river, so that we were in constant concern lest our white-hooded Cape cart would be seen by some of their scouts and we would be taken prisoners and forced to travel all the way back to Cape Town.We saw many herds of deer, but no scouts or lancers, and, such being the effect of many kopjes, lost all ideas as to where we were.We knew we were bearing steadily south toward Lord Roberts, who as we later learned, was then some three miles distant.

About two o’clock his guns opened on our left, so we at least knew that we were still on the wrong side of the river and that we must be between the Boer and the English artillery.Except for that, our knowledge of our geographical position was a blank, and we accordingly “out-spanned” and cooked more bacon.“Outspanning” is unharnessing the ponies and mules and turning them out graze, and takes three minutes—“inspanning” is trying to catch them again, and takes from three to five hours.

We started back over the trail over which we had come, and just at sunset saw a man appear from behind a rock and disappear again.Whether he was Boer or Briton I could not tell, but while I was examining the rock with my glasses two Boers came galloping forward and ordered me to “hands up.”To sit with both arms in the air is an extremely ignominious position, and especially annoying if the pony is restless, so I compromised by waving my whip as high as I could reach with one hand, and still held in the horse with the other.The third man from behind the rock rode up at the same time.They said they had watched us coming from the English lines, and that we were prisoners.We assured them that for us nothing could be more satisfactory, because we now knew where we were, and because they had probably saved us a week’s trip to Cape Town.They examined and approved of our credentials, and showed us the proper trail which we managed to follow until they had disappeared, when the trail disappeared also, and we were again lost in what seemed an interminable valley.But just before nightfall the fires of the commando showed in front of us and we rode into the camp of General Christian De Wet.He told us we could not reach the bridge that night, and showed us a farm-house on a distant kopje where we could find a place to spread our blankets.I was extremely glad to meet him, as he and General Botha are the most able and brave of the Boer generals.He was big, manly, and of impressive size, and, although he speaks English, he dictated to his adjutant many long and Old-World compliments to the Greater Republic across the seas.

We found the people in the farm-house on the distant kopje quite hysterical over the near presence of the British, and the entire place in such an uproar that we slept out in the veldt.In the morning we were awakened by the sound of the Vickar-Maxim or the “pom-pom” as the English call it, or “bomb-Maxim” as the Boers call it.By any name it was a remarkable gun and the most demoralizing of any of the smaller pieces which have been used in this campaign.One of its values is that its projectiles throw up sufficient dust to enable the gunner to tell exactly where they strike, and within a few seconds he is able to alter the range accordingly.In this way it is its own range-finder.Its bark is almost as dangerous as its bite, for its reports have a brisk, insolent sound like a postman’s knock, or a cooper hammering rapidly on an empty keg, and there is an unexplainable mocking sound to the reports, as though the gun were laughing at you.The English Tommies used to call it very aptly the “hyena gun.”I found it much less offensive from the rear than when I was with the British, and in front of it.

From the top of a kopje we saw that the battle had at last begun and that the bridge was the objective point.The English came up in great lines and blocks and from so far away and in such close order that at first in spite of the khaki they looked as though they wore uniforms of blue.They advanced steadily, and two hours later when we had ridden to a kopje still nearer the bridge, they were apparently in the same formation as when we had first seen them, only now farms that had lain far in their rear were overrun by them and they encompassed the whole basin.An army of twenty-five thousand men advancing in full view across a great plain appeals to you as something entirely lacking in the human element.You do not think of it as a collection of very tired, dusty, and perspiring men with aching legs and parched lips, but as an unnatural phenomenon, or a gigantic monster which wipes out a railway station, a cornfield, and a village with a single clutch of one of its tentacles.You would as soon attribute human qualities to a plague, a tidal wave, or a slowly slipping landslide.One of the tentacles composed of six thousand horse had detached itself and crossed the river below the bridge, where it was creeping up on Botha’s right.We could see the burghers galloping before it toward Ventersburg.At the bridge General Botha and President Steyn stood in the open road and with uplifted arms waved the Boers back, calling upon them to stand.But the burghers only shook their heads and with averted eyes grimly and silently rode by them on the other side.They knew they were flanked, they knew the men in the moving mass in front of them were in the proportion of nine to one.

When you looked down upon the lines of the English army advancing for three miles across the plain, one could hardly blame them.The burghers did not even raise their Mausers.One bullet, the size of a broken slate-pencil, falling into a block three miles across and a mile deep, seems so inadequate.It was like trying to turn back the waves of the sea with a blow-pipe.

It is true they had held back as many at Colenso, but the defensive positions there were magnificent, and since then six months had passed, during which time the same thirty thousand men who had been fighting then were fighting still, while the enemy was always new, with fresh recruits and re-enforcements arriving daily.

As the English officers at Durban, who had so lately arrived from home that they wore swords, used to say with the proud consciousness of two hundred thousand men back of them: “It won’t last much longer now.The Boers have had their belly full of fighting.They’re fed up on it; that’s what it is; they’re fed up.”

They forgot that the Boers, who for three months had held Buller back at the Tugela, were the same Boers who were rushed across the Free State to rescue Cronje from Roberts, and who were then sent to meet the relief column at Fourteen Streams, and were then ordered back again to harass Roberts at Sannahspost, and who, at last, worn out, stale, heartsick, and hopeless at the unequal odds and endless fighting, fell back at Sand River.

For three months thirty thousand men had been attempting the impossible task of endeavoring to meet an equal number of the enemy in three different places at the same time.

I have seen a retreat in Greece when the men, before they left the trenches, stood up in them and raged and cursed at the advancing Turk, cursed at their government, at their king, at each other, and retreated with shame in their faces because they did so.

But the retreat of the burghers of the Free State was not like that.They rose one by one and saddled their ponies, with the look in their faces of men who had been attending the funeral of a friend and who were leaving just before the coffin was swallowed in the grave.Some of them, for a long time after the greater number of the commando had ridden away, sat upon the rocks staring down into the sunny valley below them, talking together gravely, rising to take a last look at the territory which was their own.The shells of the victorious British sang triumphantly over the heads of their own artillery, bursting impotently in white smoke or tearing up the veldt in fountains of dust.

But they did not heed them.They did not even send a revengeful bullet into the approaching masses.The sweetness of revenge could not pay for what they had lost.They looked down upon the farm-houses of men they knew; upon their own farm-houses rising in smoke; they saw the Englishmen like a pest of locusts settling down around gardens and farm-houses still nearer, and swallowing them up.

Their companions, already far on the way to safety, waved to them from the veldt to follow; an excited doctor carrying a wounded man warned us that the English were just below, storming the hill.“Our artillery is aiming at five hundred yards,” he shouted, but still the remaining burghers stood immovable, leaning on their rifles, silent, homeless, looking down without rage or show of feeling at the great waves of khaki sweeping steadily toward them, and possessing their land.

THE JAPANESE-RUSSIAN WAR: BATTLES I DID NOT SEE

We knew it was a battle because the Japanese officers told us it was.In other wars I had seen other battles, many sorts of battles, but I had never seen a battle like that one.Most battles are noisy, hurried, and violent, giving rise to an unnatural thirst and to the delusion that, by some unhappy coincidence, every man on the other side is shooting only at you.This delusion is not peculiar to myself.Many men have told me that in the confusion of battle they always get this exaggerated idea of their own importance.Down in Cuba I heard a colonel inform a group of brother officers that a Spanish field-piece had marked him for its own, and for an hour had been pumping shrapnel at him and at no one else.The interesting part of the story was that he believed it.

