“I fear no foe in shining armourThough his lance be swift and keen,But I fear and love the glamour’Neath thy drooping lashes seen.”
“I fear no foe in shining armourThough his lance be swift and keen,But I fear and love the glamour’Neath thy drooping lashes seen.”
“I fear no foe in shining armourThough his lance be swift and keen,But I fear and love the glamour’Neath thy drooping lashes seen.”
“I fear no foe in shining armourThough his lance be swift and keen,But I fear and love the glamour’Neath thy drooping lashes seen.”
“I fear no foe in shining armour
Though his lance be swift and keen,
But I fear and love the glamour
’Neath thy drooping lashes seen.”
The Chinese soldier is not so sentimental. He is extremely sensible. “All’s game that comes to my gun,” is his motto in time of war, and he would argue (not without some show of justice) that if a woman were foolish enough, unsexed enough, to go into the field of battle as a combatant, a maker of carnage, the sooner she were exterminated the better.
Yes; the Emperor of Japan has done well to exclude the dainty women folk of Japan from active participation in the present fray. Let the women of Japan wait. When there is a Japanese-European war, then their turn will have come, and they will have the proud happiness of being Japan’s invincible defenders, Japan’s strongest soldiers, and the conquerors of all Europe.
A number of Japanese women have petitioned the Emperor to enrol them as army nurses, and send them to the seat of war. So wise a man as Mutsuhito will not, I feel sure, refuse so admirable a suggestion. Cooks are taught sometimes: statesmen made, poets manufactured as often as not. Nurses are born.
The knack of nursing is a gift; a gift from God. Japanese women have this gift to a delightful degree. Physically, they are ideal nurses. Their voices are sweet, low, and clear. Their motion is gentle and graceful. Their touch is cool but comfortable, soft, comforting. They have not a single quality among them that could rasp the sorest nerves.
A Japanese girl (now the wife of a lieutenant in the Japanese navy) used to make illness a perfect treat to me when we were girls at school together. It was a big family ours, almost a thousand, if I remember, but Shige nursed us all, from the Lady Principal to the college cat. We always thought her inspired with a gentle, loving talent for helping and soothing the sick. Certainly she was the best nurse I ever knew: but when I came to live in Japan, I learned that every Japanese woman is an almost ideal nurse.
The Chinese hospitals are hells of horror. The Japanese hospitals are heavens of flower-perfumed rest and consolation.
The soldiers of Japan have acquitted themselves well in the field and in the sea of battle. And they seem to have had all the best of the Korean war.
The woman of Japan will excel always and everywhere in the holier half of war: the binding of wounds, the staunching of blood flow, the decent shrouding of the dead.
And so the strife goes on. The fate of Korea, and perchance the fate of the Far East, hangs in war’s awful balance. Yet even now Korea is half asleep amid her lotus-flowers, and far more inclined to dream away a hermit life, hidden behind the Ever-white Mountains, lulled by the crooning of the Yellow and the Japan Seas, than to come out into the tumult, the struggle, and the glare of international day.
THE END.
GLOSSARY.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Archaic spellings and hyphenation have been retained. Punctuation and obvious typesetting errors have been corrected without note.
[End ofQuaint Korea, by Louise Jordan Miln]