A staff officer's scrap-book during the Russo-Japanese war

Front matter

LIBRARY

ANNEX

^uMWH) ^?

Preface

It is difficult to convey to the peaceable citizens of Greater Britain a true picture of that glorious and impressive survival from heroic times, a nation in arms. The difficulty is enhanced by the fact that military history must be always to some extent misleading.

If facts are hurriedly issued, fresh from the mint of battle, they cannot be expected to supply an account which is either well balanced or exhaustive. On the other hand, it is equally certain that, when once the fight has been fairly lost or won, it is the tendency of all ranks to combine and recast the story of their achievement into a shape which shall satisfy the susceptibilities of national and regimental vainglory. It is then already too late for the painstaking historian to set to work. He may record the orders given and the movements which ensued, and he may build up thereon any ingenious theories which occur to him ; but to the hopes and fears which dictated those orders, and to the spirit and method in which those movements were executed, he has for ever lost the clue. On the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking ; by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms.

vi Preface

If the impressions here recorded possess any value, it will he because they do faithfully represent the facts as they appeared to the First Japanese Army while the wounded still lay bleeding upon the stricken field. Further than this they do not profess to go.

The time has hardly yet come for a full and critical account by an ex-attache" of a war round which so many conflicting national ambitions have revolved. Meanwhile these scraps, snap-shots, by-products, or whatever they may be called, are offered to the public in the hope that they may interest, without hurting the feelings of either of the great armies concerned. If this hope should be realised, I shall be encouraged to advance with Kuroki through conflicts fiercer and bloodier far than any I have here attempted to set down.

My special thanks are due to Captain Vincent for the help he has given me, and for the maps, sketches and photographs with which the volume is illustrated. It is hardly necessary for me here to acknowledge my indebtedness to my kind hosts, or to other British attaches, for this will become patent to the reader as he reads.

Ian Hamilton.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. First Impressions op the Japanese Army ... 1

II. Some New Acquaintances 19

Chapter I

British Legation, Tokio, 11 p.m., March 16th, 1904. — Startled from sleep by the sudden stillness of the engines, I ran up on deck this morning and found our great ship gliding forward without effort, noiselessly, as if to the soft attraction of a magnet. She was heading due west, and made her final stately approach to the land of the Rising Sun, with the deep red rim of the sun rising directly in her wake. All around us stretched the bay, smooth and green as polished jade, and freckled with the sails of fisher-boats where the margin grew darker under the reflections of encircling hills. So much I saw, and then — incredulous at first as when some fairy vision is caught for one moment in the meshes of a daydream — I realised Fuji. Fuji uplifting a pale unearthly crown of purest snow far above ship, bay, town, and all the misty network of subordinate valleys and mountains ! Unawares — too swiftly and unceremoniously — I found myself ushered into the presence of one of the marvels of the world ! Venice from the sea. The immortal Taj. My thrill of surprise and admiration had touched some sleeping chords of memory, for, unbidden, these wonders of days gone by rose faintly to my eyes, then fading away left me face to face with the stirring realities of the present.

T a

The past was past, the future had never seemed so full of life and strange adventures. I breathed a short prayer for continued good fortune, whilst our Japanese reservists, summoned from Hong Kong to march through ice and snow and. fire and blood for Emperor and Fatherland, raised a shout, unfamiliar as the landscape itself, to mark the accomplishment of the first stage of their journey.

I wonder sometimes, is it possible that the human soul has a power vouchsafed to it of moulding time and circumstance to meet a calm and confident desire ? Is it not the case that things involving struggle are rarely worth obtaining, whereas all the best of life drops, like the manna of the Israelites, from the skies ? I moved heaven and earth with my importunities to get to Japan. But when I stopped struggling and simply believed I must arrive in good time, then the way was presently made straight for me. I no longer accept the theory of life which Dick Whittington evolved to the tune of the bells of London, but believe rather in keeping mind and body absolutely fit; doing whatever work happens to come to hand, and leaving the rest to Providence.

