# Scribner's Magazine/Volume 37/Number 1/War Dragon's Tail

On the War-Dragon’s Trail
By John Fox, Jr.
here was the dean of the corps—one Meiton Prior who, in spite of his years—may they be many more—is still the first war artist in the world. He was mounted on a white horse, seventeen hands high and with a weak back that has a history. Prior sold him in the end to a canny Englishman, who sold him to the Japanese—giving Prior the price asked. “Why, didn’t you know that he wasn’t sound?” said a man of another race, who wondered, perhaps, that in a horse-trade blood should so speak to blood even in a strange land.
“Yes,” said the Englishman, “but the Japanese won’t know it.” They didn’t. There was Richard Harding Davis who, for two reasons—the power to pick from any given incident the most details that will interest the most people and the good-luck or good judgment to be always just where the most interesting thing is taking place (with one natural exception, that shall be told)—is also supreme. Mounted on another big horse was he—one Devery by name—with a mule in the rear, of a name that must equally appeal. Quite early, after purchase, Davis had laid whispering lip to flapping ear.
“I’ll call you Williams, or I’ll call you Walker just as you choose,” he said.
There was no response.
“Then I’ll call you both,” said Davis, and that wayward animal was Williams and Walker through the campaign. A double name was never more appropriate, for a flagrant double life was his. There was Bill the Brill of the gentle heart, on a nice chestnut; Burleigh, the veteran, on a wretched beast that was equally dangerous at either end; Lionel James with cart and coolies of his own and the Italian on a handsome iron-gray. There were the two Frenchmen—Reggie, the young, the gigantic, the self-controlled and never complaining—so beloved, that his very appearance always brought the Marseillaise from us all—and Laguerié, the courteous, ever-vivacious, irascible—so typical that he might have stepped into Manchuria from the stage. There was Whiting, artist, on the cutest beast with the biggest ambition that I ever saw navigating on legs; lanky Wallace, whose legs, like Lincoln’s, were long enough to reach the ground—even when he was mounted—and there were the two Smiths—English and American—and Lewis, gifted with many tongues and a beautiful barytone who, his much boasted milky steed being lame, struck Oku’s trail on foot. On Pit-a-Pat, a pony that used to win and lose money for us at the Yokohama races, was little Clarkin the stubborn, the argumentative, who, at a glance, was plainly sponsor for the highest ideals of the paper that, in somebody’s words, made virtue a thing to be shunned: and, finally and leastly, there were “Fuji and me.”
These were the men who thought they were going to Port Arthur and who, with the sound of the big guns at that fortress growing fainter behind them, struck Oku’s trail, up through a rolling valley that was bordered by two blue volcanic mountain chains. The sky was cloudless and the sun was hot. The roads were as bad as roads would likely be after 4000 years of travel and 4000 years of neglect but the wonder was that, after the Russian army had tramped them twice and the Japanese army had tramped them once, they were not worse.
The tail of the War-Dragon, whose jaws were snapping at flying Russian heels far on ahead, had been drawn on at dawn, and through dust and mire and sand, we followed its squirming wake. On the top of every little hill we could see it painfully crawling ahead—length interminable, its vertebra carts, coolies, Chinese wagons, its body columns of soldiers, its scales the flashes of sword-scabbard and wagon-tire—and whipping the dust heavenward in clouds. The button on that tail was Lynch the Irishman on a bicycle—and that button was rolling itself headwards—leading us ​all. Behind, Lewis was eating the road up with a swinging English stride, and, drinking the dust of the world, we followed. Fuji had side-stepped from barrack yard into that road, sawing on his bit, pawing the earth and squealing challenges or boisterous love-calls to anything and everything that walked. Sex, species, biped or quadruped—never knew I such indiscriminate buoyancy—all were one to Fuji. With malediction on tongue and murder in heart, I sawed his gutta percha mouth until my fingers were blistered and my very jaws ached—but I could hold him back only a while. We overtook the Italian, a handsome boy with a wild intensity of eye—one puttee unwound and flying after him. The iron-gray was giving trouble and he, too, was unhappy. We passed Reggie—his great body stretched on a lumpy heap of baggage—with a pipe in his mouth, that was halved with his perennial smile of unshakable good humor and the other Frenchman squatting between the two humps of baggage on a jolting cart.
