Читать книгу The Cable Game - Stanley Washburn - Страница 5

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From War to Peace in Manchuria—Peking—A New Assignment, “Russia Direct”—Shanghai.

For three days we had been congratulating ourselves that we were on the eve of the greatest battle in history. Around us in silent might, two armies slept on their arms. From the border of far Mongolia for a hundred and eighty miles eastward lay the line of the Japanese trenches, and for forty miles deep every Manchu hut and village sheltered the soldier or coolie patriot of the Island Emperor. Above the roads for endless miles hung the heavy powdered dust of Mongol soil; like a mist unstirred by any wind, it rose from the plodding of the feet of limitless thousands of men and animals, pushing forward for the last great struggle of a mighty conflict. Regiment after regiment fresh from home, poured along the Japanese made arteries, for the blood of an army corps. Now and again the khaki colored battalions at the command of an officer halted at the side of the road while a battery of artillery, with clanking chains and creaking limbers, trotted through the thickening clouds of dust that settled on one like flour. Cavalry, red cross, transport, coolies, bridge trains and telegraph corps gave place the one to the other in rapid succession. In eighteen months’ association with the Japanese we had not seen such activity. “The Peace Conference at Portsmouth has failed” we told ourselves, and leaving the extreme front of the army, where we had been visiting the cavalry outposts, we turned our horses’ heads for the thirty-mile ride to the headquarters of General Nogi, to which we had been attached since May. All our talk was of the coming of the great battle and of the preparations which we must make for a three weeks’ campaign in the saddle, and more important still, how we should arrange an open line of communications from the ever-changing front of the prospective struggle to the cable office in the rear.

Covered with dust an eighth of an inch deep, we rode into Fakumen, our headquarters, late on the afternoon of September 4th. At the door of a Chinese bean mill, where for four weary months we had been awaiting the call to action, stood a Japanese orderly. As we dismounted, he saluted and respectfully handed me one of the Japanese charactered envelopes of the Military field telegraph. Turning my horse over to my Japanese boy I opened it, and read the word “Return.”

The Russo-Japanese War was over, and even before the armies themselves knew that the end had come, my chief in his office in far away Chicago had sent the word over the cable which meant as much as reams of explanation. The same night the London Times reached half around the world and ordered home its special correspondent with the Japanese armies in the field.

That night I handed in at the Chinese mudhouse, where the telegraph ticked cheerfully over the hundreds of miles of Manchurian plains and Korean mountains to Fusan, and thence by cable to Nagasaki and the civilized world, a short dispatch to my office in Chicago, “Leaving the front immediately. Wire instructions Peking.” Two days later at sunrise we took our leave. I shall not soon forget our leave-taking from the army whose fortunes we had followed off and on for nearly eighteen months. So many of the correspondents left the “front” with such bitter feelings toward their erstwhile hosts that, in justice to the Japanese, it is but fair to chronicle that in one Army of the Mikado at least the relations between the staff and the soldiers of the press were anything but unpleasant, and that we, who left the Third Army that September morning, left with only the tenderest affection toward the commander under whose shadow we had lived, slept and thought these many months—that is General Baron Nogi—than whom no finer gentleman, ardent patriot and gentle friend ever drew the breath of life. The night before our departure the general entertained us at a farewell banquet and in a kindly little toast bade us god-speed on our journey. That night we shook the hands of all the staff whom we had known so well, and went to our quarters thinking that we had seen them for the last time, for we were to leave at daybreak for the long ride to the railroad. The next morning as we were mounting our horses to begin our journey an orderly from headquarters rode up and said that Major General Ichinohe (Nogi’s Chief of Staff and right-hand man during the siege of Port Arthur) had requested that we stop at headquarters on our way out of town. So it was that accompanied by the small cavalry escort that had been detailed to see us to the railroad, we rode into the compound where Nogi and his staff had lived that last long summer of the war.

