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