“Ah!” he cried with extended hands, “you see—you see—” his head was tossed to one side just then, he clutched wildly first one way and then the other and with palms upward again—“you see how comfortable I am. It ees gr-reat—gr-reat!” From laughter I let Fuji go then and he went—through coil after coil of that war-dragon’s length, past the creaking, straining vertebræ, taking a whack with teeth or heels at something now and then and something now and then taking a similar whack at him. The etiquette of the road Fuji either knew not, or cared for—nor cared he for distinctions of rank in his own world nor in mine. By rights the led cavalry horses should have had precedence. But nay, Fuji passed two regiments without so much as “by your leave”; but I was doing that for him vigorously and, whenever he broke through the line, I said two things and I kept saying them that I might not be cut off with a sword:
“Warui desu!” I said, which means “He’s bad!” and “Gomen nasai,” which is Japanese for “Beg pardon.” These two phrases never failed to bring a smile instead of the curse that I might have got in any other army in the world. We passed even an officer who seemed and was, no doubt, in a great and just hurry but even his eyes had to take the dust thrown from Fuji’s heels. I pulled him in at last on top of a little hill whence I could see the battle-hills of Nanshan. But I cared no more for that field than did Fuji, both of us being too much interested in life to care much for post-mortems and when the rest came up, we rode by Nanshan without turning up its green slopes, and on to where the first walled Chinese city I had ever seen lifted its gate-towers and high notched walls in glaring sunlight and a mist of strangling dust. We passed in through the city gates and stopped where I know not. It was some bad-smelling spot under a hot sun and being off Fuji and in that sun, I cared not. I have vague memories of white men coming by and telling me to come out of the sun and of not coming out of the sun; of horses kicking and stamping nearby and an occasional neigh from Fuji hitched in the shade of the city wall and guarded by a Chinaman; of a yellow man asleep on a cart, his unguarded face stark to that sun and a hundred flies crawling about his open mouth; and, of an altercation going on between two white men. One said:
“Your horse has kicked mine—remove him!”
“Move your own,” said another and his tone was that of some Lord Cyril in a melodrama. “Mine was there first.”
The other took off his coat:
“Tm sorry, but I’ve got to fight you.”
“Very well, then,” said Lord Cyril, stripping, too, and then the voice of a peacemaker that I knew well broke in and in a moment all was still. Takeuchi rode in on a mule. No hitting the dust for the proud feet of Takeuchi then, as I learned, nor afterwards, when there were any other four feet that could be made to travel for hire.
“I, want a ‘betto’,” he said—which is Japanese for hostler—“for Fuji.”
“Whatever need there be for Fuji, the accursed,” said I, lapsing into such Oriental phraseology as I had read in books, “buy, and buy quickly—my money is in thy belt.” He bought then and kept on buying afterwards.
Straightway I fell again into sun-dreams with the yellow man nearby whose mouth was wide, for it was my first experience with the God of Fire in his hell-hot Eastern home and I strayed in them until I was shaken into consciousness by a white man with a beer bottle in his hand. I remember a ​garden and trees next, a Chinese room with mats, a Chinese woman—the first I had seen—with a sad, pretty face who rose, when I came to the door, and stalked into a house as though she were walking on deer-hoofs (every step she took on her tiny misshapen feet made me shudder), and then the sound of Davis’s guitar and Lewis’s voice on the soft night air and under a Manchurian moon soaring star-ward above the Eastern city-wall.
… It is noon of the second day now and we sit in the shade of willow trees. We left that first Chinese town of Kinchau and its dirty natives this morning at eight. The dragon’s tail again had been drawn ahead through a narrow valley, rich in fields of millet and corn, from which on either side a bleak, hilly, treeless desert ran desolately to a blue mountain chain. Now, still on its trail, we sit in a green oasis, on real grass and under sheltering willows. A lot of little Chinese boys are around us, all naked except for a little embroidered vari-colored stomacher which hangs by a cord from the neck of each—for what purpose I know not—and their elders are bringing water for us and sheaves of millet blades for the menagerie of beasts we ride. They seem a good-natured race—these Manchurian farmers—a genuine, submissive, kindly, but genuine and human in contrast, if I must say it, with the Japanese. Who was it that said the Chinese were the Saxons of the East and the Japanese the Gauls? I know now what he meant.
Lewis in a big white helmet has just ridden in on a diminutive white jackass. I envy the peace and content of both of them, for Fuji was particularly bad this morning. Again, he passed everything in the road, and as we swept the length of a cavalry column, I saw a soldier leading a puny stallion a hundred yards ahead. When he heard us, he shouted a warning:
“Warui desu!”
At the same time the beast he was leading turned, with ears laid back and teeth showing and made for us dragging the soldier along. I was greatly pleased.
“Here, Fuji,” I said, “is where my revenge comes in. You are going to get it now and, if I mistake not, right in the neck.”
