Chapter VII: Part 7

These two did not pretend to speak at the last. The Horse-killer took on the look (his gray eyes were cold and immutable as corner stones, anyway) as if he would spur over a sea of dead men’s faces to get a big tale and a free cable. It would not have been so bad except that the London papers, coming in now with the first cables of the correspondents, showed a consistent garbling and distortion of their reports. Home writers occupied miles of space, placed Togo along with Lord Nelson, and Mutsuhito with Gladstone--a deep planned, conscienceless campaign of fact-mutilation for the extolling of Japanese character and mettle. New York, young in war-handling, was inclined to follow London’s diplomatic lead, against the reports of her own men. February and March ended before the first batch of the British correspondents were informed that they could take the field with Kuroki’s first army.

Feeney and Finacune remained in the billiard-room that last night at the Imperial, long after the rest had gone. These two men had pulled apart from the others in pulling together--the most florid with the dullest of writers; the showiest with the deepest. It had been an evening of rousing festivity. Possibly because these two had drunk less than the others; or possibly because their hopes for the field had been prolonged and mangled for such a length of time that they could not sleep now until they were actually booming down the Tokaido, Feeney and Finacune were billiarding idly after one o’clock in the morning and cooling the fever of the night’s stronger spirits with long, chilled glasses of soda, lightly flavored with Rhenish wine.

Jerry Cardinegh had come down for a moment early in the evening for a word of parting. For days none had seen him below; and only a few of his older friends were admitted to the big, dim room, overlooking the park of the Government buildings--where a woman lived and moved, lost to light and darkness, and struggled every inch with the swift encroachments of the inevitable. Noreen’s father relied upon her, as upon air and a place to lie. God knows what vitality he drew from the strong fountains of her life to sustain his last days.

Incessantly active, Noreen Cardinegh was worn to a brighter lustre, as if fatigue brought out the fineness of her human texture--a superlative woman who held her place and her dreams. Finacune had loved her for years. He was closer to her own romance than any of her father’s friends; and the little man perceived with an agony of which few would have thought him capable, that his own chance was not worth the embarrassment of telling her. Indeed, Finacune told no one. This was his best room, and locked. Noreen Cardinegh was the image there, beyond words, almost an abstraction. This _Word_ man was rather a choice spirit, if not a great one. He was thinking of Noreen now, as he knocked the balls around. She had appeared with her father earlier in the night, and had stood behind him under the old Moorish arch at the entrance to the billiard-room--darkness behind her, and a low table-chandelier in front....

Finacune was thinking, too, of the old man whom she had helped down-stairs to say good-by to the boys. Cardinegh had been his boyish ideal. He would not be seen again--and what a ghastly travesty was his last appearance!... Jerry had entered walking rigidly, his limbs like wood, a suggestion of chaos in the shaking, aimless hands; the shaven face all fallen about the mouth; all the stirring history of an earth-wise man, censored and blotted from the flame-rimmed eyes; the temples blotched with crimson and the mind struggling with its débris like Gilliat against sea and sand and sky. And the words the dean had uttered--nothings that meant death.

Feeney had just carefully and neatly made a three-cushion carom, with the remark that he could do it again on horseback, when there was a light, swift tread upon the stairway, a rushing in the hall, light as a blown paper, and Noreen Cardinegh burst upon them--half a torrent, half a spirit, indescribable altogether. The souls of the two men divined her message before she spoke, but their brains were slower. And their eyes were startled. To Finacune, it became an ineffable portrait--the frightened face, white as pearl and set in gold; the dark silk waist, unfastened at the throat; the red-gold hair dressed and wound seemingly in Mother Nature’s winds; the face refined in the whitest fires of earth; her eyes like twin suns behind smoked glass; and the lips of Noreen--lips like the mother of a prophet.

“Oh, come quickly!” she said, and was gone.

Finacune dashed up the stairway three at a stride, but he never overtook her--a fact for profound speculation afterward. She was bending over the edge of the bed, sustaining her father, when he entered. Cardinegh stared at him wildly for a second; then hearkened to Feeney’s footsteps in the hall. When the latter entered, the dean turned imploringly to his daughter.

“Where’s Routledge?” he gasped. “He said he’d come back.”

A single jet of gas was burning in the big room. With a nod of her head, Noreen signified for the men to answer.

“I haven’t heard from him, Jerry,” Feeney faltered.

“Eh, Gawd!--he’d better come quickly--or he won’t see old Jerry. I’m going out--not with you, boys--but afield. I want to see Routledge. He said he’d come back and bring his book--done under the pressure of British hate. I told you, didn’t I--he took the hate from me?... I told Noreen.... Feeney! Finacune!... It was I who gave the Russian spies the Shubar Khan papers!... Don’t leave me, Noreen. Pour me a last drink, Feeney.... Gawd! but I’ve travelled in the shadow of death for two years--afraid--afraid to tell--afraid of his coming back! I can see now--he wouldn’t come back!... I’m not afraid now--but I’ve had my hell two years.... You would have found it in my papers, Noreen. Show them to the men--cable the truth to London----”

“Jerry, Jerry,” whispered old Feeney, who was stricken, “did Ireland get the best of you at the last?”

Finacune nudged him angrily. “Jerry,” he exclaimed, “don’t go out with this stuff on your lips. We know you’re doing it for Routledge----”

The woman turned upon him, but did not speak.

“I did it for Ireland--but it failed!” Cardinegh answered. “These brown mongrels are fighting in Manchuria the Russians that England should have fought on the Indian border!... Eh, Gawd!--the dark has been long a-liftin’, deere--but it’s gone--and you know from me, without the papers!... Ah, Nory, child of my heart----” He was straining upward toward her face, as if he could not see her well. “... ’Tis your mother--’tis your mother--I’m off, darlin’----”

“The old toast,” Feeney muttered. “It came true--the toast we all stood to in Calcutta!”

