p 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 attaches 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
pro