Mounted on a coal black horse in full dress uniform, with half a dozen of his staff about him, sat old Ichinohe, a tall, gaunt man nearing sixty, whose life typifies the ideal of Japanese chivalry. Spartan in his simplicity and endurance, fearless as a lion in battle, and gentle as a woman in time of peace, we had known him almost since the war started. At Port Arthur he had commanded the Sixth Brigade of the Ninth Division, which, more than any other, had borne the heat and burden of the day. We had known him then, when sword in hand he had led in person his brigade against one of the most impregnable redoubts on the crest of that all but unconquerable fortress. Twice his column had been thrown back shattered and bleeding, but on the third assault, and just as the light of day was breaking in the East, this redoubtable man covered with blood and powder, and with his broken sword clutched in his hand, placed the Sun Flag on a position that the Russians had regarded as beyond possibility of capture. It was impossible to realize that this kindly old gentleman, who spoke so gently to us that morning in distant Manchuria, was the desperate commander who had been decorated by the Mikado for his invincible attack on the famous redoubt before Port Arthur’s bloody trenches.

He met us with that smile which we had come to know and love, and bade his interpreter tell us that he and his staff would ride with us out of the town and see us started on our journey. So, with the staff riding about us, with clatter of saber and ring of spur, we rode through the old winding stonewall flanked street of Fakumen to the main gate of the town. Here the road winds out over a bridge that crosses the little river that wends its way down from the pass in the mountains three miles beyond and through which led our way that morning. The sun had just risen and its first copper-colored rays turned the dew on the grass to drops of brilliants. Away and away stretched the Oriental landscape with the hills standing out in the background in the clear, crisp air of early autumn. Behind us lay the town which had been our home since May, its strange, fantastic Chinese temples and maze of jumbled dwellings just catching the early sunlight; the whole scene might have been a setting snatched from the banks of the Jordan in the far away Holy Land. As we rode out of the gate and onto the old wooden bridge with its stone parapets the full strength of the Third Army Corps Military band blazed out the first notes of Sousa’s “The Stars and the Stripes,” and with the glorious swing of that martial strain taken up by drum and trumpet we crossed the river. None who has never lived for months in an alien land among a people of a different race can ever realize the throb of the heart that such music inspires. To us, in far off Mongolia, it sounded like a voice from our very own, coming across the wide Pacific.

When we reached the open country our old friend stopped his horse and his interpreter spake his last words to us. “You have been with us long,” he told us. “With us you have lived through a terrible period. For many months our paths have lain side by side. We would not, therefore, say farewell, for the Japanese never says adieu to his friends.” He had paused with the sweetest, gentlest of smiles before he uttered his last words, which the interpreter then translated to us. “I will sit here upon my horse, with my staff gathered about me. When you reach the bend in the road you will turn in your saddles and wave your hand at me and I will wave my hand to you and that, my friends, shall be our last good-by.”

Silently we wrung their hands, these hard-visaged friends on whom a cruel war had left its scars in gray hairs and furrowed faces, and rode on our way. Half a mile beyond the ancient Mongol highway turned a bluff, and wound up toward the Pass in the Hills. When we reached the bend we turned in our saddles. There below us on the outskirts of the town we could see the general, motionless in the flooding sunlight, with the little group of the staff crowded in the background. As we turned in our saddles we could barely discern the flutter of a handkerchief from the stern old figure on the black horse. Once again the faint strains of martial music drifted to us on the still morning air; we waved our hands and turned once more on our way. Who shall say that we were oversentimental if there was a little mist in our eyes as we looked our last upon the men and on the army, whose lives and ours had been so closely linked?

Forty miles we rode that day over dusty highways that wound their way through waving fields of the whispering kowliang (or millet) that bent and swayed in the breeze. A few hours’ sleep at Tieling in a deserted shell-torn Russian house, then a five hours’ pounding over rough rails in a box car and we were back once more at the Grand Headquarters of the army at Moukden.

Here we paid our final respects to the officers of the staff whom we had known off and on for nearly two years. A few hours passed, and again we were on the train. This time it is a ten hour stretch in a third class car to Newchwang, the end of the neutral and uncensored cable.

In the early hours of the morning, with typewriter on my army trunk, half a column cable was pounded out, and that afternoon the Chicago News printed the first cable from the field of what the army thought of peace. A day’s delay in Newchwang to sell my horse, then two nights on a B. & S. freight steamer to Chefoo, and thence by boat and rail two days more to Peking, and a white man’s hotel. No one who has not lived in a Chinese village, surrounded by the filth and vermin of a Manchu compound, during the rainy season, with water trickling through the roof on the inside and mud two feet deep without, can quite realize what a bed, a bath, clean clothes and good “chow” means. Two hours after arriving, a blue-clad Chinese boy handed in a cable from Chicago. It ran: “Await further instructions, Peking.”