The woman held but the ashes of a man in her arms, and they drew her away at last. They thought from the look of her face that she would fall, but she did not. Instead, she said with sudden swiftness:

“Here are the papers. He told me all, just before I called for you. I wanted you both to hear. It is true. You must cable to-night to the war-office in London--to the owners of your papers--to all those who know the story. Then the secret service must be told--lest they do Routledge-san further hurt. It must be done now. Tell the other men to cable before they go out. I will cable, too.... My father is guilty. We went back to Tyrone before the Bhurpal trouble--to the little town where he found my mother, in Tyrone. When he saw the British troops quartered on that starving, sunken little place--his mind gave way. He had the papers then, which he gave afterward to the Russian spies!”

All this the woman spoke before she wept.

SIXTEENTH CHAPTER

CERTAIN CIVILIANS SIT TIGHT WITH KUROKI, WHILE THE BLOOD-FLOWER PUTS FORTH HER BRIGHT LITTLE BUDS

They were in a troop-train at last, down the Tokaido, the old cedar-lined highway of the _daimios_,--Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, Bingley, other English and as many more Americans. The road was a brown streak of troop-laden trains off to embarkation ports. Japan was sending out her willing wealth of men to a brown and sullen land of such distances as would balk the short-sighted Japanese eye, so used to toy sizes in all things--toy trees, terraces, hills, and roads, whose ends are mostly in view. These men were off to fight now in the outer court of “the last and the largest empire, whose map is but half unrolled.”

Bingley was sitting apart as usual, already in puttees and Bedford cords, a blanket-roll underfoot and a light, travelling type-mill in a leather-case by his side. Bingley was brimming with the morbid, moody passion for Bingley triumphs. A great type of the militant Englishman this, with his stiff jaw and strong-seasoned blood, utterly painless to almost everything but the spur of ambition; identified peculiarly, penetratingly, with Bingley and no other; the six feet of animal named Bingley, in a soft shirt and Bingley cords. He was sombrely glad this April morning to be started for the field at last. Presently the _Thames_, London, the world, would hear the name of Bingley again--and the name would mean a giant grappling with “monster heroisms” in the midst of Asia and armies. The revelation and death of Jerry Cardinegh the night before had a personal aspect from Bingley’s point of view. It was that Routledge, vindicated, would have a free hand again. He would probably oust Benton Day from the _Review_ and seek to regain his old supremacy. Routledge would require lots of handling, delicate and daring, to be downed and dimmed.

To Feeney and Finacune, the events of the night before had taken a place among the great military crises of their experience. They had cabled the morning hours away, as the other Englishmen had done, urged by the woman. Indeed, the American correspondents were not a little disturbed by the unwonted activity of the Londoners at a time when, to them, all was done. What the confession of Jerry Cardinegh meant to the English is difficult adequately to express. Routledge had always been _outré_ and mysterious. The great treachery adjusted itself to him with a degree of readiness, since it is easier to identify a brilliant crime with an individual held loftily, than with one in the more immediate reaches of the public comprehension. But that old Jerry, their dean, their master of many services, their idol and chief, should have turned this appalling trick against the British arms which he had helped to make famous--this was a heart-jolt which bruised the twinings of a hundred sentiments. Feeney was an Irishman, and could understand the Cardinegh-passion, probably better than the others, but he could not understand its expression in treachery. To him there was only one explanation--madness....

They discerned the Pacific from the Hankone mountains, boomed through big, strange towns to Kyoto; then Sasebo, the troop-ships, and the landing at a Korean base, where they learned with bitterness that a second siege of waiting had just begun. The world outside now was but a wordless buzzing of voices, as from a locked room. They were at Anju when the first brush happened at Chengju (a neat little rout of Cossacks). They were at Chengju when Kuroki occupied Wiju, regardless of the growling of the Bear. They were at Yongampho, in the last few hours of April, when Kuroki crossed the Yalu, ten miles northeast, and fought the first great battle, named after the river. Always it was this way--a day or two’s march behind the business-end of the army.

It had been a dead delay in Tokyo; but it was a wait lively with aggravations now--the wisp of fragrant hay forever dangling in scent. An English military attaché arriving late from Seoul brought the word that the cables of the correspondents reached their papers from seven to fifteen days late; and then with lineaments of the text effaced by censorship--stale, egoless, costly messages. At this word one of the American scribes crumpled under the strain and went out into the Yellow Sea in a junk, a mad dream in his brain to meet the sea-god, Togo, face to face. Old Feeney, accustomed to discuss strategies with generals, was spurred to such a distemper that he cabled to be recalled. It is significant that his message was the first of the war to go through the Japanese censor untouched by the blue pencil.

Aye, and when the silent red stream of wounded began to trickle back from the Yalu fight, it required a man to keep himself reined down to a fox-trot. It was color, war-color, this back-throw from the weltering fields. Even this stopped, and Kuroki seemed hung forever in the hills about Fengwangcheng. The civilians breathed hard those weeks, and lived in an atmosphere burned from human rage. Always excepting Trollope, the Blue Boar, who had a feeling for China. He studied the deep, rutty Chinese roads through the hills (back of the army), some of them worn into formidable ravines--eroded by bare human feet and the showers of centuries. There were strange little shrines and monasteries high in those grim hills, and Trollope filled a note-book with their names and history. There are strata of mystery under the cuticle of China of which the raw young mind of the white man can only conceive a tithe--and then only in the ecstasy of concentration. And what names he found--Road of the Purple Emperor; Spring of the Whispering Spirit; Cascade of the Humming-bird’s Wing; Cataract of the Sombre Clouds; Grotto of the Adulteress’ Death--not names of mere flowery choosing, but names made florid by the necessities of a people whose history is so long that a poetic glamour has fallen upon it. And the Blue Boar found much to eat of a weird flavory sort, and kept his poundage.