But the brute attacked me instead—me. He got my right forearm between his teeth and held on until I shifted a stick from right hand to left and beat him off—the soldier spouting Japanese with French vivacity meanwhile and tugging ineffectively. I got away only after the vicious brute had pasted Fuji with both heels first on one side of my right leg and then similarly on the other, missing me about three inches each time. Fuji now shows blood but I'm little hurt. Somehow in the scrimmage O.kin-san’s charm—the little block of wood—was broken in its wicker case and whether the heels reached it that high I don’t know. But it was a good omen, for it meant that I am to be safe in this campaign. The puny brute had not strength enough to break an Anglo-Saxon arm—I’m no giant—and it is his kind that make impossible for the Japanese certain big guns that the Russians use.
… It is 6 P. M. of the third day now and we are at Wa-fang-tien. We left Palien-tan this morning and made thirty-two miles. We took lunch in a stinking Chinese village and the chicken—well, it was a question which was the more disturbing conjecture—how long it had lived or how long it had been dead. Oh, Yokoyama! Fuji has not improved. He kicked the Italian on the leg to-day and I’ve just helped to bandage it. Again to-day I had to let him go. I tried to tire him out by riding him through mud holes and see-sawing him across deep wagon-ruts. But it was no use. If a horse, bullock, man, woman, child, cat or dog is visible 500 yards away Fuji with a squeal makes for it. When the object is overtaken, Fuji pays no attention to it but looks for something else towards which he can start his squealing way. For brutal, insensate curiosity give me Fuji or rather give him to anybody but me. ’Tis an Eveless land for Fuji but hope springs eternal for him. Dinner is just over—tinned soup, half-cooked tinned sausages, prunes and rice from Yokoyama’s larder—which we are stocking at 12 yen per day. Hundreds of coolies are squatting along the railroad track. In front of us a group of Japanese soldiers have stood for five minutes staring at us with the frank curiosity of children. They began to move away when I pulled this note-book. Leaning against the tallest telegraph-pole, with hands bound behind him, his pig-tail tied to a thick wire twice twisted, stands a miserable Chinese cooly. An hour ago I saw him on his knees across the track, held down by four men, while the ​littlest Japanese soldier in the group beat him heavily with a stick much thicker than the thumb. Then they led him praying, howling and limping to the telegraph pole where he stands as an awful example to his fellows. He had stolen some coal and it was his second offense. It was all right, of course, but it was strange to see the apparent joy with which the Japanese did it and stranger still to see the other coolies grinning, chatting and making fun of the culprit. I wonder whether they were crooking the pregnant hinges of the knee or what on earth it did mean. We were hung up here at 3 P. M., and allowed to go no further. There is no order for us to remain—only a “strong desire” that we should—which is the Japanese way. Davis and I had a great bath to-day in a pool which somebody had dammed up—for what purpose I know not. What I do know is that it was not meant for us.
… Sitting on the sand we are this August fifth under birch saplings and by the side of a running stream. Davis and Lewis are asleep in the sand. Fifteen miles only is our métier to-day and Brill is anxious to go on. The roads are bad farther on, say the Japanese, and transportation difficult: the only satisfactory reason yet given for this hideous delay, and this, I’m afraid, not the true one. They simply don’t trust us—that’s all. The body of the dragon is naturally getting bigger and his vertebræ are distinctly more lumpy. For instance, he gathered in a train of thirty freight cars this morning and he had six hundred coolies pulling it for him. The button of him dropped back to-day towards the tip o’ tail that is his anatomical place. Brill passed him on the road. His bicycle tire was punctured and he was trying to mend it, Brill says, with 25-cent postage stamps. He evidently succeeded for he has just arrived. He seems to have had a high old time on the way. At the last Chinese village he halted long enough to offer a prize—what I don’t know—to the Chinese child that could display the prettiest embroidered stomacher. He had them lined up in a shy, smiling row and was about to deliver the prize when the winner was suddenly thrust forward with a wonderful piece on his chubby tum-tum. The wild Irishman gave him the prize, hoisted him on the bicycle and circled the compound swiftly to the delight of the village. I asked him how he communicated with these wild heathens and he said he talked Irish to them. I’m quite sure he does and he seems to make himself understood.
It’s sunset now at North Wa-fang-tien and all of us are out in a hard-packed, sand-floor yard under little birch trees. It was a hot ride to-day—the last mile being over a glaring white road and through glaring white sand. That glare of a fierce sun made the head ache and the very eye-balls burn. I almost reeled from Fuji who, for that mile, was, for the first time, almost docile.