But the battle of Anshantien was in no way disquieting.It was a noiseless, odorless, rubber-tired battle.So far as we were concerned it consisted of rings of shrapnel smoke floating over a mountain pass many miles distant.So many miles distant that when, with a glass, you could see a speck of fire twinkle in the sun like a heliograph, you could not tell whether it was the flash from the gun or the flame from the shell.Neither could you tell whether the cigarette rings issued from the lips of the Japanese guns or from those of the Russians.The only thing about that battle of which you were certain was that it was a perfectly safe battle to watch.It was the first one I ever witnessed that did not require you to calmly smoke a pipe in order to conceal the fact that you were scared.But soothing as it was, the battle lacked what is called the human interest.There may have been men behind the guns, but as they were also behind Camel Hill and Saddle Mountain, eight miles away, our eyes, like those of Mr. Samuel Weller, “being only eyes,” were not able to discover them.

Our teachers, the three Japanese officers who were detailed to tell us about things we were not allowed to see, gazed at the scene of carnage with well-simulated horror.Their expressions of countenance showed that should any one move the battle eight miles nearer, they were prepared to sell their lives dearly.When they found that none of us were looking at them or their battle, they were hurt.The reason no one was looking at them was because most of us had gone to sleep.The rest, with a bitter experience of Japanese promises, had doubted there would be a battle, and had prepared themselves with newspapers.And so, while eight miles away the preliminary battle to Liao-Yang was making history, we were lying on the grass reading two months’ old news of the St.Louis Convention.

The sight greatly disturbed our teachers.

“You complain,” they said, “because you are not allowed to see anything, and now, when we show you a battle, you will not look.”

Lewis, of the Herald, eagerly seized his glasses and followed the track of the Siberian railway as it disappeared into the pass.

“I beg your pardon, but I didn’t know it was a battle,” he apologized politely.“I thought it was a locomotive at Anshantien Station blowing off steam.”

And, so, teacher gave him a bad mark for disrespect.

It really was trying.

In order to see this battle we had travelled half around the world, had then waited four wasted months at Tokio, then had taken a sea voyage of ten days, then for twelve days had ridden through mud and dust in pursuit of the army, then for twelve more days, while battles raged ten miles away, had been kept prisoners in a compound where five out of the eighteen correspondents were sick with dysentery or fever, and finally as a reward we were released from captivity and taken to see smoke rings eight miles away!That night a round-robin, which was signed by all, was sent to General Oku, pointing out to him that unless we were allowed nearer to his army than eight miles, our usefulness to the people who paid us our salaries was at an end.

While waiting for an answer to this we were led out to see another battle. Either that we might not miss one minute of it, or that we should be too sleepy to see anything of it, we were started in black darkness, at three o’clock in the morning, the hour, as we are told, when one’s vitality is at its lowest, and one which should be reserved for the exclusive use of burglars and robbers of hen roosts. Concerning that hour I learned this, that whatever its effects may be upon human beings, it finds a horse at his most strenuous moment. At that hour by the light of three paper lanterns we tried to saddle eighteen horses, donkeys, and ponies, and the sole object of each was to kick the light out of the lantern nearest him. We finally rode off through a darkness that was lightened only by a gray, dripping fog, and in a silence broken only by the patter of rain upon the corn that towered high above our heads and for many miles hemmed us in. After an hour, Sataki, the teacher who acted as our guide, lost the trail and Captain Lionel James, of the Times, who wrote “On the Heels of De Wet,” found it for him.Sataki, so our two other keepers told us, is an authority on international law, and he may be all of that and know all there is to know of three-mile limits and paper blockades, but when it came to picking up a trail, even in the bright sunlight when it lay weltering beneath his horse’s nostrils, we always found that any correspondent with an experience of a few campaigns was of more general use.The trail ended at a muddy hill, a bare sugar-loaf of a hill, as high as the main tent of a circus and as abruptly sloping away.It was swept by a damp, chilling wind; a mean, peevish rain washed its sides, and they were so steep that if we sat upon them we tobogganed slowly downward, ploughing up the mud with our boot heels.Hungry, sleepy, in utter darkness, we clung to this slippery mound in its ocean of whispering millet like sailors wrecked in mid-sea upon a rock, and waited for the day.After two hours a gray mist came grudgingly, trees and rocks grew out of it, trenches appeared at our feet, and what had before looked like a lake of water became a mud village.

Then, like shadows, the foreign attachés, whom we fondly hoped might turn out to be Russian Cossacks coming to take us prisoners and carry us off to breakfast, rode up in silence and were halted at the base of the hill.It seemed now, the audience being assembled, the orchestra might begin.But no hot-throated cannon broke the chilling, dripping, silence, no upheaval of the air spoke of Canet guns, no whirling shrapnel screamed and burst.Instead, the fog rolled back showing us miles of waving corn, the wet rails of the Siberian Railroad glistening in the rain, and, masking the horizon, the same mountains from which the day before the smoke rings had ascended.They now were dark, brooding, their tops hooded in clouds.Somewhere in front of us hidden in the Kiao liang, hidden in the tiny villages, crouching on the banks of streams, concealed in trenches that were themselves concealed, Oku’s army, the army to which we were supposed to belong, was buried from our sight.And in the mountains on our right lay the Fourth Army, and twenty miles still farther to the right, Kuroki was closing in upon Liao-Yang.All of this we guessed, what we were told was very different, what we saw was nothing.In all, four hundred thousand men were not farther from us than four to thirty miles—and we saw nothing.We watched as the commissariat wagons carrying food to these men passed us by, the hospital stores passed us by, the transport carts passed us by, the coolies with reserve mounts, the last wounded soldier, straggler, and camp-follower passed us by.Like a big tidal wave Oku’s army had swept forward leaving its unwelcome guests, the attachés and correspondents, forty lonely foreigners among seventy thousand Japanese, stranded upon a hill miles in the rear.Perhaps, as war, it was necessary, but it was not magnificent.

That night Major Okabe, our head teacher, gave us the official interpretation of what had occurred.The Russians, he said, had retreated from Liao-Yang and were in open flight.Unless General Kuroki, who, he said, was fifty miles north of us, could cut them off they would reach Mukden in ten days, and until then there would be no more fighting.The Japanese troops, he said, were in Liao-Yang, it had been abandoned without a fight.This he told us on the evening of the 27th of August.

The next morning Major Okabe delivered the answer of General Oku to our round-robin.He informed us that we had been as near to the fighting as we ever would be allowed to go.The nearest we had been to any fighting was four miles.Our experience had taught us that when the Japanese promised us we would be allowed to do something we wanted to do, they did not keep their promise; but that when they said we would not be allowed to do something we wanted to do, they spoke the truth.Consequently, when General Oku declared the correspondents would be held four miles in the rear, we believed he would keep his word.And, as we now know, he did, the only men who saw the fighting that later ensued being those who disobeyed his orders and escaped from their keepers.Those who had been ordered by their papers to strictly obey the regulations of the Japanese, and the military attachés, were kept by Oku nearly six miles in the rear.