What strategy was this which held a big, fat, pompous army inactive through a golden month of campaigning like this June? Bingley exclaimed that Kuroki was so inflated by the Yalu victory that he was content to hunt butterflies for the rest of the summer. The rumble of real war reached the writers from time to time. Apparently, the other Japanese generals were not like this gray-haired Fabius--Kuroki of the first army. A man named Oku, it was reported, had landed a second army at Pitsewo, half-way down the east coast of Liaotung, had bored straightway across some devilishly steep passes and cut off the fortress, Port Arthur, from the mainland. The story of this fight was insufferable poison to the white men with Kuroki. It had taken place on a narrow neck of land, where sits high the town of Kinchow, joining the little peninsula of the fortress to the big Liao peninsula above. The rock-collared neck of land is memorable now by a hill called Nanshan--the battle’s name. Oku burned five thousand dead after the fight, but he had cut off Port Arthur for the siege, and made possible the landing of one Nogi with a third Japanese army at Dalny--cheap at twice the price. Japanese gunboats and torpedoes at sea on the west had helped Oku get the strangle-hold on the neck of land, while a Russian fleet had bombarded from the bay on the east. What torture to believe this--that at last in the history of the world armies and navies had met in a single action! It was almost unthinkable to be camping with Kuroki in the ancient Chinese hills, while such a panorama unfolded for the eyes of other men--a battle such as the gods would put on flesh to witness.

Finally the word was brought in by the Chinese, who knew all things, that this jumping-bean, Oku, had left the fortress to Nogi and the third army, and leaped north to join a fourth army, under Nodzu, who had effected a perfect landing at Takushan. Oku whipped poor Stackelberg on the journey, Telissu being the historic title of this incident of his flying march. Thus Yalu, Nanshan, and Telissu were fought without even a smell of smoke for Bingley, Feeney, Finacune, Trollope, and others. It is to be noted that even Trollope blanched at the great war story the world missed by not letting him in on Nanshan. That was one battle for a Tolstoi. The English civilians sat together on a breezy, sweet-scented hill and watched the sun go down on one of those June evenings. Feeney was writing, the pad resting upon his knee.

“What did you say was the name of your new book?” Finacune inquired.

“‘Sitting Tight with Kuroki; or, The Wild Flowers of Manchuria,’” grumbled the old man.

Into the group presently came Major Inuki, the Japanese officer assigned to watch over the correspondents, to see that none escaped, to see that none learned anything but generalities, to furnish unlimited courtesy and apologetic ramifications that stretched from Kirin to Port Arthur. Inuki also supplied universes of unverifiable information, having to do with vague Japanese miracles and vast Russian casualties. He took off his hat now and bowed all around, inhaled a long breath with a hiss through his sparkling teeth, and snuffled violently.

“It iss more dan quite possible we will remain here for to-morr’, my dear fren’s. In such case would it not be of good to instruk your servan’s to ereck the tents--more stolidity?”

Feeney reached over and gravely clutched the flapping trouser-leg of his Chinese coolie. “Jean Valjean,” he said, “you are instruk to ereck tents--more stolidity.”

“Me plentee slabee,” said Jean.

The odor of supper was abroad in the camp of the noncombatants, and the twilight was deep in the valley of young corn. Feeney and Finacune ate in silence. These two were closer together--close as only two male adults can be who have lived long alone in broad areas, sharing toil and irritation and peril; apart from women, but akin in memories and ambition. Feeney had ridden with the greatest of the nineteenth-century generals. He was being herded now close to war, but out of range of any good to his calling. He was thinking of Nanshan--what a battle to have added to his string! Finacune was thinking of the world’s greatest woman--how she had come down like a spirit to the billiard-room that last night in Tokyo--and with what exacting zeal she had caused him and the others to cable away the last vestige of glory from the name she bore.

“Blot up another piece of tea, Feeney,” he muttered, “and cheer up.”

“I was just about to suggest, my vivid young friend, that if you spilled any more gloom on this outfit, I should burst into tears,” Feeney replied.

There was a long silence. “What?” said Feeney.

“I’m a hare-lipped cock-roach, if it isn’t wonderful!” Finacune observed in an awed tone.

“What?”

“Suppose now--just now--suppose a white woman--all in a soft summer gown and blowing golden hair--should walk through this camp? Think of it!”

“I did--twenty years ago,” said Feeney.

“Think of it now,” Finacune persisted raptly, leaning back against his saddle with a pot of tea in his hand. “The mere sight of her would jam a sweetheart or a wife, or both, into the brain of every man present--the first kiss or a last, dim light somewhere, a word or a caress--the unspeakable miracle that comes to every man some time--that of a woman giving herself to him!... Ah, that’s it, you old crocodile! It would all come back on live wires--if a woman walked through here--to each man his romance--hot throats, dry lips, and burning eyes. The world holds a woman for us all--even for you, yoked to the war-hag; and if memories were tangible, the right woman would sweep in upon us to-night from five continents and seven seas. A woman! The mere name is a pang to us lonely devils out here in the open, where we blister with hate because we are not allowed to smell blood. Hell!--one would think I had just broken out of a gas-house.”

“Twenty years ago----” Feeney remarked.

