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While threatened with insanity and complete blindness, and hourly from his wounds suffering a pain drugs could not master, he dictated for the Century Magazine the only complete account of the battle of the Yalu. In a letter to Mr. Richard Watson Gilder he writes: "...my eyes are troubling me. I cannot see even what I am writing now, and am getting the article under difficulties.
The Yalu thus not only marks the rise of Japan as a formidable force in international affairs, but brings us to a period of intensified colonial and commercial rivalry in the Far East and elsewhere which gave added significance to naval power and led to the war of 1914. Aside from those already cited see: ROBERT FULTON, ENGINEER AND ARTIST, H. W. Dickinson, 1913.
The Japanese squadron had just convoyed a fleet of transports, bearing ten thousand troops and thirty-five hundred horses, to Chemulpo, near the Corean capital. The Chinese squadron had similarly convoyed four thousand troops to the Yalu River. These were landed on the 16th, and on the morning of the 17th the fleet started on its return.
Their first response to Korea's appeal was to mobilize a force of five thousand men in the Liaotung peninsula, which force crossed the Yalu and moved against Pyong-yang, where the Japanese van had been lying idle for over two months. This occurred early in October, 1592. The incident illustrated China's confidence in her own superiority.
This is precisely what is going on from the Yalu to Eastern Mongolia, and this procedure no doubt will be extended in time to other regions as opportunities arise.
It might have been supposed that she would then rest content with the assurance of safety her prowess had won. But, in the immediate sequel of the war, three of the great European powers, Russia, Germany, and France, joined hands to deprive Japan of the fruits of her victory by calling upon her to vacate the southern littoral of Manchuria from the mouth of the Yalu to the Liaotung peninsula.
Beyond the Yalu, forty miles wide, was the strip of waste that constituted the northern frontier and that ran from sea to sea. It was not really waste land, but land that had been deliberately made waste in carrying out Cho-Sen's policy of isolation. On this forty-mile strip all farms, villages and cities had been destroyed.
Omitting details of the long and uninteresting fight which followed it may be said that the most remarkable feature of the battle of the Yalu was that it took place between two nations which, had the war broken out forty years earlier, would have done their fighting with fleets of wooden junks and weapons of the past centuries.
In men, the Chinese lost 700 killed or drowned and 300 wounded, while the Japanese lost 115 killed and 150 wounded. The result of this victory was that the Chinese never afterward attempted to dispute the control of the sea, and their water communication with the Yalu was effectually cut off.
He gave a parliamentary soirée at the New Palace in Potsdam, and before allowing his Conservative and National Liberal guests to sit down to supper, made them listen to a lecture which occupied two hours, giving particular attention, with the aid of maps and plans, to the battle of the Yalu between the fleets of China and Japan.
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