On the receipt of Oku’s answer to the correspondents, Mr. John Fox, Jr., of Scribner’s Magazine, Mr. Milton Prior, of the London Illustrated News, Mr. George Lynch, of the London Morning Chronicle, and myself left the army.We were very sorry to go.Apart from the fact that we had not been allowed to see anything of the military operations, we were enjoying ourselves immensely.Personally, I never went on a campaign in a more delightful country nor with better companions than the men acting as correspondents with the Second Army.For the sake of such good company, and to see more of Manchuria, I personally wanted to keep on.But I was not being paid to go camping with a set of good fellows.Already the Japanese had wasted six months of my time and six months of Mr. Collier’s money, Mr. Fox had been bottled up for a period of equal length, while Mr. Prior and Mr. Lynch had been prisoners in Tokio for even four months longer.And now that Okabe assured us that Liao-Yang was already taken, and Oku told us if there were any fighting we would not be allowed to witness it, it seemed a good time to quit.

Other correspondents would have quit then, as most of them did ten days later, but that their work and ours in a slight degree differed.As we were not working for daily papers, we used the cable but seldom, while they used it every day.Each evening Okabe brought them the official account of battles and of the movements of the troops, which news of events which they had not witnessed they sent to their separate papers.But for our purposes it was necessary we should see things for ourselves.For, contrary to the popular accusation, no matter how flattering it may be, we could not describe events at which we were not present.

But what mainly moved us to decide, was the statements of Okabe, the officer especially detailed by the War Office to aid and instruct us, to act as our guide, philosopher, and friend, our only official source of information, who told us that Liao-Yang was occupied by the Japanese and that the Russians were in retreat.He even begged me personally to come with him into Liao-Yang on the 29th and see how it was progressing under the control of the Japanese authorities.

Okabe’s news meant that the great battle Kuropatkin had promised at Liao-Yang, and which we had come to see, would never take place.

Why Okabe lied I do not know. Whether Oku had lied to him, or whether it was Baron-General Kodama or Major-General Fukushima who had instructed him to so grossly misinform us, it is impossible to say. While in Tokio no one ever more frequently, nor more unblushingly, made statements that they knew were untrue than did Kodama and Fukushima, but none of their deceptions had ever harmed us so greatly as did the lie they put into the mouth of Okabe. Not only had the Japanese not occupied Liao-Yang on the evening of the 27th of August, but later, as everybody knows, they had to fight six days to get into it. And Kuroki, so far from being fifty miles north toward Mukden as Okabe said he was, was twenty miles to the east on our right preparing for the closing in movement which was just about to begin. Three days after we had left the army, the greatest battle since Sedan was waged for six days.

So our half year of time and money, of dreary waiting, of daily humiliations at the hands of officers with minds diseased by suspicion, all of which would have been made up to us by the sight of this one great spectacle, was to the end absolutely lost to us.Perhaps we made a mistake in judgment.As the cards fell, we certainly did.But after the event it is easy to be wise.For the last fifteen years, had I known as much the night before the Grand Prix was run as I did the next afternoon, I would be passing rich.

The only proposition before us was this: There was small chance of any immediate fighting.If there were fighting we could not see it.Confronted with the same conditions again, I would decide in exactly the same manner.Our misfortune lay in the fact that our experience with other armies had led us to believe that officers and gentlemen speak the truth, that men with titles of nobility, and with the higher titles of general and major-general, do not lie.In that we were mistaken.

The parting from the other correspondents was a brutal attack upon the feelings which, had we known they were to follow us two weeks later to Tokio, would have been spared us. It is worth recording why, after waiting many months to get to the front, they in their turn so soon left it. After each of the big battles before Liao-Yang they handed the despatches they had written for their papers to Major Okabe. Each day he told them these despatches had been censored and forwarded. After three days he brought back all the despatches and calmly informed the correspondents that not one of their cables had been sent. It was the final affront of Japanese duplicity. In recording the greatest battle of modern times three days had been lost, and by a lie. The object of their coming to the Far East had been frustrated. It was fatuous to longer expect from Kodama and his pupils fair play or honest treatment, and in the interest of their employers and to save their own self-respect, the representatives of all the most important papers in the world, the Times, of London, the New York Herald, the Paris Figaro, the London Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, and Morning Post, quit the Japanese army.

Meanwhile, unconscious of what we had missed, the four of us were congratulating ourselves upon our escape, and had started for New-Chwang.Our first halt was at Hai-Cheng, in the same compound in which for many days with the others we had been imprisoned.But our halt was a brief one.We found the compound glaring in the sun, empty, silent, filled only with memories of the men who, with their laughter, their stories, and their songs had made it live.

But now all were gone, the old familiar faces and the familiar voices, and we threw our things back on the carts and hurried away.The trails between Hai-Cheng and the sea made the worst going we had encountered in Manchuria.You soon are convinced that the time has not been long since this tract of land lay entirely under the waters of the Gulf of Liaotung.You soon scent the salt air, and as you flounder in the alluvial deposits of ages, you expect to find the salt-water at the very roots of the millet.Water lies in every furrow of the miles of cornfields, water flows in streams in the roads, water spreads in lakes over the compounds, it oozes from beneath the very walls of the go-downs.You would not be surprised at any moment to see the tide returning to envelop you.In this liquid mud a cart can make a trail by the simple process of continuing forward.The havoc is created in the millet and the ditches its iron-studded wheels dig in the mud leave to the eyes of the next comer as perfectly good a trail as the one that has been in use for many centuries.Consequently the opportunities for choosing the wrong trail are excellent, and we embraced every opportunity.But friendly Chinamen, and certainly they are a friendly, human people, again and again cheerfully went far out of their way to guide us back to ours, and so, after two days, we found ourselves five miles from New-Chwang.

Here we agreed to separate.We had heard a marvellous tale that at New-Chwang there was ice, champagne, and a hotel with enamelled bath-tubs.We had unceasingly discussed the probability of this being true, and what we would do with these luxuries if we got them, and when we came so near to where they were supposed to be, it was agreed that one of us would ride on ahead and command them, while the others followed with the carts.The lucky number fell to John Fox, and he left us at a gallop.He was to engage rooms for the four, and to arrange for the care of seven Japanese interpreters and servants, nine Chinese coolies, and nineteen horses and mules.We expected that by eight o’clock we would be eating the best dinner John Fox could order.We were mistaken.Not that John Fox had not ordered the dinner, but no one ate it but John Fox.The very minute he left us Priory’s cart turned turtle in the mud, and the largest of his four mules lay down in it and knocked off work.The mule was hot and very tired, and the mud was soft, cool, and wet, so he burrowed under its protecting surface until all we could see of him was his ears.The coolies shrieked at him, Prior issued ultimatums at him, the Japanese servants stood on dry land fifteen feet away and talked about him, but he only snuggled deeper into his mud bath.When there is no more of a mule to hit than his ears, he has you at a great disadvantage, and when the coolies waded in and tugged at his head, we found that the harder they tugged, the deeper they sank.When they were so far out of sight that we were in danger of losing them too, we ordered them to give up the struggle and unload the cart.Before we got it out of dry-dock, reloaded, and again in line with the other carts it was nine o’clock, and dark.