“Hark, listen to that young American sing----”

“You listen to me, young man,” Feeney said forcefully. “These lines, with which I am about to cleanse you from carnality are by my young friend Kipling:

“White hands cling to the tightened rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel.
Tenderest voices cry, ‘Turn again,’
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel;
High hopes faint on the warm hearthstone--
He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

“‘Sing the heretical song I have made,’” Finacune added, entirely uncooled.... “I’ve heard fat London club men expatiate for hours on what they might have done if they hadn’t married--the beasts! They couldn’t talk that way to us, sons of Hagar, out here in this unsexed wilderness! I’d tell ’em what it would mean to me--to be married to _one_ woman! It would mean more to me to be allowed to listen to whispered revelations from one woman’s lips--than----”

“Dam’ you, quiet down!”

“Guess I better had.”

“Shall we have a hand at crib?” Feeney asked softly.

“Not now--please.”

There was a dusky splash of red in the sky beyond the western hills, and a faint red foam above. The evening was soft and sweet, and tobacco as fragrant as tropical islands.

“Gad! I’m red-blooded,” Finacune murmured after a moment. “I could squeeze milk out of a pound note. I’d like to see a dog-fight. If there’s a man-fight to-morrow, I’ll throttle Nookie-san, slide down into the stoke-hold, and see how this new brand of fighter shovels hell.”

“If you leave the woman behind,” Feeney grumbled, “I’ll go with you.”

“A man is an awful animal--when he’s fit as I am,” Finacune added. “The gang is certainly moonstruck to-night. Listen to that ungodly American sun-spotter sing.”

“There is an island fair, set in an eastern sea;
There is a maid keeping her tryst with me,
In the shade of the palm, with a lover’s delight,
Where it’s always the golden day or the silvery night--
... My star will be shining, love,
For you in the moonlight calm,
So be waiting for me by the eastern sea
In the shade of the shelt’ring palm.”

“That’s just the point--her star’ll be shining--only, it may not,” Finacune whispered.

Feeney disdained to answer. Presently Major Inuki appeared again and announced guilelessly:

“Gentlema’--my dear fren’s, our gen’ral express himself prepare to greet your illustrious peersonages--one and every one--in his quarters at once. Would you be deigned to follow my poor leadership?”

“Holy Father!--where’s my dress-suit?” Feeney asked with a start.

“Such an honor does not increase our chances for watching the next battle at close-range,” observed Finacune.

Nookie-san led them through the dust past innumerable battalions, until on a rising trail the sentries became as thick as fire-flies. After a twenty-minute walk they reached the summit of a commanding hill. At the entrance of a large tent paper-lanterns were hung, and below in the light Kuroki’s staff was gathered. Felicitations endured for several moments; then an inspired hush dominated all. The flap of the tent was drawn aside, and a small, gray-haired man of stars emerged stiffly. His eyes were bent toward the turf and thus he stood motionless beneath the lanterns for several seconds.

“General Kuroki,” spoke Inuki in a low voice.

The general raised his eyes for just an instant--great, tired, burning, black eyes with heavy rolled lids--bowed slightly, then backed into the tent.

“Now, there’s a man with no carnal lust in him,” Feeney commented to his companion. “He has commanded his wife and family not to write him from Japan, lest their letters distract attention from his work at hand.”

“And he drowned a thousand men crossing the Yalu,” remarked Finacune.

Bingley passed them with the remark, “I wonder if God has the dignity of Kuroki?”

* * * * *

Long afterward, when silence and stars lay upon the hills, there was still a low whispering in the tent of Feeney and Finacune.

“I wonder where the great frieze coat is this night?” came with a yawn from the old man.

“God knows,” Finacune replied. “Alone in the dark somewhere--unearthing great tales to be printed under a strange name. If any one finds them, it will be Dartmore, and his roots will wither because they are not in the _Review_. Or----” The little man halted suddenly. He had been about to add that a woman was apt to find them. Instead he said, “Alone in the dark somewhere, hiding from the wrath of the world--unless somebody’s hunted him down to tell him that he’s clean and desirable again.”

“I’d like to see the great frieze coat this night,” said Feeney in a listless tone, as if he had not listened to the other.

“I’d like to have been the one--to find him for her.”

“There never was a nobler thing done for a woman--than Routledge did,” the old man went on, after a pause.

“There never was a nobler woman,” breathed the florid one.

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER

FEENEY AND FINACUNE ARE PRIVILEGED TO “READ THE FIERY GOSPEL WRIT IN BURNISHED ROWS OF STEEL”

As a matter of fact, Kuroki was only waiting for Oku and Nodzu to join him in the great concentration upon Liaoyang under Oyama. This battle was planned to finish the Russians in the field, as Togo was to do at sea, and Nogi in the Fortress. Roughly, the Japanese now stretched across the peninsula from the mouth of the Liao to the mouth of the Yalu--a quarter of a million men with eyes on Liaoyang--Kuroki on the right, Nodzu in the centre, Oku on the left. Oyama polished his boots and spurs in Tokyo, preparing to take his rice and tea in the field as soon as it was heated to the proper temperature.

Late in June, Kuroki awoke and began to spread like a gentle flow of lava, filling the hither defiles of the great Shanalin range, making ready to take the stiff and dreadful passes which the Russians had fortified as the outer protection of Liaoyang. Right here it must be interpolated that Bingley had cut Kuroki for Nodzu’s fourth army a few days before, when the two forces had touched wings for a day. The “Horse-killer” was scarcely gone before Kuroki encountered one of the toughest and pluckiest foes of his stupendous campaign, General Kellar, who gave him terrific fights at Fenshui and Motien passes, and tried to take them back after they were lost. Again at Yansu, a month later, the doughty Kellar disputed the last mountain-trail to the city, and Kuroki had to kill him to get through.... The army was growing accustomed to the civilians, and these were days of service for the correspondents. It was given them now to see the great fighting-machine of Kuroki--that huge bulk of flying power--lose its pomp and gloss and adjust itself to the field. It faded into the brown of the mountains, took on a vulpine leanness and a nerveless, soulless complacence, like nothing else in the world. Food was king; fighting was the big-game sport; toil was toil, and death was not the least of benefits. It was now August, and Kuroki’s part in the Liaoyang preliminaries finished. A month later the battle was on.... In the gray morning light of the twenty-ninth of August, the sound of distant batteries boomed over the Shanalin peaks to the ears of the correspondents. Finacune leaped up with a cry:

“Liaoyang is on! And what are we doing away off here?”

