TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTERROUTLEDGE STRIKES A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE JAPANESE EMPEROR AND THE JAPANESE FIGHTING-MAN, WHILE OKU CHARGES INTO A BLIZZARD OF STEEL
Queerlyenough, Routledge’s first thought was that the moment of the wound had come, but this was out of the question. These men would not fire at him. They would send him to the rear under a guard; or, worse, escort him to the command where the other correspondents were held. The Englishmen would then suggest to the Japanese that their captive had once proved a traitor to England, and that it would be well to look deep into his present business, lest he repeat.... He would miss the battle, be detained for a Russian spy—and Noreen would hear.
Routledge was ordered to approach, and obeyed, swallowing Failure. The lieutenant spoke English, but disdained to look at proffered credentials. The sergeant gripped Routledge’s arm, and his superior led the way down the slope through the lines of troops. Many of the little soldiers of Oku were eating rice and drinking tea from bowls; some were bathing their bodies, others cleansing their teeth with great zeal, using soaps and pointed sticks. These meant to be gathered unto their fathers that day with clean mouths. Down and forward, the American was led, no word being spoken until they were in the midst of Oku’s front. Here was the fieldheadquarters of some high officer of the left wing. Routledge breathed a hope that action would be joined before he was ordered back. The unknown commander stood in the centre of a thick protecting cordon of men. Evidently he was too rushed at present to attend the case of the detained civilian. Aides and orderlies spurred out with dispatches, and others riding in took their places.
Three or four minutes had passed when certain commands went ripping down the unformed lines and action was indeed joined. The lieutenant was brushed away in the torrent of infantry which just now swept over them, but the sergeant held grimly to his prisoner’s arm. Oku had ordered the first charge of the day. This was the reeking red splash on the map of all the world.
The soldiers leaped over Routledge and his captor. Shielding his head from their boots and rifle-butts, the American looked deep into the sweating brown faces that rushed past—red, squinting eyes, upper lips twisted with a fury they could not have explained, the snarling muscles drawn tight—and not a zephyr of fear in the command! Some of the men still had their eating-sticks and bowls and paper napkins. One stuffed the contents of a dish of rice into his mouth as he ran—an eight-pound rifle clapped between his elbow and ribs.
The correspondent warmed to the human atoms hurtling by and to the sergeant who stuck so fast to his arm. There was something tremendous in the delusion of these poor pawns who were doing their cruel work so well. There was an infernal majesty in the huge gamble for the old gray walls of Liaoyang on this gorgeous morning.... War is immense and final—for thebig devil-clutched souls who make it—an achievement, indeed, to gather and energize and hurl this great force against an enemy, but what a rotten imposition upon the poor little obscure men whofight, not a tithe the richer if they take all Asia! So the thoughts of Routledge surged. Into the havoc, from time to time, he threw a sentence, wrung from the depths of his understanding:
“... Once a father threw his children out of the sleigh to hold back a wolf-pack—as he whipped his horse to the village. Would you call such a man ‘father’?... Yet you call a nation ‘fatherland’ that hurls you now to the wolves!... Oh, ye of mighty faith!... Pawns—poor pawns—of plague, famine, war around the world—God, tell us why the many are consumed to ashes at the pleasure of the few!... Oh, glorious Patriotism—what sins are committed in thy name!”
The great system of Russian fortifications now opened fire upon the Japanese charge. Men were falling. The bulk of the infantry avalanche had passed, and smoke was crowding out the distances. The longp-n-n-n-gof the high bullets, and the instantb-zrpof the close ones, were stimulus for that fast, clear thinking which so often comes close to death. Routledge’s brain seemed to hold itself aloof from his body, the better to grasp and synthesize the startling actions of the present.
The smoke blurred all but a finger-bone of the valley; yet from that part he could reconstruct the whole horrid skeleton of a Twentieth-century crime.... The brown line of Japanese rolled up against the first Russian trench. Routledge thought of toy soldiers, heads bent forward, legs working, and guns ofpapiermachéin bayonet charge. The works wore a white ruff of smoke, and its lace was swept by stray winds down over the fallen....
The grip upon his arm relaxed. For a moment Routledge thought he was hit, when the blood rushed down the veins of his arm where the tightened fingers had been. He was free—and at what a cost! The little sergeant was down—his legs wriggling and beating against the American’s, the “red badge of courage” widening on his breast. Routledge bent over him and looked long into the dying face—forgetting the world and the war, forgetting all but the spirit behind the hour.
The face was brown, oriental. In the corner of the mouth was a flake of rice, and the coarse-grained dust of Manchuria was over all. The eyes were turned back, and the ears were bad. Evolution was young in the shape of the head and the cut of those ears—small, thick, close to the skull, criminal ears. But the mouth was beautiful! It was carved as if some God had done it—and on a fine morning when joy was abroad in the world—and the perfection of the human mouth was the theme of the day.
Routledge had not even water to give, but he said, “Hello.”
Deep understanding came to him from the dying face. He saw what it meant to this little soldier to go out for his Emperor—saw the faith and pity of it all. It was the smiling face of a man who comes home after years of travail to the marvel of a loved woman’s arms.