In the meantime, Lynch, his sense of duty weakened by visions of enamelled bathtubs filled with champagne and floating lumps of ice, had secretly abandoned us, stealing away in the night and leaving us to follow.This, not ten minutes after we had started, Mr. Prior decided that he would not do, so he camped out with the carts in a village, while, dinnerless, supperless, and thirsty, I rode on alone.I reached New-Chwang at midnight, and after being refused admittance by the Japanese soldiers, was finally rescued by the Number One man from the Manchuria Hotel, who had been sent out by Fox with two sikhs and a lantern to find me.For some minutes I dared not ask him the fateful questions.It was better still to hope than to put one’s fortunes to the test.But I finally summoned my courage.

“Ice, have got?”I begged.

“Have got,” he answered.

There was a long, grateful pause, and then in a voice that trembled, I again asked, “Champagne, have got?”

Number One man nodded.

“Have got,” he said.

I totally forgot until the next morning to ask about the enamelled bathtubs.

When I arrived John Fox had gone to bed, and as it was six weeks since any of us had seen a real bed, I did not wake him.Hence, he did not know I was in the hotel, and throughout the troubles that followed I slept soundly.

Meanwhile, Lynch, as a punishment for running away from us, lost his own way, and, after stumbling into an old sow and her litter of pigs, which on a dark night is enough to startle any one, stumbled into a Japanese outpost, was hailed as a Russian spy, and made prisoner.This had one advantage, as he now was able to find New-Chwang, to which place he was marched, closely guarded, arriving there at half-past two in the morning.Since he ran away from us he had been wandering about on foot for ten hours.He sent a note to Mr. Little, the British Consul, and to Bush Brothers, the kings of New-Chwang, and, still tormented by visions of ice and champagne, demanded that his captors take him to the Manchuria Hotel.There he swore they would find a pass from Fukushima allowing him to enter New-Chwang, three friends who could identify him, four carts, seven servants, nine coolies, and nineteen animals.The commandant took him to the Manchuria Hotel, where instead of this wealth of corroborative detail they found John Fox in bed.As Prior, the only one of us not in New-Chwang, had the pass from Fukushima, permitting us to enter it, there was no one to prove what either Lynch or Fox said, and the officer flew into a passion and told Fox he would send both of them out of town on the first train.Mr. Fox was annoyed at being pulled from his bed at three in the morning to be told he was a Russian spy, so he said that there was not a train fast enough to get him out of New-Chwang as quickly as he wanted to go, or, for that matter, out of Japan and away from the Japanese people.At this the officer, being a Yale graduate, and speaking very pure English, told Mr. Fox to “shut up,” and Mr. Fox being a Harvard graduate, with an equally perfect command of English, pure and undefiled, shook his fist in the face of the Japanese officer and told him to “shut up yourself.”Lynch, seeing the witness he had summoned for the defence about to plunge into conflict with his captor, leaped unhappily from foot to foot, and was heard diplomatically suggesting that all hands should adjourn for ice and champagne.

“If I were a spy,” demanded Fox, “do you suppose I would have ridden into your town on a white horse and registered at your head-quarters and then ordered four rooms at the principal hotel and accommodations for seven servants, nine coolies, and nineteen animals?Is that the way a Russian spy works?Does he go around with a brass band?”

The officer, unable to answer in kind this excellent reasoning, took a mean advantage of his position by placing both John and Lynch under arrest, and at the head of each bed a Japanese policeman to guard their slumbers.The next morning Prior arrived with the pass, and from the decks of the first out-bound English steamer Fox hurled through the captain’s brass speaking-trumpet our farewells to the Japanese, as represented by the gun-boats in the harbor.Their officers, probably thinking his remarks referred to floating mines, ran eagerly to the side.But our ship’s captain tumbled from the bridge, rescued his trumpet, and begged Fox, until we were under the guns of a British man-of-war, to issue no more farewell addresses.The next evening we passed into the Gulf of Pe-chi-li, and saw above Port Arthur the great guns flashing in the night, and the next day we anchored in the snug harbor of Chefoo.

I went at once to the cable station to cable Collier’s I was returning, and asked the Chinaman in charge if my name was on his list of those correspondents who could send copy collect. He said it was; and as I started to write, he added with grave politeness, “I congratulate you.”

For a moment I did not lift my eyes.I felt a chill creeping down my spine.I knew what sort of a blow was coming, and I was afraid of it.

“Why?”I asked.

The Chinaman bowed and smiled.

“Because you are the first,” he said.“You are the only correspondent to arrive who has seen the battle of Liao-Yang.”

The chill turned to a sort of nausea.I knew then what disaster had fallen, but I cheated myself by pretending the man was misinformed.“There was no battle,” I protested.“The Japanese told me themselves they had entered Liao-Yang without firing a shot.”The cable operator was a gentleman.He saw my distress, saw what it meant and delivered the blow with the distaste of a physician who must tell a patient he cannot recover.Gently, reluctantly, with real sympathy he said, “They have been fighting for six days.”

I went over to a bench, and sat down; and when Lynch and Fox came in and took one look at me, they guessed what had happened.When the Chinaman told them of what we had been cheated, they, in their turn, came to the bench, and collapsed.No one said anything.No one even swore.Six months we had waited only to miss by three days the greatest battle since Gettysburg and Sedan.And by a lie.

For six months we had tasted all the indignities of the suspected spy, we had been prisoners of war, we had been ticket-of-leave men, and it is not difficult to imagine our glad surprise that same day when we saw in the harbor the white hull of the cruiser Cincinnati with our flag lifting at her stern. We did not know a soul on board, but that did not halt us. As refugees, as fleeing political prisoners, as American slaves escaping from their Japanese jailers, we climbed over the side and demanded protection and dinner. We got both. Perhaps it was not good to rest on that bit of drift-wood, that atom of our country that had floated far from the mainland and now formed an island of American territory in the harbor of Chefoo. Perhaps we were not content to sit at the mahogany table in the glistening white and brass bound wardroom surrounded by those eager, sunburned faces, to hear sea slang and home slang in the accents of Maine, Virginia, and New York City. We forgot our dark-skinned keepers with the slanting, suspicious, unfriendly eyes, with tongues that spoke the one thing and meant the other. All the memories of those six months of deceit, of broken pledges, of unnecessary humiliations, of petty unpoliteness from a half-educated, half-bred, conceited, and arrogant people fell from us like a heavy knapsack. We were again at home. Again with our own people. Out of the happy confusion of that great occasion I recall two toasts. One was offered by John Fox. “Japan for the Japanese, and the Japanese for Japan.” Even the Japanese wardroom boy did not catch its significance. The other was a paraphrase of a couplet in reference to our brown brothers of the Philippines first spoken in Manila. “To the Japanese: ‘They may be brothers to Commodore Perry, but they ain’t no brothers of mine.’ ”

It was a joyous night.Lieutenant Gilmore, who had been an historic prisoner in the Philippines, so far sympathized with our escape from the Yellow Peril as to intercede with the captain to extend the rules of the ship.And those rules that were incapable of extending broke.Indeed, I believe we broke everything but the eight-inch gun.And finally we were conducted to our steamer in a launch crowded with slim-waisted, broad-chested youths in white mess jackets, clasping each other’s shoulders and singing, “Way down in my heart, I have a feeling for you, a sort of feeling for you”; while the officer of the deck turned his back, and discreetly fixed his night glass upon a suspicious star.