“Smokin’ our pipes in the mountings,” Feeney answered huskily, reaching for a match, “‘an’ breathin’ the mornin’ cool.’”

“We’re lost,” Finacune declared bitterly. “I can hear the London experts howling, ‘Where’s Kuroki and his lost army?’”

“Lost, is it? Hush! Come near me, young man. We’re lost, but destined to appear in good time,” Feeney whispered. “I’ll bet you an oyster-stew to a dill-pickle that we are the flankers. We’re relegated off here to cross the river when the moon’s right, and to bore in at the railroad behind the city, while Oyama and Kuropatkin are locking horns in front.”

Old Feeney, wise in war, had hit upon the strategy before the others; although any expert familiar with the terrain would thus have planned the taking of the city. That night Kuroki camped on the south side of the Taitse; and on the morning of the second day following was across with seventy thousand men. This by the grace of a corps of insignificant-looking engineers, busy little brown chaps who worked a miracle of pontooning--conquered a deep and rushing river without wetting a foot in Kuroki’s command. There had been rains, too, and between the showers, far salvos of cannon rode in from the west on the damp, jerky winds.

There is no place so good as here to drop a conventional figure of the Liaoyang field. The strategy of the battle is simple as a play in straight foot-ball. Japanese and Russian linesmen are engaged in a furious struggle south and southeast of the city. Imagine Kuroki, the Japanese half-back, breaking loose with the ball and dashing around the right end (crossing the Taitse River) and boring in behind toward the Russian goal--the railroad. This threatens the Russian communications. If the Russian full-back, Orloff, cannot defend the goal, the whole Russian line will be jerked up and out of the city to prevent being cut off from St. Petersburg. This leaves the field and the city to the Japanese. Here is the simplest possible straight line sketch of the city, river, railroad, and the position of the fighters when the battle began; also, shown by the arrow, the sweep of Kuroki’s now-famous end-run. [See drawing on next page.]

The midnight which ended August found the intrepid flanker launched straight at the Russian railroad at the point called the Yentai Collieries, nine miles behind the city.

“We’re locked tight in the Russian holdings this minute,” Finacune whispered, as he rode beside the grim veteran.

“Where did you think we were--on some church steps?” Feeney asked.

It looked a dark and dangerous game to the dapper little man. The lure of action, so strong at Home, often turns cold at the point of realization. Finacune had the nerves which are the curse of civilization, and he felt the chill white hand of fear creeping along these sensitive ganglia just now in the dark.

“I haven’t a thing against Kuropatkin--only I hope he is a fool for a night,” he observed presently. “Somehow, I don’t feel cheerful about the fool part. He _must_ hear us tramping on his back door-steps this way. Why can’t he spare enough men from the city to come out here and sort of outflank the flanker?”

“That’s just his idea,” Feeney replied, “but don’t forget that Oyama will keep him so dam’ busy below that it will be hard for him to match us man for man and still hold on. However, remember he’s got the position, and he won’t need to match the Japanese--quite.”

As a matter of fact, Kuropatkin’s far-flung antennæ had followed Kuroki well. The Russian chief, knowing the strength of his front position on the city, had determined to slip back and crush Kuroki with an overwhelming force, leaving only two corps of Siberians, under Zurubaieff, to hold off Nodzu and Oku from the inner defenses of Liaoyang. General Orloff, who was in command at the Yentai Collieries, where Kuroki’s flanking point was aimed, was under orders to attack the Japanese in flank at the moment Kuropatkin’s main force appeared to hit the Japanese in full. There was the constant roar of big guns in Orloff’s ears in that dawning of September first--a rainy dawn. Also his own troops were moving along the railroad. Another thing, there had been a vodka-train broken into the night before by his own men.

Orloff thought he saw Kuropatkin coming, and set out prematurely. Kuroki was concealed in the fields of ripe millet, and turned to the work of slaughter with much enthusiasm, wondering at the weakness of the enemy. This slaughter of Orloff, which lost the battle for the Russians, Feeney and Finacune saw.

“There’s eighteen burnt matches in your coat pocket, my young friend,” said Feeney, “and your pipe would light better if you put some smokin’ in it--in the bowl, y’know. For what do you save the burnt matches?”

Finacune grinned shyly. “Wait till the fire starts--I’ll be warmer. I’m always like this at first--like the little boy who tried to cure bees with rheumatism.”

“Something’s wrong with the Russians,” Feeney declared in low excitement. “We should all be dead by this time--if they are going to whip Kuroki. Oh, war--war is a devil of a thing!” he added flippantly. “We’re crushing the farmers’ grain.”

“Shut up, you fire-eater. Haven’t you any reverence? I’m preparing myself for death.”

That instant they heard a low command from an unseen Japanese officer, and a long drawn trumpet-cry. The Japanese leaped up from the grain. All was a tangle. Feeney, grabbing Finacune’s arm, seized the moment to break from Major Inuki and the others, and rushed forward to the open with the infantry.