For the first time in nearly two years, the editor in his office ten thousand miles away had no immediate plan of action on his mind. For the moment the world was quiet, and a brief respite from the constant call for “stories” granted to the correspondent.

War work for the reading public falls naturally into two distinct classes, as different as prose and poetry in literature. Editors call the exponents of these divisions “feature men” and “events” or “cable men.” The former are the literary artists who write atmosphere and artistic impressions for the monthly and weekly papers of the world. At enormous salaries, and with the retinue and camp equipage of a commanding general, they drift leisurely along with the army. When the battles are over, they chronicle their impressions and send them by mail to their home offices. They are accompanied by trained artists of the camera, to illustrate their stories, and what is still lacking is filled in by some artist of repute at home. Their names appear in large letters on the covers of the magazines to which they contribute, and to the world are they known far and wide. The other type, the “cable men,” are collectors of what might be called “spot” news. From them not atmosphere or color is demanded, but “accuracy of fact” and “quick delivery” is the essence of their work. Known professionally wherever big papers are printed, the cable man is almost unknown to the general public. His paper requires of him first to be on the spot where news is being made, and second to get a clear, concise and correct report of that news to an uncensored cable, and do it before anyone else can. Waking or sleeping, the events man has two ideas in the back of his head, the hour his paper goes to press, and his line of communication to his cable office. As a diver depends on his air tube to the face of the water, so the correspondent depends on his line of communication to the outer world. The moment his retreat is severed he is useless and for the moment might as well be dead. He may have a story of world importance, but if he is out of touch with the cable his news is worthless. His paper, on the other hand, is prepared to back him to the limit to maintain such a line. Steamers, railroad trains, courier systems, and any means or methods his imagination or ingenuity may devise, are his for the asking, if he can only get out exclusive news, and get it first. His paper will pay fabulous sums, $2,000, $5,000, even $10,000 for an account of a world event. A single story of this kind is printed in ten thousand papers in fifty different languages within twenty-four hours after the correspondent files it in a cable office. His version of the affair is read first by every foreign office in the civilized world. On his story the editorials on the “situation” are based, from London to Buenos Ayres. The “feature man” chronicles the events as he sees them. The “cable man,” though in a small way, is a part of the great event. In the boiling vortex where history is in the making, there is he, struggling against his colleagues of the press of America and Europe to give to the world the first facts of an international clash. He moves to the click of the telegraph, and if he acts at all, he must act on the minute. Even hours are too slow for the newspaper reading public. His editor at home watches the ever-changing kaleidoscope of history, moving and reforming on the stages of the world. Now Japan is in the public’s eye. He has a man on the spot. Again it is a race war in Georgia—the invasion of Thibet, a constitutional parliament in Persia, war in the Balkans, or a revolution in Russia. All of these the restless, lynx-eyed one watches from his office in Chicago. A hundred cables a day reach his desk from all quarters of the globe, and in his mind from hour to hour he is weighing the relative importance of all the interesting situations in the world. If a parliamentary crisis develops in Europe, he has the choice of a dozen of his foreign staff to cover it. A few words on the pad, and in five hours the Berlin correspondent starts for Sweden, or perhaps the Paris man telephones his wife that he is off for Algeciras or Madrid. A pause in the career of a war correspondent for such a paper means to him that for the moment the situation is too indefinite to warrant any immediate action. From day to day he lives with a vague wonder on his mind where the next day will see him. Will he be on his way home, to Europe, Asia, or the Philippines, or perhaps to some unfamiliar place he has to search in the Atlas to find? Surrounded by his campaign baggage and war kit, he sits and waits, ready for a quick call to any quarter of the globe to which the cable may order him.

Peking is too far from the haunts of civilization for one to follow the news of the world day by day. The telegrams are days old, and the papers weeks and months. For over a month the correspondent waited in Peking and played. China is ever the source of interest which ebbs and flows. Now it is on the point of another Boxer outbreak, and next it is in the throes of constitutional reforms. An occasional anti-foreign riot, a Chinese execution, or perhaps even a bomb helps to while away the lazy days, and gives material for intermittent cables on the trend of far eastern politics.

