United States or French Polynesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The wind, indeed, has been generally favorable since the rain-storm at Okabe, but it fairly whistles this morning. It calls to mind the Kansas wheelman, who claimed to have once spread his coat-tails to the breeze and coasted from Lawrence to Kansas City in three hours.
While in Tokio no one ever more frequently, nor more unblushingly, made statements that they knew were untrue than did Kodama and Fukushima, but none of their deceptions had ever harmed us so greatly as did the lie they put into the mouth of Okabe.
Collier's money, Mr. Fox had been bottled up for a period of equal length, while Mr. Prior and Mr. Lynch had been prisoners in Tokio for even four months longer. And now that Okabe assured us that Liao-Yang was already taken, and Oku told us if there were any fighting we would not be allowed to witness it, it seemed a good time to quit.
This same Tomomori afterwards proved himself the greatest general on the Taira side. Okabe Tadazumi, a Minamoto captain, took the head of Tadanori but could not identify it. In the lining of the helmet, however, was found a roll of poems and among them one signed "Tadanori:" Twilight upon my path, And for mine inn to-night The shadow of a tree, And for mine host, a flower.
He even begged me personally to come with him into Liao-Yang on the 29th and see how it was progressing under the control of the Japanese authorities. Okabe's news meant that the great battle Kuropatkin had promised at Liao-Yang, and which we had come to see, would never take place. Why Okabe lied I do not know.
Like a big tidal wave Oku's army had swept forward leaving its unwelcome guests, the attaches and correspondents, forty lonely foreigners among seventy thousand Japanese, stranded upon a hill miles in the rear. Perhaps, as war, it was necessary, but it was not magnificent. That night Major Okabe, our head teacher, gave us the official interpretation of what had occurred.
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.
But what mainly moved us to decide, was the statements of Okabe, the officer especially detailed by the War Office to aid and instruct us, to act as our guide, philosopher, and friend, our only official source of information, who told us that Liao-Yang was occupied by the Japanese and that the Russians were in retreat.
The next morning Major Okabe delivered the answer of General Oku to our round-robin. He informed us that we had been as near to the fighting as we ever would be allowed to go. The nearest we had been to any fighting was four miles.
Other correspondents would have quit then, as most of them did ten days later, but that their work and Kuroki, so far from being fifty miles north toward Mukden, as Okabe said he was, was twenty miles to the east on our right preparing for the, closing-in movement which was just about to begin. Three days after we had left the army, the greatest battle since Sedan was waged for six days.
Word Of The Day