“Come on,” he said excitedly. “We’re foot-loose! Come on, my little angel brother, and play tag with these children!... ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’”

Never a wild rose of boyhood smelled half so sweet to Finacune as the ancient soil of Asia that moment, but he was whipped forward by certain emotions, to say nothing of Feeney and the avalanche of Japanese. They reached the edge of the grain and met the first gust of Orloff’s rifle steel. Down they went for the volleys, and that moment perceived a most amazing trick of a shell. A little knot of ten Japanese were running forward just before them when there was a sudden whistling shriek. The ten were lost for a second in a chariot of fire. When it cleared only one Japanese remained standing.

“That Russian gunner bowled a pretty spare,” grimly observed Feeney. “Come, get up, lad. The volleys are over.”

“Not this Finacune. I’m not short-sighted. I’m going to hold fast to this sweet piece of mainland just now. Besides----”

The little man burst into a nervous laugh and glanced at his foot. Then he stiffened into a sitting posture. Feeney looked him over. His hat was gone, scalp bleeding, his shirt-sleeve burst open as if it had been wet brown paper, and the sole of his left shoe torn away clean.

“Queer about that shrapnel,” he mumbled. “I’m interested in shrapnel anyway. I haven’t got any more toe-nails on that foot than a bee.”

Meanwhile, Kuroki was crushing the Orloff member with a force destined to wreck the whole Russian nervous-system. Out of the grain he poured torrents of infantry which smote the Russian column in a score of places at once.

“Did you ever put your ear to the ground during a battle, Feeney?” the other asked wistfully. “It sounds aw’fly funny--funnier than sea-shells. Let’s try.”

Feeney did not answer. He was watching the disorder which swept over the Russian lines. It had changed into a deluge tossing back toward the Collieries. There was a fury even in the clouds of powder smoke that seemingly had nothing to do with the winds. They darted, stretched, and tore apart from the whipped-line with some devilish volition of their own.

“There’ll be excitement presently,” the veteran remarked.

The other had risen and was clutching his arm, his bare foot lifted from the ground. He was properly stimulated by the action, but kept up a more or less incessant chattering, his brain working as if driven by cocaine.

“Ex--excitement! This is a sedative, I believe. Let’s lie down, you bald-headed fatalist----”

“Don’t dare to. Look at your foot. Dangerous below. Ricochets hug the turf.... Livin’ God! they’re going to throw out cavalry upon us! They’re going to heave cavalry against Kuroki’s point! Bloom up, little man. Here’s where the most nerveless of the white races smite the most nervous of the yellow--and on horses!”

“I’m bloomin’ on one foot,” said Finacune.

Kuropatkin, apprised of Orloff’s error, was thundering his divisions up the railroad at double-time toward the Collieries, but, despairing to reach the blundering Orloff in time, had ordered his cavalry railway-guards to charge the enemy.... They came on now with mediæval grandeur, a dream of chivalry, breaking through gaps of Orloff’s disordered infantry--to turn the point of the Japanese flanker. Splendid squadrons!... A curse dropped from Feeney’s gray lips.

“They’re going to murder the cavalry to put red blood into that rotten foot-outfit,” he said.

Finacune’s face was colorless. He did not answer. The sound of bullets in the air was like the winging of a plague of locusts. Often the two huddled together, allowing a gasping battalion to leap past them toward the front. Kuroki was breaking his command into fragments and rolling them forward like swells of the sea. His front-rankers dropped to their knees to fire; then dashed forward a little way to repeat--all with inhuman precision. Feeney’s field-glass brought out their work. In a mile-long dust-cloud, the Russian cavalry thundered forward like a tornado.

The Cossacks swept into Kuroki’s zone of fire. Feeney heard his companion breathe fast, and turned his head. The _Word_ man was staring into the heart of the Cossack charge, his fears forgotten, fascinated unto madness. The earth roared with hoofs, and the air was rent with guns. On came the cavalry until it reached Kuroki’s point and halted it; but upon the Cossacks now from the countless Japanese skirmish-lines were hurled waves of flying metal--waves that dashed over the Russian horsemen as the sundered seas rushed together upon Pharaoh’s hosts.

“It’s like a biograph,” came from Finacune.

Kuroki was checked; his van ridden down. The Russian horse, cumbered with its dead, and taking an enfilading fire from half the Japanese command, was now ordered to retire. Only the skeletons of the glorious squadrons obeyed. Kuroki was stopped indeed--stopped to thrust an impediment aside. He rose from his knees, fastened a new point to his plow, and bored in toward the railway upon the strewn and trampled grain-fields. Already the hospital corps was gathering in the endless sheaves of wounded.

“One can tell the dead by the way they lie,” Finacune said vaguely. “They lie crosswise and spoil the symmetry.”

Orloff was steadied a trifle by the cavalry sacrifice, and turned an erratic but deadly fire upon the Japanese.... At this instant Major Inuki pounced upon the two correspondents and carried them back toward headquarters. He made very many monkey-sounds; was quite unintelligible from excitement; in fact, at the thought of these two being suffered to see so much alone. If their heads had been cameras, straightway would they have been smashed....

Practically they had seen it all. Kuroki’s work for that September day was done. Shortly after the retirement of the cavalry, he received a dispatch from Oyama saying that Kuropatkin had ordered a general retreat. Kuroki’s end-run had won the battle for Oyama; Orloff had lost it for Kuropatkin. The latter, perceiving the havoc at the Collieries when he came up with his big force, decided not to attack the victorious flanker. Instead, he set out for Mukden, and commanded Zurubaieff, the rear-guard, to pull up out of the city, cross the Taitse, and burn his bridges behind him.

* * * * *

“He’s quite a little ornament-merchant, this Kuroki,” Finacune observed that afternoon, holding a very sore foot in his hands.