We were waiting on the veranda of the hotel across from the American Legation. At this moment we seem as far from Chicago as from Mars. The sounds and sights of Peking have weaned us from the confusion of a world beyond. Rickshaw coolies squatting outside, the low murmur of their voices, the jingle of a bell on a passing Peking cart, all tend to widen the gulf that separates the East from the West. We are aroused by a voice at our side. “Telegram have got.” It is for me. I take the sheet of paper that in some form or other has found out my quiet in every quarter of the globe. As you tear open the gray envelope you wonder almost subconsciously where the next weeks will take you, and your curiosity hurries your hand as you tear it open and read the curt message dated Chicago, and marked “Rush.”

“Russia direct. When do you start?” Once more the love and fascination of the game surge through your veins. You are too far out of the world to know what is passing for the moment in Russia, but you feel sure it must be something good and big, with promise of long duration, to have brought this urgent cable of five words, ordering you half around the world. You call for a telegraph blank, and as you wait, your mind works almost unconsciously, something unexpressed and involuntary. “Russia direct! The Trans-Siberian road is unquestionably the quickest, providing you can get immediate action, but it is now blocked with troops and munitions of war. Obviously a permit will be necessary. It would take ten days at least to make connections through the State Department and the Petersburg Minister of Railroads to get it. Ten days is too long to wait, and then there are the uncertainties of days besides. The Pacific might do, but the Empress sails from Shanghai to-morrow. You can’t make her, and there is not another fast boat for a fortnight. There is a French or German mail for the Canal surely within a week,” and your mind is made up, and on the arm of your chair you write the reply, “Leaving to-night. Shanghai Monday, thence first steamer Canal,” and sign your name, mark the message “R. T. P.,” which means “Receiver to pay,” and walk to your room. Your Japanese understudy who has been on your staff these many months jumps up. Another man who has been waiting in the corner of the room gets out of his chair. He is an American negro, Monroe D. Morris, who for three weeks has been an anxious candidate for a staff position. Since it is Russia, the Jap is obviously impossible. You tell him so, and he shuffles his feet as he hears the ultimatum, for he had hoped for a trip to Europe. But one man’s meat is another man’s poison, for while the mournful Ikezwap backed up for the last time, the beaming Ethiopian grinned from ear to ear as he rushed to his quarters to throw together his own small belongings.

A few hours sufficed to pack all my effects which, when mobilized, comprised fourteen pieces of impedimenta. The theory is that a war correspondent must move from place to place prepared at any moment to adjust himself to any situation, from a war assignment, revolution or riot, down to the meeting socially of a foreign ambassador. Hence these fourteen pieces, which sound excessive, contained everything from a frock coat and a high hat down to a kitchen camp stove. Saddles, tents, campaign outfits of various kinds take up much room, but are really worth the bother, for when one wants them, that want is a demand that money often cannot meet. One’s own saddle on a hurry call that may mean days of riding is in itself an asset beyond comparison. It may mean all the difference between success and failure. One knows just what one can do with an outfit tried and true, and hence it is worth while lugging it about the world, even if it is used but once or twice.

A few days later saw me and my grinning Ethiopian disembarked on the Bund at Shanghai. The place looked familiar enough, for I had spent weeks there, and this was my fifth visit. Every time I left I felt that I had made a distinct addition to my information as to the wickedness of the world, and every time the desire rested heavily on my mind to write a story about this cosmopolitan mushroom on the China coast, but each time I held my hand as I realized that fate might well bring me back to it, but now that Shanghai is some ten thousand miles away, and the chances of seeing the people who might read such a story remote, I feel that I cannot pass it over without a few comments.