At a time when the last smouldering fires of the Boer War were reducing to ashes] the political hatreds accumulated during the previous century, I had strained all that friends or credit could do to obtain permission, as soon as peace was concluded, to come home from South Africa via Japan, Korea, Manchuria and Bussia. Thus I hoped I might get an opportunity to study not only the actors, but also the theatre, of an impending world drama ; a world drama more fascinating than any staged since the Greeks put measure to another ambition which had known no bounds until the curtain rose on the plains of Marathon. My application found favour in the eyes of the War Minister and Commander-in-Chief. My belongings were mobilised— and, three days before starting, the conqueror of Omdurman signified that it might be more convenient if I accompanied him home ! The convenience of a conqueror is not to be gainsaid, and thus, the mere expression of a wish shattered my glittering Japanese castle into its original components ; the card pack of a gambler with fortune. Yet now — when the experiences I seek are ripening for the harvest — the proverbial ill- wind has veered in my favour. Who could have foretold that the cutting blast which swirled through Pall Mall some six weeks ago, making a clean sweep of a venerated institution situated"therein, would turn to the halcyon breeze that was to waft me to these happy isles. Out of the War Office into the realities of war ; out of the English fog into the presence of Fuji, with all that Fuji now portends to a soldier !

The best qualification for success seems then to be not to desire it over anxiously, and certainly the best moments in life are not those in which a man sees success impending ; still less, those in which he savours the dead sea fruit of achievement with its sickly complimentary sauce of congratulations and applause. Are they not rather those moments in which it is borne in to a poor mortal that some immortal has clearly designated the field of action, wherein he has only to be true to his convictions and himself, and advance confidently by word of command to the accomplishment of some predestined end ?

It is now midnight. There is nothing in this luxurious English room with its blazing coal fire and close-drawn curtains to tell me I am at last in Japan ; yet surely this diary, commenced in a manner so foreign to my intentions, is evidence of the fact. So let me to bed, and may I dream of Fuji ! Pale Fuji — touched into life by the strange dull crimson of this morning's rising sun. An emblem — a sign sent from the Heavens and sealed in the mountain — proclaiming the blood yet to flow before that sun climbs its full height up the sky.

" And blood, he cried, the chariots and the horses, The noise of shout and thunder of the battle heard afar."

Tokio, April 1st, 1904. — I am not quite sure if it was William of Normandy or Julius Csesar who burnt his boats ? Anyway, on this very suitable date for a foolhardy action, I have put a torch to the whole of my fleet, and I only hope I may be as well justified in the result as was the conquering hero with regard to whose performance my memory is a little shaky. To descend from my insecure historical platform to everyday life, I have posted my letters and I feel the same uneasy qualms about them as when about October 1, 1899, I had fairly launched from Pietermaritzburg a batch of futile warnings. To-day there has been nothing of the Cassandra spirit in my strain, but I have taken some chances all the same. For in these letters just despatched the last poor shreds of my military reputation have been staked upon a forecast that the Japanese army will beat the Russian army wherever they meet them on terms even approaching equality. Further, I have fairly let myself in for the opinion that the Japanese army, battalion for battalion, surpasses any European army, excepting only the British army at its best (not at its second best, which is the state in which it usually finds itself). The diagnosis may be considered somewhat hasty, but experts with urgent convictions to express cannot afford to wait like amateurs until the course of events makes prediction fairly safe at the cost of nine-tenths of its value.* There is certainly no more thankless task than that of playing prophet. It is like betting with some one who says, " Heads I win ; tails we stand quits." Loss is possible, profit is not. Still, it appears to me best to state my impressions frankly, and not to balance whether or no it will be expedient to do so.

And now for my reasons. It was not only because I had fought against the Boers in the year 1881 that it was borne in upon me how long and difficult would be the way to success in the year 1899. It was because of my conviction that up-to-date civilisation is becoming less and less capable of conforming to the antique standards of military virtue, and that the hour is at hand when the modern world must begin to modify its ideals, or prepare to go down before some more natural, less complex and less nervous type. The Boers furnished one example of those primitive peoples whose education and intelligence had just reached a stage at which they could avail themselves of modern rifles and guns. City-bred dollar-hunters are becoming less and less capable of coping with such adversaries as Deer-slayer and his clan. In situation after situation where our soldiers were helpless the Boers were perfectly at home. It was this which made one Boer equal to three freshly landed British soldiers in everything except those hammer-and-tongs fights which, in such a war, are quite exceptional.

* These letters ^were delivered in England with the mornin papers announcing the Japanese victory on the Yalu river.

6 A Staff Officer's Sceap-Book

Even now the old civilised nations try to shut their eyes to this. They do so upon exactly the same principle on which mankind refuse to let their thoughts dwell upon the subject of death. It is more comfortable to blame the British War Office, to sneer at British officers, and to speak slightingly of the cost and bloodshed involved in defeating "a handful of farmers," than to face the tremendous truth with all that it involves, this truth being that it is just because the Boers were primitive farmers that they were able to make so long a stand against troops who had not such an advantage. Had the war taken place a few years later, the overthrow of the advanced types of civilisation by the backward types would have been inaugurated with the disappearance of the British power, name and language from South African soil.