“He’d put out hell--he’s too cold to burn,” replied Feeney.

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER

BINGLEY BREAKS AWAY FROM THE CAMP OF THE CIVILIANS TO WATCH “THE LEAN-LOCKED RANKS GO ROARING DOWN TO DIE”

While Feeney and Finacune were flanking with Kuroki, the “Horse-killer” was with Nodzu, whose business it was to charge the Russian centre before Liaoyang. Bingley had not shifted commands without a good reason. He had made up his mind to get to an uncensored cable after the battle was over, and Nodzu was nearer the outlet of the war-zone. Moreover, it was said that the civilian contingent with Nodzu was not subjected to the smothering system, quite to the same extent as that with the flanker, Kuroki.

Nodzu, himself, did not appeal to Bingley. He seemed like a nice, polite little person of the sort the “Horse-killer” had observed serving behind curio-counters in Tokyo. His voice was light, and his beard wasn’t iron-gray. Bingley remarked that a marooned painter would have a hard time gathering a pastelle-brush from Nodzu’s beard, and he noted with contempt that the general spoke drawing-room Japanese to his staff. The generals whom Bingley respected, roared. They not only split infinitives, but they forked them with flame.

All three officers under Field-Marshal Oyama--Kuroki flanking on the right, Nodzu bearing in on the Russian centre, and Oku pushing up the railroad on the left--had to fight their way to the positions from which the three finally took the city. Many lesser towns and some very difficult passes were picked up on the way. For instance, Oku, the left blade of the crescent, who was being watched by the chief male figure in this narrative (as Bingley was watching Nodzu), changed the flags at Kaiping, Tashekao, and Newchwang on the way, Chinese towns of filth and fatness; and shoved before him in an indignant turkey-trot Generals Stackelberg and Zurubaieff.

Baking hot weather, and Liaoyang ahead! Nogi was thundering behind at the fortress of Port Arthur; Togo was a red demon in smoky crashing seas; blood of the Bear already smeared the Sun flag, and the blood-flower was in bloom in Manchuria.

Bingley felt the floods of hate stir and heat within him on the morning of August twenty-fourth, when over the hills from the right, which was eastward, sounded the Beginning--Kuroki in cannonade. Feeney and Finacune had had the luck to beat him to real action. The next day Oku took up the bombardment on the left. It was not until the following morn that Nodzu leaped to his guns, and the hot winds brought to the nostrils of the “Horse-killer” the pungent breath of powder.

The correspondents were held back in the smoke as usual. Five months in the field, and they had not yet caught up with the war. Again, on the second day of Nodzu’s action, the correspondents were left behind under a guard who was extremely courteous. This was more than white flesh could bear. The civilians implored, demanded. It was remarkable that Bingley did not mix strongly in this rebellion. He was planning carefully, desperately, to be in at the end, and showed the courage to wait. He realized that the battle was far from ended yet; even though Kuroki was mixing hand-to-hand in the east, Oku in the west closing in over barriers of blood, and Nodzu in the centre engaged daily with a ten-mile front of duelists--a bare-handed, hot-throated fiend, chucking his dead behind him for elbow-room.

Bingley studied maps and strategy--not from Nodzu’s standpoint alone, but from the whole. What would he do if he were Field-Marshal Oyama?

The theatre of war was dark on the morning of August twenty-ninth, but in mid-afternoon Nodzu began firing--firing at nothing! He stood still and belched thunder, as if it were something to be rid of; ripping open the very kernels of sound, and making the summer afternoon no fit place for butterflies. Bingley’s eyes were very bright. This tallied with one of his hypotheses. It was a demonstration, under the cover of which his old friend Kuroki was to start a flanking movement.

That night the smileless young giant worked long in his tent. Stretched full-length upon his blankets, a lantern by his side, he wrote hard in his note-books and drew maps of the flying flanker, whom Feeney and Finacune were now following. He showed these maps, all dated to the hour, in London afterward, with the remark that he had divined the strategy of Liaoyang before the battle.

He glanced at his watch, at last, and at his field outfit, which was all packed and in order. Then he slept until dawn. No one slept after that, since Nodzu was up with the first light, like a boy with a new cannon on the morning of the Fourth. Bingley was missed at breakfast. His Korean coolies knew nothing, except that they had been ordered to take care of the Bingley property and wait for orders. The “Horse-killer” had made a clean departure with a good mount and nothing but his saddle-bags. Still, no one fathomed his audacity. Confidently, it was expected that he would be returned in short order by some of the Japanese commanders who happened to read the civilian insignia flaring upon his sleeve. As a matter of fact, Bingley quickly would have been overhauled had he not brooded so long and so well upon the time. The middle Japanese army was too busy that morning to think of one daring civilian.

Bingley’s plan was this: To watch what he could of the battle, unfettered, making his way gradually westward behind Oku until the end, or until such time as he mastered the color and saw the end; then to ride alone down the railroad, nearly to Fengmarong; there to leave his horse, cross the Liao River, and travel on foot down to Wangcheng. He planned to catch the Chinese Eastern at Wangcheng and make the day’s journey to Shanhaikwan beyond the Wall, where the Japanese could not censor his message. In a word, Bingley’s plan was to stake all on reaching a free cable before any other man, and to put on that cable the first and greatest story of the greatest battle of the war.

That was a day in which Bingley truly lived. A mile behind Nodzu’s reserve, he spurred his horse down into a tight darkened ravine, and tethered the beast long to crop the pale grass blades thinly scattered throughout the sunless crevasse. Marking well the topography of the place, so that he could find it again in anything but darkness, Bingley moved back toward the valleys of action. Nodzu was hammering the impregnable Russian position before the city from the hills, and charging down at intervals great masses of infantry to hold the main Russian force in their intrenchments before the city, and thus to prevent the Russian general from sending back a large enough portion of his army to crush or outflank the Japanese flanker.