Geographically, the Chinese city is almost at the end of the earth. Morally, one could say, without any hesitation, it is at the end. The only place that can compete with it for demoralization and unrestriction is Port Said. The two are neck and neck for laurels of this description. Shanghai is the final bit of dead water to which the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of life seems to drift and then stop in utter stagnation. People who have failed to make good in all other quarters of the world, seem to turn naturally towards the China coast, and Shanghai lures them as the candle does the moth. There remittance men are as thick as sparrows in springtime. These creatures are the black sheep and younger sons, or other undesirable members of well-to-do families, who are allowed so many pounds a quarter by their loving friends, on the sole condition that the cash must be paid anywhere “east of the Canal.” They drift along through India, over to Burma, down the States of the Malay Peninsula, and with short stops at Singapore and Hongkong, they start straight for their final collapse in Shanghai, where they meet shoals of their fellows, consuming bad whiskey and soda at the bars of the various hotels. These gentlemen form a strong and populous element in the community. Next we find a large colony of alleged business men who have failed to accumulate the fortunes to which their alleged abilities are supposed to have entitled them, and who have come out to China to sell someone a gold brick. These two classes form the matrix of the foreign unattached residents. Then we have the men who are actually attached to some business house with their home office in the States, or back in Europe. These are for the most part doing short sentences, and are fairly respectable. Lastly we have the Shanghai business man, who is one of the most strenuous gentlemen of his kind to be seen the world over. He speculates in shares, of which there is an enormous variety in Shanghai. The operations in the Chicago wheat pit and the New York stock exchange in days of a panic are mild in comparison to the fluctuations observed on any ordinary day’s business in Shanghai stocks. The result is, people are losing and winning fortunes every few hours.

At 11 o’clock everyone who has the entrée begins to drift toward the Shanghai Club. By noon the bar is packed. At 2 o’clock the rush is over, and only those that have fallen by the way remain, cast away on sofas. In race week or holidays, sofas are as few and far between as snowballs in Hades. At five o’clock the rush begins again, and lasts until the early hours of the morning.

Everybody in Shanghai drinks, mostly to excess. It is the only place I know of where young men with incomes of from $50 to $100 a month are able to spend twice that sum in a week on their establishment, yet this is unquestionably the case. I knew of one young man making perhaps $20 a week, who in a year failed for $10,000. At no time, as far as I could ever learn, did he ever have any assets worth mentioning. This remarkable means of living is fostered by the so-called “chit” system. The “chits” are small bits of paper on which one writes an I O U for any commodity or service conceivable. Any man who has a position can sign a chit at almost any bar, store or dive in Shanghai. The young men of the clerk class proceed to do this with great effect, and ready cash is used for speculative purposes, while their immediate wants are met by the simple process of signing a “chit.” If they are successful in their speculation, they pay the “chits,” and all goes well. If they fail, and are unable to beg, borrow or steal means to meet their obligations, they either commit suicide or go to Chefoo or Tientsin until the trouble blows over, which it soon does, as there are so many other men in the same boat. After a few months of this precarious life about the China coast, back they come, and if they are unable to get employment, they fall back into a semi-loafing class and ultimately a vagrant class, which helps to swell the already large population of this sort. The wealthy men of the place are mostly young fellows of the kind described, who have prospered in their investments. They go in more heavily for all sorts of deals and speculations. Chinese concessions, promotion schemes and similar enterprises are created, to be sold at home with great advantage. Every week fortunes are made and lost, and everybody, nearly, is happy and irresponsible.

The methods of doing business are quaint, and to the westerner somewhat astonishing. Every man who is connected, in even the most remote way, with a business deal, comes in for a squeeze of some sort. I knew of a case where one man had a boat to sell, and another man, who had learned the description of the boat (for the names of the gentlemen are withheld by the middle man lest the latter be cut out entirely) was eager to snap it up for use in running the blockade. Both the buyer and the seller were eager to meet each other, but the only man who knew them both declined to disclose their names until he was paid a commission sum of $5,000. If you meet a man, and he introduces you to another man, who makes you acquainted with a third party who sells you a commodity, numbers one and two block all negotiations until the seller consents to share the spoils with them. The result is that after a business deal has gone through so many hands, there is not much left for anyone in particular. The tendency is for the man who has the commodity and the man who has the price to combine, and exclude the line of grafters who would stand between, hence the gentlemen who profit on the legitimate business men veil all their negotiations until almost the last moment in a business deal. The names of the actual parties are withheld from each other by the “go betweens” for fear that the gentlemen will combine and exclude them from profit.

A volume might easily be written in description of the various habits of the men, women and children who lead the fierce pace of foreign life in Shanghai, but the requirements of space demand that I pass over such a tempting analysis of degeneracy and vice with these few comments.