“Sayonara!” the fine lips muttered. One of the sweetest and saddest words of human speech—this Japanese farewell.
“Sayonara!” Routledge repeated.... The body jerked itself out, but the smile remained. The whole story of the Japanese conquest stirred in Routledge’s brain. It was all in the smile upon the face of the guard—all in that one perishable portrait of joy.
Routledge had once seen the Emperor for whom this soldier died with a smile. Though it was forenoon, he had been forced to put on evening-clothes for the Presence. Mutsuhito came back to his mind as he bent over the fresh corpse....
“He has no such mouth as yours, little sergeant,” he said in a swift, strange fashion. “His head is not so good as your hard, bad head, though his ears are better. He was dazed with champagne, as you have never been. He had the look of an epileptic, and they had to bring him a red-blooded woman of the people to get a son from him—and that son a defective!... A soft, inbred pulp of a man, without strength of will or hand or brain, and God only knows what rudiment of a soul—such is the Lord of Ten Thousand Years, whom you die for with a smile. You are greater than the Empire you serve, little sergeant—greater than the Emperor you die for; since he is not even a clean abstraction.... God pity you—God pity you all!”
The sun sent streamers into the white smoke drapery upon the Russian bank. The Island Empire men were thrashing against it. They met with their breasts the fire that spurted continuously from the ledges. One man of a Japanese company lived to gain the top of the trench. He was skewered on Russian bayonets and shaken down among his writhing fellow-soldiers, as the wing of a chicken is served upon a waiting plate. Running,crawling, Routledge made his way down and forward.
The Japanese hope lives high above the loss of companies. It was a glad morning for the Island Empire men, a bright task they were given to do. Other companies, full quota, were shot forward to tread upon the dead and beat themselves to death against the entrenchment. A third torrent was rolled against the Russians before the second had suffered a complete blood-letting.... Routledge saw one five-foot demon wielding his rifle-butt upon the rim of the trench, in the midst of gray Russian giants. For an instant he was a human tornado, filled with the idea to kill—that Brownie—then he was sucked down and stilled. Routledge wondered if they completely wiped out the little man’s smile at the last.
He was ill from the butchery, and his mind was prone to grope away from the bleeding heart of things; still, he missed little of the great tragedy which unfolded in the smoke. And always Oku, unparalleled profligate of men, coiled up his companies and sprung them against a position which Napoleon would have called impregnable—Oku, whose voice was quiet as a mystic’s prayer. The thought came to Routledge that the women of America would tear down the capitol at Washington with their hands, if the walls contained a monster who had spent the blood of their sons and lovers as Oku was doing now.
A new tumult in the air! It was like an instant horrid crash of drums in the midst of a violin solo. Artillery now roared down upon Oyama’s left wing.... The wildest dream of hell was on. Routledge,crawling westward through the pit of fire, saw a platoon of infantry smashed as a cue-ball shatters a fifteen block in pool.... Westward under the Russian guns, he crawled through the sun-shot, smoke-charged shambles, miraculously continuing alive in that thick, steady, annihilating blizzard of steel—his brain desperate with the rush of images and the shock of sounds. Over a blood-wet turf he crawled, among the quivering parts of men....
Silence. Oku stopped to breathe and pick up the fragments.... From far up on the Russian works—it was like the celestial singing in the ears of the dying—began a distant, thrilling music. Some regiment or brigade, swinging into the intrenchments to relieve a weary command, had burst into song.... Once before Routledge had caught a touch of this enchantment, during the Boxer Rebellion. He had never been able to forget Jerry Cardinegh’s telling of the Russian battle-hymns at Plevna.... Great emotions bowed him now. Another terrace of defense caught up the song, and the winds that cleared the reeking valley of smoke carried along the vibrant inspiration. Every Russian heart gripped the grand contagion. From terrace to terrace, from trench to trench, from pit to emplacement, that glorious thunder stalked, a company, a battery, a brigade, at a stride. Each voice was a raw, dust-bitten shout—the whole a majestic harmony, from the cannon-meat of Liaoyang! Sons of the North, gray, sodden, sorrow-stunted men of pent misery and unlit souls—Finlander, Siberian, Caspian, Caucasian—hurling forth their heart-hunger in a tumult of song that shook the continent. The spirit of All the Russias givingtongue—the tragedy of Poland, the clank of chains, the mockery of palaces, the iron pressure of frost, the wail of the wolf-pack on frozen tundras, the cry of the crushed, the blind groping of the human to God—it was all in that rhythmic roar, all the dreadful annals of a decadent people.
As it was born, so it died,—that music,—from terrace to terrace, the last wavering chant from out the city walls. The little Japanese made no answer. Routledge could not help but see the mark of the beast in contrast. It wasn’t the Russians that bothered Oku, but the Russian position. Kuroki would pull them out of that.... Song or steel, they would take Liaoyang. They prepared to charge again.
In the disorder of the next charge Routledge crossed the railroad and passed out of the Japanese lines. Late afternoon, as he hurried westward for his horses, he met the eyes of Bingley. He was not given a chance to pass another way. The race for the cable was on.