As it is, we have escaped that sad initiation, but we are not yet out of the wood. We have still to face the problem of Afghanistan which Russian and English jealousies now condemn to barbaric isolation. Such people as the Afghans and the tribes on the North-west frontier of India must be resolutely penetrated and tamed within the next generation, or they will become capable of overthrowing and uncivilising India herself ; just as Abyssinia, unless she is absorbed and educated within the next thirty years, may become capable of overwhelming North Africa, and as the Basutos, Zulus, and Herreros would make short work of South Africa if the white population were not fortunately convinced believers in the necessity of cultivating military ideals. Western civilisation must enlighten its eventual conquerors as Rome even dying enlightened the barbarians, lest when our modern world is finally defeated in the field Europe should be wrapped again in darkness. Is it not the old, old story? India is Gaul; Central Asia is Germany; Varus loses his legions at Maiwand.

This is no time for any ciyilised nation to play pranks with its army, or to gamble at confidence-trick games with its rivals at The Hague. Disarmament talk from the mouths of the masters of India would be supremely ridiculous were it not so dangerous. Have those who cry " peace " ever paused to consider the lordly Sikh, whose god is the sword and his religion war? What would he say, or do rather, for he does not say much, if the Sahibs tried to transform gallant armies into military police ? Every thinking soldier who has served on our recent Indian campaigns is aware that for the requirements of such operations a good Sikh, Pathan or Gurkha battalion is more generally serviceable than a British battalion. If, for instance, a non-commissioned officer and a dozen men are required to picquet a mountain top two or three miles distant, until the ; column has passed, and are then to find their way back and follow on with the rear guard, no one in his senses would send British soldiers. They might lose their way ; they might unseasonably exhibit a preference for fighting and require to be extricated ; or, in some way or another, accentuate the anxieties of their general, even if they did not form the text for a regrettable incident despatch by getting cut up completely. For advance guards, rear guards, roadmaking, night fighting, escorts to convoys, and for everything in fact that takes place in these mountains except a definite attack upon a definite position, the best native troops, being more in touch with nature, can give points to the artificially trained townsmen who now form so large a proportion of our men. I do not ignore the fortunate fact that the scouting and reconnoitring of the British army has vastly improved since the South African War. But even so we remain, and must continue to remain, a loug way behind more primitive nations in these important warrior characteristics.

All this is supposed to be a secret ; a thing to be whispered with bated breath, as if every sepoy did not already know who does the rough and dirty work, and who, in the long run, does the hardest fighting. Nevertheless, these very officers who know will sit and solemnly discuss whether our best native troops would, or would not, be capable of meeting a European enemy ! Why — there is material in the north of India and in Nepaul sufficient and fit, under good leadership, to shake the artificial society of Europe to its foundations if once it dares tamper with that militarism which now alone supplies it with any higher ideal than money and the luxury which that money can purchase.

I have taken Nepaul as an example of the primitive State whose people are natural born fighters, and it is owing, I think, to my knowledge of the gallant little Gurkhas that I have found confidence and courage to write home so early in the day giving an estimate of the Japanese army. From the standpoint of practical study, experience and knowledge of men and material, I have less claim to express an opinion on that army than any civilian inhabitant of Tokio who has kept his eyes open and seen its officers, non-commissioned officers and men, march and drill and walk about the streets for the past twelve months. But imaginatively I carry a key which gives me the entree right into the heart of the machine.

At intervals since 1879 I have fought alongside of Gurkhas — I have had the honour of having them under my command — I have watched them long hours at musketry when the heart of the soldier very much reveals itself — I know them in camp and on the march, in war and in peace. Nor must I forget the sport we have had together, my visits to Nepaul, or, above all, that glorious week in the southern jungle with 400 elephants and two battalions of Khas Gurkhas to help the great man I was with to his tigers. I ought to know the Gurkhas well, and, if so, I know the Japanesa soldier also. He is a very old friend. Lord Roberts had a faithful orderly, a splendid fighting Gurkha, who watched over him jealously from '78 to '81, and is now a respected native officer retired upon his pension. We called him " Bullet-head." Behold, in one Japanese company, at least a dozen young " Bullet-heads," as small as life, and quite unmistakable in their resemblance to that splendid old soldier of the Afghan war !