We had a shock and a thrill to-day—Brill, Lewis, Davis and I. It was noon and while we sat on a low stone wall in a grassy grove, a few carts filled with wounded Japanese, passed slowly by. In one cart, sat a man in a red shirt, with a white handkerchief tied over his head and under his chin. Facing him was a bearded Japanese with a musket between his knees. The man in the red shirt wearily turned his face. It was smooth-shaven and white. The thrill was that the man was the first Russian prisoner we had seen—the shock that among those yellow faces was a captive with a skin like ours. I couldn’t help feeling pity and shame—pity for him and a shame for myself that I needn’t explain. I wondered how I should have felt had I been in his place and suddenly found four white men staring at me. It’s no use. Blood is thicker than water—or anything else—in the end.
This is distinctly a human country—a country of corn-fields, beans and potatoes, horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, goats and no freaks in tree-trunk, branch or foliage. But I can’t get over seeing a Chinaman in a corn-field. It is always a shock. He doesn’t seem to have any right there—somehow nobody does except a white man or a darkey. There are tumble-bugs in the dusty road and gray, flying grasshopper-like things that rise from the dust, flutter a few feet from the earth and drop back again, just as they do at home. And the dragon-flies—why they are nothing in the world but the “snake-doctors” that I used to throw stones at when I was a boy in the Bluegrass. The mountains are treeless and volcanic but its a human country and I don’t feel as far from home as I did in Japan. Brill says it all looks like a lot of Montana hills around Ohio corn-fields: only the corn is millet ​that grows twelve feet high. The people eat the top, they feed the blades to live stock and the stalk serves almost every purpose of bamboo and for fire-wood as well. You can ride for hours between two solid walls of it and you wonder how there can be people enough in the scattering villages to plant and till, or even to cut it. A richer land I never saw. It looks as though it would feed both armies and yet there was no sign—no burned house, or robbed field or even a cast-off bit of the soldier’s equipment to show that an army had ever passed that way. One fact only spoke significantly of war. No woman—except a child or a crone—was ever visible. This struck me, when I recalled the trail of the Massachusetts volunteers from Siboney to Santiago and the thousands of women refugees straggling into Caney—as very remarkable. I suppose both Japanese and Russians are trying to keep the good-will of the Chinaman as well as of the rest of the world. I don’t wonder that the Russians are fighting for that land nor shall I wonder should the Japanese, if they win, try to keep it. But how it should belong to anybody but the Chinaman who has tilled if in peace and with no harm to anybody for thousands of years—I can’t for the life of me see.
Next morning there was a sign of war. At daybreak some red flecks from the dragon’s jaws drifted back from the mist and dust through which he was writhing forward. It looked, some man said, like the procession of the damned who filed past Dante in hell. Each man had a red roll around him. They uttered no sound—they looked not at one another, but stared vacantly and mildly at us as they shuffled silently, from the mist and shuffled silently on. The expression of each was so like the expression of the rest that they looked like brothers. A more creepy, ghost-like thing I never saw. I knew not what they were but they fascinated me and made me shudder and I found myself drawing towards them, step by step, hardly conscious that I was moving. I do not recall that any one of us uttered a word. Yet they were only sick men coming back from the front—soldiers sick with the kakke, the “beriberi,” the sleeping sickness. It was hard to believe that the face of any one of them had ever belonged to a soldier—hard to believe that sickness could make a soldier’s face so gentle. That man in the red shirt and those gray ghosts that shuffled so silently out of one mist and so silently into another are the high lights in the two most vivid pictures I’ve seen thus far.
The beriberi comes from a diet of too much fish and rice, I understand. It numbs the extremities and has a paralyzing effect on body and mind. Summer is its time and snow checks its course. A man may have it a dozen times and sometimes he dies. The young and able-bodied are its favorite victims, old men its rare ones and women and foreigners it wholly spares. It made great havoc among Japanese soldiers in Korea but the Japanese now conquer beriberi as though it was a Russian metamorphosis.
Shung-yo-hing is the place now and the time is 2 P. M. The heat was awful and the dust from thousands of carts, coolies and beasts of burden choked the very lungs. I have the bulge on Fuji now. I knot the reins and draw them over the pommel of a McClellan saddle, thus holding his muzzle close to his chest. It seemed to puzzle Fuji a good deal.
“He can’t even neigh,” I said to Brill in triumph, and Brill cackled scorn. Fuji neighed five times in the next ten yards. I should say that his record in six hours to-day was about this: stumbling with right fore-foot—300 times; stumbling with left hind-foot—200 times; neighs—1000.