It was an American cruiser that rescued this war correspondent from the bondage of Japan.It will require all the battle-ships in the Japanese navy to force him back to it.

A WAR CORRESPONDENT’S KIT

I am going to try to describe some kits and outfits I have seen used in different parts of the world by travellers and explorers, and in different campaigns by army officers and war correspondents. Among the articles, the reader may learn of some new thing which, when next he goes hunting, fishing, or exploring, he can adapt to his own uses. That is my hope, but I am sceptical. I have seldom met the man who would allow any one else to select his kit, or who would admit that any other kit was better than the one he himself had packed. It is a very delicate question. The same article that one declares is the most essential to his comfort, is the very first thing that another will throw into the trail. A man’s outfit is a matter which seems to touch his private honor. I have heard veterans sitting around a camp-fire proclaim the superiority of their kits with a jealousy, loyalty, and enthusiasm they would not exhibit for the flesh of their flesh and the bone of their bone. On a campaign, you may attack a man’s courage, the flag he serves, the newspaper for which he works, his intelligence, or his camp manners, and he will ignore you; but if you criticise his patent water-bottle he will fall upon you with both fists. So, in recommending any article for an outfit, one needs to be careful. An outfit lends itself to dispute, because the selection of its component parts is not an exact science. It should be, but it is not. A doctor on his daily rounds can carry in a compact little satchel almost everything he is liable to need; a carpenter can stow away in one box all the tools of his trade. But an outfit is not selected on any recognized principles. It seems to be a question entirely of temperament. As the man said when his friends asked him how he made his famous cocktail, “It depends on my mood.” The truth is that each man in selecting his outfit generally follows the lines of least resistance. With one, the pleasure he derives from his morning bath outweighs the fact that for the rest of the day he must carry a rubber bathtub. Another man is hearty, tough, and inured to an out-of-door life. He can sleep on a pile of coal or standing on his head, and he naturally scorns to carry a bed. But another man, should he sleep all night on the ground, the next day would be of no use to himself, his regiment, or his newspaper. So he carries a folding cot and the more fortunate one of tougher fibre laughs at him. Another man says that the only way to campaign is to travel “light,” and sets forth with rain-coat and field-glass. He honestly thinks that he travels light because his intelligence tells him it is the better way; but, as a matter of fact, he does so because he is lazy. Throughout the entire campaign he borrows from his friends, and with that camaraderie and unselfishness that never comes to the surface so strongly as when men are thrown together in camp, they lend him whatever he needs. When the war is over, he is the man who goes about saying: “Some of those fellows carried enough stuff to fill a moving van. Now, look what I did. I made the entire campaign on a tooth-brush.”

As a matter of fact, I have a sneaking admiration for the man who dares to borrow.His really is the part of wisdom.But at times he may lose himself in places where he can neither a borrower nor a lender be, and there are men so tenderly constituted that they cannot keep another man hungry while they use his coffee-pot.So it is well to take a few things with you—if only to lend them to the men who travel “light.”

On hunting and campaigning trips the climate, the means of transport, and the chance along the road of obtaining food and fodder vary so greatly that it is not possible to map out an outfit which would serve equally well for each of them.What on one journey was your most precious possession on the next is a useless nuisance.On two trips I have packed a tent weighing, with the stakes, fifty pounds, which, as we slept in huts, I never once had occasion to open; while on other trips in countries that promised to be more or less settled, I had to always live under canvas, and sometimes broke camp twice a day.

In one war, in which I worked for an English paper, we travelled like major-generals.When that war started few thought it would last over six weeks, and many of the officers regarded it in the light of a picnic.In consequence, they mobilized as they never would have done had they foreseen what was to come, and the mess contractor grew rich furnishing, not only champagne, which in campaigns in fever countries has saved the life of many a good man, but cases of even port and burgundy, which never greatly helped any one.Later these mess supplies were turned over to the field-hospitals, but at the start every one travelled with more than he needed and more than the regulations allowed, and each correspondent was advised that if he represented a first-class paper and wished to “save his face” he had better travel in state.Those who did not, found the staff and censor less easy of access, and the means of obtaining information more difficult.But it was a nuisance.If, when a man halted at your tent, you could not stand him whiskey and sparklet soda, Egyptian cigarettes, compressed soup, canned meats, and marmalade, your paper was suspected of trying to do it “on the cheap,” and not only of being mean, but, as this was a popular war, unpatriotic.When the army stripped down to work all this was discontinued, but at the start I believe there were carried with that column as many tins of tan-leather dressing as there were rifles.On that march my own outfit was as unwieldy as a gypsy’s caravan.It consisted of an enormous cart, two oxen, three Basuto ponies, one Australian horse, three servants, and four hundred pounds of supplies and baggage.When it moved across the plain it looked as large as a Fall River boat.Later, when I joined the opposing army, and was not expected to maintain the dignity of a great London daily, I carried all my belongings strapped to my back, or to the back of my one pony, and I was quite as comfortable, clean, and content as I had been with the private car and the circus tent.

Throughout the Greek war, as there were no horses to be had for love or money, we walked, and I learned then that when one has to carry his own kit the number of things he can do without is extraordinary.While I marched with the army, offering my kingdom for a horse, I carried my outfit in saddle-bags thrown over my shoulder.And I think it must have been a good outfit, for I never bought anything to add to it or threw anything away.I submit that as a fair test of a kit.

Further on, should any reader care to know how for several months one may keep going with an outfit he can pack in two saddle-bags, I will give a list of the articles which in three campaigns I carried in mine.

Personally, I am for travelling “light,” but at the very start one is confronted with the fact that what one man calls light to another savors of luxury. I call fifty pounds light; in Japan we each were allowed the officer’s allowance of sixty-six pounds. Lord Wolseley, in his “Pocketbook,” cuts down the officer’s kit to forty pounds, while “Nessmut,” of the Forest and Stream, claims that for a hunting trip, all one wants does not weigh over twenty-six pounds.It is very largely a question of compromise.You cannot eat your cake and have it.You cannot, under a tropical sun, throw away your blanket and when the night dew falls wrap it around you.And if, after a day of hard climbing or riding, you want to drop into a folding chair, to make room for it in your carry-all you must give up many other lesser things.

By travelling light I do not mean any lighter than the necessity demands.If there is transport at hand, a man is foolish not to avail himself of it.He is always foolish if he does not make things as easy for himself as possible.The tenderfoot will not agree with this.With him there is no idea so fixed, and no idea so absurd, as that to be comfortable is to be effeminate.He believes that “roughing it” is synonymous with hardship, and in season and out of season he plays the Spartan.Any man who suffers discomforts he can avoid because he fears his comrades will think he cannot suffer hardships is an idiot.You often hear it said of a man that “he can rough it with the best of them.”Any one can do that.The man I want for a “bunkie” is the one who can be comfortable while the best of them are roughing it.The old soldier knows that it is his duty to keep himself fit, so that he can perform his work, whether his work is scouting for forage or scouting for men, but you will often hear the volunteer captain say: “Now, boys, don’t forget we’re roughing it; and don’t expect to be comfortable.”As a rule, the only reason his men are uncomfortable is because he does not know how to make them otherwise; or because he thinks, on a campaign, to endure unnecessary hardship is the mark of a soldier.