Noon found Bingley still at large and across a big valley, now almost empty of troops. He was forced to cross one more ridge to command the battle-picture. This required a further hour, and he sat down to rest upon the shoulder of a lofty, thickly timbered hill which overlooked the city for which the nations met--a huge, sprawled Chinese town, lost for moments at a time in the smoke-fog. The river behind was obscured entirely; still, the placing of the whole battle array was cleared to him in a moment. All his mapping and brooding had helped him marvelously to this quick grasp of the field. He wished that he could cable the picture of the city, the river, the railroad, the hills, just as he saw them now--so that London might also see through Bingley eyes. As for the rest--Nodzu’s great thundering guns and his phantom armies moving below in the white powder-reek--he could write that....

“But I’ve got to get a strip of real action--I’ve got to see the little beasts go,” he muttered at length. “It’s a long chance, but I’ve got to get a touch of the blood-end--to do it right. It is as necessary as the lay of the land.”

And down he went, forgetting fear and passing time, even during certain moments, forgetting the outer world that would cry, “Bingley! Bingley!” when he was through.... Deeper and deeper he sank into the white mist of smoke which five minutes before had been torn by flame and riven with rifle crashes.

It was a moment of lull between Nodzu’s infantry charges. A land current of air cleared the low distance. The southern line of intrenched Russian infantry looked less than a mile away. Behind them, the land was pitted and upheaved with defenses to the very wall of the city, having the look, as Bingley observed, as the wind swiftly cleared away the smoke, of the skin of a small-pox convalescent. There was no sign of life in the Russian works, but his quick eye marked that shrapnel was emplaced on the higher mounds.... Had he lived a thousand years for the single purpose of viewing a battle--hundreds of acres of embattled thousands straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked and strewn with life essences, yet swarming with more raw material for murder--he could not have judged his advent better. It was the thirtieth of August--the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly sacrifices to hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki flanked.

Suddenly--it was like a tornado, prairie fire, and stampede rolled into one--Nodzu of the pastelle-brush beard called up his swarm from thicket, hummock, gulley, ditch, from the very earth, and launched it forward against the first blank ridge of the Russians. This brown cyclone tore over Bingley of the _Thames_ and across the ruffled valley. The “Horse-killer” sat in awe. There was not yet a shot. The Russian trenches had the look of desertion.

“Hell!” he snapped viciously. “Those trenches are abandoned. Kuropatkin might as well be cooling his toes in Lake Baikal for all Nodzu will find there, and he’s rushing as if----”

At this instant the Russian works were rubbed out of vision in a burst of white smoke, and the sound of Russian bullets was like the swooping of ten thousand night-hawks.... A terrific crash, a blast of dust, burnt powder, filings, sickening gases--and that which a moment ago was a dashing young captain with upraised sword was now wet rags and dripping fragments of pulp.

“Shrapnel,” said Bingley. “He’s happy now. He was playing to a gallery of Samurai saints--that little officer.... Nervy devils all--never doubt it.... But we’re walloped--walloped sure as hell. We can never take those works.”

The position of the enemy was now obscured by trembling terraces of white smoke, out of which poured countless streams of death, literally spraying Nodzu’s command, as firemen play their torrents upon a burning building. A rat couldn’t have lived out a full minute in the base of that valley. The Japanese left a terrible tribute, but the few sped on and upward to the first line of Russian entrenchments. A peculiar memory recurred to Bingley. Once in London he had seen a runaway team of huge grays attached to a loaded coal-cart. The tailboard of the cart jarred loose, and the contents streamed out behind as the horses ran. So the hard-hit streamed out from the Japanese charge as it passed over the base of the valley.

Even as the maddest of the Japanese survivors were about to flood over the first embankment, it was fringed with bayonets as a wall with broken glass; and along the length of the next higher trenches shot a ragged ring of smoke--clots of white strung like pearls.... As a train boring into a mountain is stopped, so was Nodzu’s brown swarm halted, lifted, and hurled back.

“The little brown dogs!” observed Bingley with joyful amazement. “Why, they’d keep the British army busy!... And they smile, dam’ ’em--they smile!”

This last referred to the dead and wounded which the hospital corps was now bringing back.... From out of the welter, a new charge formed and failed. Again--even Bingley was shaken by the slaughter and his organs stuck together--Nodzu hurled a third torrent of the Samurai up that unconquerable roll of earth. It curled like a feather in a flame, diminished, and faltered back....

The day was ending--Bingley’s gorgeous, memorable day. He had travelled twenty-five miles on foot; he had caught up with the Japanese army after five months in the field; he had seen Nodzu charge and Zurubaieff hold; he had seen the wounded who would not cry, and the dead who would not frown.

The whole was a veritable disease in his veins. The day had burned, devoured him. He was tired enough to sleep in a tree, chilled from spent energy; so hungry that he could have eaten horn or hoof; but over all he was mastered by the thought of Bingley and his work--the free cable, the story, the _Thames_, the battle, Bingley, the first and greatest story, acclaim of the world, the world by the horns! So his brain ran, and far back in his brain the films of carnage were sorted, filed, and labelled--living, wounded, dead; the voices of the Japanese as they ran, Russian-pits from which death spread, shrapnel emplacements which exploded hell; barbed entanglements spitting the Japanese for leisure-slaying, as the butcher-bird hangs up its living meat to keep it fresh for the hunger-time; the long, quick-moving, burnished guns that caught the sun, when the smoke cleared, and reflected it like a burning-glass--such were the details of the hideous panorama in Bingley’s brain.