: Following the Sun-Flag: A Vain Pursuit Through Manchuria by Fox John Jr - Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905

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INTRODUCTION

After a long still-hunt in Tokio, and a long pursuit through Manchuria, following that Sun-Flag of Japan, I gave up the chase at Liao-Yang.

Not being a military expert, my purpose was simply to see under that flag the brown little "gun-man"--as he calls himself in his own tongue--in camp and on the march, in trench and in open field, in assault and in retreat; to tell tales of his heroism, chivalry, devotion, sacrifice, incomparable patriotism; to see him fighting, wounded--and, since such things in war must be--dying, dead. After seven months my spoils of war were post-mortem battle-fields, wounded convalescents in hospitals, deserted trenches, a few graves, and one Russian prisoner in a red shirt.

Upon that unimportant personal disaster I can look back now with no little amusement; and were I to re-write these articles, I should doubtless temper both word and spirit here and there; but as my feeling at the time was sincere, natural, and justified, as there is, I believe, no over-statement of the facts that caused it, and as the articles were written without malice or the least desire to "get even"--I let them go, as written, into book form now.

No more enthusiastic pro-Japanese than I ever touched foot on the shores of the little island, and no Japanese, however much he might, if only for that reason, value my good opinion, can regret more than I any change that took place within me when I came face to face with a land and a people I had longed since childhood to see.

I am very sorry to have sounded the personal note so relentlessly in this little book. That, too, was unavoidable, and will, I hope, be pardoned.

JOHN FOX, JR. BIG STONE GAP, VIRGINIA.

FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG

FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG

I

THE TRAIL OF THE SAXON

An amphitheatre of feathery clouds ran half around the horizon and close to the water's edge; midway and toward Russia rose a great dark shadow through which the sun shone faintly. Such was the celestial setting for the entrance of a certain ship some ten days since at sunset into the harbor of Yokohama and the Land of the Rising Sun; but no man was to guess from the strange pictures, strange people, and jumbled mass of new ideas and impressions waiting to make his brain dizzy on shore, that the big cloud aloft was the symbol of actual war. No sign was to come, by night or by day, from the tiled roofs, latticed windows, paper houses, the foreign architectural monstrosities of wood and stone; the lights, lanterns, shops--tiny and brilliantly lit; the innumerable rickshas, the swift play under them of muscular bare brown legs which bore thin-chested men who run open-mouthed and smoke cigarettes while waiting a fare; the musical chorus of getas clicking on stone, mounted by men bareheaded or in billycock hats; little women in kimonos; ponies with big bellies, apex rumps, bushy forelocks and mean eyes; rows of painted dolls caged behind barred windows and under the glare of electric lights--expectant, waiting, patient--hour by hour, night after night, no suggestion save perhaps in their idle patience; coolies with push carts, staggering under heavy loads, "cargadores" in straw hats and rain coats of rushes, looking for all the world like walking little haycocks--no sign except in flags, the red sunbursts of Japan, along now and then with the Stars and Stripes--flags which, for all else one could know, might have been hung out for a holiday.

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