In the Cuban campaign the day the American forces landed at Siboney a major-general of volunteers took up his head-quarters in the house from which the Spanish commandant had just fled, and on the veranda of which Caspar Whitney and myself had found two hammocks and made ourselves at home.The Spaniard who had been left to guard the house courteously offered the major-general his choice of three bed-rooms.  They all were on the first floor and opened upon the veranda, and to the general’s staff a tent could have been no easier of access.Obviously, it was the duty of the general to keep himself in good physical condition, to obtain as much sleep as possible, and to rest his great brain and his limbs cramped with ten days on shipboard.But in a tone of stern reproof he said, “No; I am campaigning now, and I have given up all luxuries.”And with that he stretched a poncho on the hard boards of the veranda, where, while just a few feet from him the three beds and white mosquito nets gleamed invitingly, he tossed and turned.Besides being a silly spectacle, the sight of an old gentleman lying wide awake on his shoulder-blades was disturbing, and as the hours dragged on we repeatedly offered him our hammocks.But he fretfully persisted in his determination to be uncomfortable.And he was.The feelings of his unhappy staff, several of whom were officers of the regular army, who had to follow the example of their chief, were toward morning hardly loyal.Later, at the very moment the army moved up to the battle of San Juan this same major-general was relieved of his command on account of illness.Had he sensibly taken care of himself, when the moment came when he was needed, he would have been able to better serve his brigade and his country.In contrast to this pose is the conduct of the veteran hunter, or old soldier.When he gets into camp his first thought, after he has cared for his horse, is for his own comfort.He does not wolf down a cold supper and then spread his blanket wherever he happens to be standing.He knows that, especially at night, it is unfair to ask his stomach to digest cold rations.He knows that the warmth of his body is needed to help him to sleep soundly, not to fight chunks of canned meat.So, no matter how sleepy he may be, he takes the time to build a fire and boil a cup of tea or coffee.Its warmth aids digestion and saves his stomach from working overtime.Nor will he act on the theory that he is “so tired he can sleep anywhere.”For a few hours the man who does that may sleep the sleep of exhaustion.But before day breaks he will feel under him the roots and stones, and when he awakes he is stiff, sore and unrefreshed.Ten minutes spent in digging holes for hips and shoulder-blades, in collecting grass and branches to spread beneath his blanket, and leaves to stuff in his boots for a pillow, will give him a whole night of comfort and start him well and fit on the next day’s tramp.If you have watched an old sergeant, one of the Indian fighters, of which there are now too few left in the army, when he goes into camp, you will see him build a bunk and possibly a shelter of boughs just as though for the rest of his life he intended to dwell in that particular spot.Down in the Garcia campaign along the Rio Grande I said to one of them: “Why do you go to all that trouble?We break camp at daybreak.”He said: “Do we?Well, maybe you know that, and maybe the captain knows that, but I don’t know it.And so long as I don’t know it, I am going to be just as snug as though I was halted here for a month.”In camping, that was one of my first and best lessons—to make your surroundings healthy and comfortable.The temptation always is to say, “Oh, it is for only one night, and I am too tired.”The next day you say the same thing, “We’ll move to-morrow.What’s the use?”But the fishing or shooting around the camp proves good, or it comes on to storm, and for maybe a week you do not move, and for a week you suffer discomforts.An hour of work put in at the beginning would have turned it into a week of ease.

When there is transport of even one pack-horse, one of the best helps toward making camp quickly is a combination of panniers and bed used for many years by E. F. Knight, the Times war correspondent, who lost an arm at Gras Pan. It consists of two leather trunks, which by day carry your belongings slung on either side of the pack-animal, and by night act as uprights for your bed. The bed is made of canvas stretched on two poles which rest on the two trunks. For travelling in upper India this arrangement is used almost universally. Mr. Knight obtained his during the Chitral campaign, and since then has used it in every war. He had it with Kuroki’s army during this last campaign in Manchuria. [6]

A more compact form of valise and bed combined is the “carry-all,” or any of the many makes of sleeping-bags, which during the day carry the kit and at night when spread upon the ground serve for a bed.The one once most used by Englishmen was Lord Wolseley’s “valise and sleeping-bag.”It was complicated by a number of strings, and required as much lacing as a dozen pairs of boots.It has been greatly improved by a new sleeping-bag with straps, and flaps that tuck in at the ends.But the obvious disadvantage of all sleeping-bags is that in rain and mud you are virtually lying on the hard ground, at the mercy of tarantula and fever.

The carry-all is, nevertheless, to my mind, the most nearly perfect way in which to pack a kit.I have tried the trunk, valise, and sleeping-bag, and vastly prefer it to them all.My carry-all differs only from the sleeping-bag in that, instead of lining it so that it may be used as a bed, I carry in its pocket a folding cot.By omitting the extra lining for the bed, I save almost the weight of the cot.The folding cot I pack is the Gold Medal Bed, made in this country, but which you can purchase almost anywhere.I once carried one from Chicago to Cape Town to find on arriving I could buy the bed there at exactly the same price I had paid for it in America.I also found them in Tokio, where imitations of them were being made by the ingenious and disingenuous Japanese.They are light in weight, strong, and comfortable, and are undoubtedly the best camp-bed made.When at your elevation of six inches above the ground you look down from one of them upon a comrade in a sleeping-bag with rivulets of rain and a tide of muddy water rising above him, your satisfaction, as you fall asleep, is worth the weight of the bed in gold.

My carry-all is of canvas with a back of waterproof.It is made up of three strips six and a half feet long.The two outer strips are each two feet three inches wide, the middle strip four feet.At one end of the middle strip is a deep pocket of heavy canvas with a flap that can be fastened by two straps.When the kit has been packed in this pocket, the two side strips are folded over it and the middle strip and the whole is rolled up and buckled by two heavy straps on the waterproof side.It is impossible for any article to fall out or for the rain to soak in.I have a smaller carry-all made on the same plan, but on a tiny scale, in which to carry small articles and a change of clothing.It goes into the pocket after the bed, chair, and the heavier articles are packed away.When the bag is rolled up they are on the outside of and form a protection to the articles of lighter weight.

The only objection to the carry-all is that it is an awkward bundle to pack.It is difficult to balance it on the back of an animal, but when you are taking a tent with you or carrying your provisions, it can be slung on one side of the pack saddle to offset their weight on the other.

I use the carry-all when I am travelling “heavy.”By that I mean when it is possible to obtain pack-animal or cart.When travelling light and bivouacking by night without a pack-horse, bed, or tent, I use the saddle-bags, already described.These can be slung over the back of the horse you ride, or if you walk, carried over your shoulder.I carried them in this latter way in Greece, in the Transvaal, and Cuba during the rebellion, and later with our own army.