There are about twenty miles more to Kaiping. Haicheng has been taken by the Japanese. Somebody has just come in with cheering news—we can get back to Yokohama by water. Gently we all said:
“Hooray!” The parting from Fuji will not be sad.
… This morning I found some strange pieces of paper with strange ideographs theron in Japanese.
“What are these, Takeuchi?”
Takeuchi looked really embarrassed.
“Prayers,” he said. “I got them at a temple. If you carry them, you will get back safe.” Well, that made Takeuchi immune for days.
At Kaiping we are now and we go to Haicheng to-morrow. At least we think we do. We got here last night: Fuji being lame, I left him for Takeuchi to lead (he rode him, of course); went on afoot and later climbed aboard a freight train, drawn by 600 coolies. I told the Japanese in my ​smattering best of their language, that my horse had gone lame and they were very polite. The train went slowly along the dragon’s length and I had a chance to observe minutely those vertebræ—heavy Chinese wagons, the wheels with two thick huge spokes cross-barred, the hoops of wood and studded with big shining rivets and the axles turning with the wheels; between the shafts, a horse, bullock or a mule; in front, three leaders, usually—donkeys, mules (the best I’ve seen out of America) or bullocks, in all possible combinations of donkey, mule or bullock. Sometimes an ass colt trotted alongside. The drivers were Chinese coolies, each with a long whip—the butt of bamboo, the shaft spliced with four cane reeds, the lash of leather and the cracker as it is all over the rural world. The two or three leaders of the four- or five-in-hand, pulled by ropes attached to the cart at either side of the cart to one side of each shaft. The hames were two flat pieces of wood, lashed to a straw collar that was sometimes canvas-covered. The cries of the drivers, strange as they sounded to the foreigner near by, were at a distance strangely like the cries of drivers everywhere.
“Atta! Atta! Atta-atta-atta!”
“Usui! Usui!—u-u-u-su-u-i!”
“Whoa-a-ah!”
At noon, Lionel James and little Clarkin rode by and shouted that the Japanese Commandant there had a lunch ready near-by. We found half a dozen tables set in the walled yard of a Chinese farm-house. All of us were expected but the others (except the Japanese correspondents who were on hand) had gone on. There was a nice sergeant there and a grave Major with medals and there were soldiers with fans to keep off the flies, while we sat in an arbor, under white Malaga-like clusters of grapes and had tea and beer and tinned Kobbe beef and army crackers. The rain started when we started on—and when it rains in Manchuria it really seems to rain. I was on foot in a light flannel shirt and had no coat or poncho. In ten minutes the road had a slippery coating of mud, I was wet to the skin and, as my boots had very low heels, I was slipping right, left and backwards with every step. Clarkin and James overtook me and we took turns walking. In an hour the road was a very swift river, belly-deep and with big waves—dangerous to cross. Miles and miles we went through muddy corn-fields for four hours, until we could see across a yellow river the high thick walls of Kaiping through the drizzling mist. I waded the river, waist-high, and on the other side an interpreter gave me a white mule which I took in order not to get my boots muddy again. We wound into a city-gate, were stopped by a sentry and sent on again around the city-walls and three or four miles across a muddy slushy flat, full of deep wagon ruts and holes. After much floundering through mud, and the fording of many streams we found the Commandant with his shoes under his chair and his naked feet on the rungs. James clicked his heels and saluted. We all took off our hats but as he neither rose nor moved naked foot towards yawning shoe, we put them back on again. We must go to Kaiping, he said, and he was very indifferent and smiled blandly when we told him that we had just waded and swum from Kaiping. Just the same we had to wade and swim back—by the same floundering way and through gathering darkness. We missed the way, of course, rode entirely around the city-walls, rode through Kaiping and back again and finally struck an interpreter who piloted us to this Chinese temple where I write. I was cold, muddy, hungry and tired to the bone. But the button on the dragon’s tail was there and Brill the gentle; and, mother of mercies, they had things to eat and to drink. An hour later, Davis came in half-dead—leading Prior on Williams and Walker. He had struck the same gentleman of the naked foot and yawning shoe and he had gone into a stream over his head and crawled on hands and knees most of the way through pitch dark. He didn’t mind himself, but Prior was elderly and was ill and Davis wanted that Commandant to take him in. “I wouldn’t turn a water-snake out of doors on a night like this,” Davis said.
But those two same Samaritans saved him straightway and we sit now in Chinese clothes in front of a temple and under a great spreading full-leafed tree, with two horses champing millet before the altar and thousands of buzzing flies around. To-morrow we go on!