The list of articles I find most useful when travelling where it is possible to obtain transport, or, as we may call it, travelling heavy, are the following:

A tent, seven by ten feet, with fly, jointed poles, tent-pins, a heavy mallet.I recommend a tent open at both ends with a window cut in one end.The window, when that end is laced and the other open, furnishes a draught of air.The window should be covered with a flap which, in case of rain, can be tied down over it with tapes.A great convenience in a tent is a pocket sewn inside of each wall, for boots, books, and such small articles.The pocket should not be filled with anything so heavy as to cause the walls to sag.Another convenience with a tent is a leather strap stretched from pole to pole, upon which to hang clothes, and another is a strap to be buckled around the front tent-pole, and which is studded with projecting hooks for your lantern, water-bottle, and field-glasses.This latter can be bough ready-made at any military outfitter’s.

Many men object to the wooden tent-pin on account of its tendency to split, and carry pins made of iron.With these, an inch below the head of the pin is a projecting barb which holds the tent rope.When the pin is being driven in, the barb is out of reach of the mallet.Any blacksmith can beat out such pins, and if you can afford the extra weight, they are better than those of ash.Also, if you can afford the weight, it is well to carry a strip of water-proof or oilcloth for the floor of the tent to keep out dampness.All these things appertaining to the tent should be tolled up in it, and the tent itself carried in a light-weight receptacle, with a running noose like a sailor’s kit-bag.

The carry-all has already been described.Of its contents, I consider first in importance the folding bed.

And second in importance I would place a folding chair.Many men scoff at a chair as a cumbersome luxury.But after a hard day on foot or in the saddle, when you sit on the ground with your back to a rock and your hands locked across your knees to keep yourself from sliding, or on a box with no rest for your spinal column, you begin to think a chair is not a luxury, but a necessity.During the Cuban campaign, for a time I was a member of General Sumner’s mess.The general owned a folding chair, and whenever his back was turned every one would make a rush to get into it.One time we were discussing what, in the light of our experience of that campaign, we would take with us on our next, and all agreed, Colonel Howze, Captain Andrews, and Major Harmon, that if one could only take one article it would be a chair.I carried one in Manchuria, but it was of no use to me, as the other correspondents occupied it, relieving each other like sentries on guard duty.I had to pin a sign on it, reading, “Don’t sit on me,” but no one ever saw the sign.Once, in order to rest in my own chair, I weakly established a precedent by giving George Lynch a cigar to allow me to sit down (on that march there was a mess contractor who supplied us even with cigars, and occasionally with food), and after that, whenever a man wanted to smoke, he would commandeer my chair, and unless bribed refuse to budge.This seems to argue the popularity of the contractor’s cigars rather than that of the chair, but, nevertheless, I submit that on a campaign the article second in importance for rest, comfort, and content is a chair.The best I know is one invented by Major Elliott of the British army.I have an Elliott chair that I have used four years, not only when camping out, but in my writing-room at home.It is an arm-chair, and is as comfortable as any made.The objections to it are its weight, that it packs bulkily, and takes down into too many pieces.Even with these disadvantages it is the best chair.It can be purchased at the Army and Navy and Anglo-Indian stores in London.A chair of lighter weight and one-fourth the bulk is the Willisden chair, of green canvas and thin iron supports.It breaks in only two pieces, and is very comfortable.

Sir Harry Johnson, in his advice to explorers, makes a great point of their packing a chair.But he recommends one known as the “Wellington,” which is a cane-bottomed affair, heavy and cumbersome.Dr. Harford, the instructor in outfit for the Royal Geographical Society, recommends a steamer-chair, because it can be used on shipboard and “can be easily carried afterward.”If there be anything less easy to carry than a deck-chair I have not met it.One might as soon think of packing a folding step-ladder.But if he has the transport, the man who packs any reasonably light folding chair will not regret it.

As a rule, a cooking kit is built like every other cooking kit in that the utensils for cooking are carried in the same pot that is used for boiling the water, and the top of the pot turns itself into a frying-pan.For eight years I always have used the same kind of cooking kit, so I cannot speak of others with knowledge; but I have always looked with envious eyes at the Preston cooking kit and water-bottle.Why it has not already been adopted by every army I do not understand, for in no army have I seen a kit as compact or as light, or one that combines as many useful articles and takes up as little room.It is the invention of Captain Guy H.Preston, Thirteenth Cavalry, and can be purchased at any military outfitter’s.

The cooking kit I carry is, or was, in use in the German army.It is made of aluminum,—weighs about as much as a cigarette-case, and takes up as little room as would a high hat.It is a frying-pan and coffee-pot combined.From the Germans it has been borrowed by the Japanese, and one smaller than mine, but of the same pattern, is part of the equipment of each Japanese soldier.On a day’s march there are three things a man must carry: his water-bottle, his food, which, with the soldier, is generally carried in a haversack, and his cooking kit.Preston has succeeded most ingeniously in combining the water-bottle and the cooking kit, and I believe by cutting his water-bottle in half, he can make room in his coffee-pot for the food.If he will do this, he will solve the problem of carrying water, food, and the utensils for cooking the food and for boiling the water in one receptacle, which can be carried from the shoulder by a single strap.The alteration I have made for my own use in Captain Preston’s water-bottle enables me to carry in the coffee-pot one day’s rations of bacon, coffee, and biscuit.

In Tokio, before leaving for Manchuria, General Fukushima asked me to bring my entire outfit to the office of the General Staff.I spread it out on the floor, and with unerring accuracy he selected from it the three articles of greatest value.They were the Gold Medal cot, the Elliott chair, and Preston’s water-bottle.He asked if he could borrow these, and, understanding that he wanted to copy them for his own use, and supposing that if he used them, he would, of course, make some restitution to the officers who had invented them, I foolishly loaned them to him.Later, he issued them in numbers to the General Staff.As I felt, in a manner, responsible, I wrote to the Secretary of War, saying I was sure the Japanese army did not wish to benefit by these inventions without making some acknowledgment or return to the inventors.But the Japanese War Office could not see the point I tried to make, and the General Staff wrote a letter in reply asking why I had not directed my communication to General Fukushima, as it was not the Secretary of War, but he, who had taken the articles.The fact that they were being issued without any return being made, did not interest them.They passed cheerfully over the fact that the articles had been stolen, and were indignant, not because I had accused a Japanese general of pilfering, but because I had accused the wrong general.The letter was so insolent that I went to the General Staff Office and explained that the officer who wrote it, must withdraw it, and apologize for it.Both of which things he did.In case the gentlemen whose inventions were “borrowed” might, if they wished, take further steps in the matter, I sent the documents in the case, with the exception of the letter which was withdrawn, to the chief of the General Staff in the United States and in England.

In importance after the bed, cooking kit, and chair, I would place these articles:

Two collapsible water-buckets of rubber or canvas.

Two collapsible brass lanterns, with extra isinglass sides.

Two boxes of sick-room candles.

One dozen boxes of safety matches.

One axe.The best I have seen is the Marble Safety Axe, made at Gladstone, Mich.You can carry it in your hip-pocket, and you can cut down a tree with it.

One medicine case containing quinine, calomel, and Sun Cholera Mixture in tablets.

Toilet-case for razors, tooth-powder, brushes, and paper.

Folding bath-tub of rubber in rubber case.These are manufactured to fold into a space little larger than a cigar-box.

Two towels old, and soft.

Three cakes of soap.

One Jaeger blanket.

One mosquito head-bag.

One extra pair of shoes, old and comfortable.

One extra pair of riding-breeches.

One extra pair of gaiters.The former regulation army gaiter of canvas, laced, rolls up in a small compass and weighs but little.

One flannel shirt.Gray least shows the dust.

Two pairs of drawers.For riding, the best are those of silk.

Two undershirts, balbriggan or woollen.

Three pairs of woollen socks.

Two linen handkerchiefs, large enough, if needed, to tie around the throat and protect the back of the neck.

One pair of pajamas, woollen, not linen.

One housewife.

Two briarwood pipes.

Six bags of smoking tobacco; Durham or Seal of North Carolina pack easily.

One pad of writing paper.

One fountain pen, self-filling

One bottle of ink, with screw top, held tight by a spring.

One dozen linen envelopes.

Stamps, wrapped in oil-silk with mucilage side next to the silk.

One stick sealing-wax.In tropical countries mucilage on the flap of envelopes sticks to everything except the envelope.

One dozen elastic bands of the largest size.In packing they help to compress articles like clothing into the smallest possible compass and in many other ways will be found very useful.

One pack of playing-cards.

Books.

One revolver and six cartridges.

The reason for most of these articles is obvious.Some of them may need a word of recommendation.I place the water-buckets first in the list for the reason that I have found them one of my most valuable assets.With one, as soon as you halt, instead of waiting for your turn at the well or water-hole, you can carry water to your horse, and one of them once filled and set in the shelter of the tent, later saves you many steps.It also can be used as a nose-bag, and to carry fodder.I recommend the brass folding lantern, because those I have tried of tin or aluminum have invariably broken.A lantern is an absolute necessity.When before daylight you break camp, or hurry out in a wind storm to struggle with flying tent-pegs, or when at night you wish to read or play cards, a lantern with a stout frame and steady light is indispensable.The original cost of the sick-room candles is more than that of ordinary candles, but they burn longer, are brighter, and take up much less room.To protect them and the matches from dampness, or the sun, it is well to carry them in a rubber sponge-bag.Any one who has forgotten to pack a towel will not need to be advised to take two.An old sergeant of Troop G, Third Cavalry, once told me that if he had to throw away everything he carried in his roll but one article, he would save his towel.And he was not a particularly fastidious sergeant either, but he preferred a damp towel in his roll to damp clothes on his back.Every man knows the dreary halts in camp when the rain pours outside, or the regiment is held in reserve.For times like these a pack of cards or a book is worth carrying, even if it weighs as much as the plates from which it was printed.At present it is easy to obtain all of the modern classics in volumes small enough to go into the coat-pocket.In Japan, before starting for China, we divided up among the correspondents Thomas Nelson & Sons’ and Doubleday, Page & Co.’s pocket editions of Dickens, Thackeray, and Lever, and as most of our time in Manchuria was spent locked up in compounds, they proved a great blessing.

In the list I have included a revolver, following out the old saying that “You may not need it for a long time, but when you do need it, you want it damned quick.”Except to impress guides and mule-drivers, it is not an essential article.In six campaigns I have carried one, and never used it, nor needed it but once, and then while I was dodging behind the foremast it lay under tons of luggage in the hold.The number of cartridges I have limited to six, on the theory that if in six shots you haven’t hit the other fellow, he will have hit you, and you will not require another six.

This, I think, completes the list of articles that on different expeditions I either have found of use, or have seen render good service to some one else.But the really wise man will pack none of the things enumerated in this article.For the larger his kit, the less benefit he will have of it.It will all be taken from him.And accordingly my final advice is to go forth empty-handed, naked and unashamed, and borrow from your friends.I have never tried that method of collecting an outfit, but I have seen never it fail, and of all travellers the man who borrows is the wisest.

Footnotes:

[1]  From “A Year from a Reporter’s Note Book,” copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers.

[2]  From “A Year from a Reporter’s Note Book, copyright, 1897, Harper & Brothers.”

[3]  For this “distinguished gallantry in action,” James R.  Church later received the medal of honor.

[4]  Some of the names and initials on the trees are as follows: J.  P.  Allen; Lynch; Luke Steed; Happy Mack, Rough Riders; Russell; Ward; E.  M.  Lewis, C, 9th Cav.  ; Alex; E.  K.  T.  ; J.  P.  E.  ; W.  N.  D.  ; R.  D.  R.  ; I.  W.  S.  , 5th U.  S.  ;  J.  M.  B.  ; J.  M.  T.  , C, 9th.

[5]  A price list during the siege:

SIEGE
of
LADYSMITH,

1899-1900.

I certify that the following are the correct and highest prices realised at my sales by Public Auction during the above Siege,

JOE DYSON,
Auctioneer

Ladysmith,
  February 21st, 1900.

	£	s.	d.
14 lbs.Oatmeal	2	19	6
Condensed Milk, per tin	0	10	0
1 lb.Beef Fat	0	11	0
1 lb.Tin Coffee	0	17	0
2 lb.Tin Tongue	1	6	0
1 Sucking Pig	1	17	0
Eggs, per dozen	2	8	0
Fowls, each	0	18	6
4 Small Cucumbers	0	15	6
Green Mealies, each	0	3	8
Small plate Grapes	1	5	0
1 Small plate Apples	0	12	6
1 Plate Tomatoes	0	18	0
1 Vegetable Marrow	1	8	0
1 Plate Eschalots	0	11	0
1 Plate Potatoes	0	19	0
3 Small bunches Carrots	0	9	0
1 Glass Jelly	0	18	0
1 lb.Bottle Jam	1	11	0
1 lb.Tin Marmalade	1	1	0
1 dozen Matches	0	13	6
1 pkt.Cigarettes	1	5	0
50 Cigars	9	5	0
¼ lb.Cake “Fair Maid” Tobacco	2	5	0
½ lb.Cake “Fair Maid”	3	5	0
1 lb.Sailors Tobacco	2	3	0
¼ lb.tin “Capstan” Navy Cut Tobacco	3	0	0

[6]  The top of the trunk is made of a single piece of leather with a rim that falls over the mouth of the trunk and protects the contents from rain.   The two iron rings by which each box is slung across the padded back of the pack-horse are fastened by rivetted straps to the rear top line of each trunk.   On both ends of each trunk near the top and back are two iron sockets. In these fit the staples that hold the poles for the bed. The staples are made of iron in the shape of the numeral 9, the poles passing through the circle of the 9. The bed should be four feet long three feet wide, of heavy canvas, strengthened by leather straps. At both ends are two buckles which connect with straps on the top of each trunk. Along one side of the canvas is a pocket running its length and open at both ends. Through this one of the poles passes and the other through a series of straps that extend on the opposite side. These straps can be shortened or tightened to allow a certain “give” to the canvas, which the ordinary stretcher-bed does not permit. The advantage of this arrangement is in the fact that it can be quickly put together and that it keeps the sleeper clear of the ground and safeguards him from colds and malaria.