Whilst I was looking at the company it was dismissed, and a number of the men having been freshly summoned from country districts hung around to enjoy a good stare at the foreigner. This gave me an opportunity of letting loose my interpreter at them, and we exchanged some sentiments. There was no doubt about it : the resemblance between Gurkhas and Japanese is more than skin deep. The same ready smile ; the same jolly good-humour ; the same independent manner, evincing, clearly but not offensively, the soldier's pride and his conscious superiority to any civilian, especially a foreign civilian. When I told them that I too was a soldier they became communicative, and we had quite a conversation. These were surely Gurkhas ; better educated, more civilised : on the other hand, not quite so powerful or hardy. The majority of the company, perhaps two-thirds of it, conformed to the type of the Muggurs of Nepaul ; squat and square : bullet-headed and pudding-faced. The remaining third were different ; more slightly built ; with a keen, grave, aquiline cast of countenance, they gave me the impression that they also would prove to be forward in the fight. In the whole of Tokio I have not seen a single soldier who is flat-footed, narrowchested or slouching. The company officers seem businesslike and athletic ; the staff officers, as a rule, do not. This Japanese army shows conscription at its best — a comparatively small number, picked out of several hundreds of thousands for physical fitness and aptitude at certain necessary trades. The army is the cream of the nation. " How different from us, Miss Beale and Miss Buss ! "

The force of the Russian army, as against other European nations, lies in her private soldiers, who are peasants ; still in touch with nature ; robust, hardy, patient, and stolid. But they have neither the habitude of war, nor, except perhaps when fighting in defence of their hearths and homes, do they possess that inborn vital spark of martial ardour which will compensate in battle for many defects in character or physique. Least of all are they endowed with that independence of character and power of acting on their own individual initiative upon which modern war will henceforth make such high demands.

The Japanese soldiers are equally peasants, equally solid and unaffected with nerves. There the resemblance ceases ; for our allies are warlike by taste and tradition ; and upon the patriotism, which they have

Fiest Impressions of the Japanese Army 11

absorbed with their mothers' milk, their government has been careful to graft initiative, quickness, and intelligence. This is accomplished in the schools, which keep the soldierly virtues in the forefront of their curriculum. Here is a rule of conduct given by the head of the Otono clan to his retainers in remote antiquity, a rule familiar from his childhood to the Japanese private soldier : " You must die by the side of your great lord, and never turn your back on the foe. If you die at sea, let your body sink into the water ; if you die on the hillside, let it be outstretched on the mountain grass." Since the Highland clans made way for the red deer, no woman in Great Britain would think of imparting such ideas or ideals to her child.

The Japanese and Russian armies denote the overlapping of two stages of civilisation. Apart from its great military forces, the one saving strength of our old Western world lies in its education and intelligence ; and yet, in this case, the representative of the East is the superior in these very factors.

The one army is close to its base, the other hangs dependent at the extremity of a single line of railway thousands of miles long, like a soap-bubble at the end of a churchwarden. What reason, then, to fear that my batch of predictions will be falsified ? None ! It is not so much the idea that we may have put our money on the wrong horse which now troubles me ; still less any fear that I may have made a false estimate of the new force which this army represents. But it should cause European statesmen some anxiety when their people seem to forget that there are millions outside the charmed circle of Western civilisation who are ready to pluck the sceptre from nerveless hands so soon as the old warrior spirit is allowed to degenerate.

12 A Staff Officeb's Scbap-Book

It is strange to read of conferences discussing the desirability of peace, and urging the repression of the military spirit, just as if there was no one in the world but themselves; just, in fact, like sheep discussing watchdogs, oblivious of the wolves. As if, indeed, Asia and Africa were not even now stirring uneasily in their sleep, and dreaming dim dreams of conquest and of war. Unless I very much mistake, this small nation, Eastern to the backbone, is about to testify by the mouth of her cannon that the six Great Powers are not all the world but only a part of it, depending as a last resource on the courage of their fighting men for their money-bags and liberty, and all else they hold most dear. Providentially Japan is our ally, and not one, if I may presume to judge so early, who will prove ungrateful. England has time therefore — time to put her military affairs in order ; time to implant and cherish the military ideal in the hearts of her children ; time to prepare for a disturbed and anxious twentieth century. The first thing we have to learn, I am sure, is that neither pay, conscription, numbers, or equipment can compensate for any falling off in the adventurous fighting spirit of which the germs still exist in the souls of our race. What civilisation may have stolen, perhaps inevitably, from the old semi-barbarous warrior spirit, she should have surely made good by quickening a more enthusiastic patriotism, and giving the young generations an ideal for which they would lay down their lives. Is it too late to expect this ? From the nursery and its toys to the Sunday school and its cadet company, every influence of affection, loyalty, tradition, and education should be brought to bear on the next generation of British boys and girls, so as deeply to impress upon their young minds a feeling of

Fibst Impressions of the Japanese Army 13

reverence and admiration for the patriotic spirit of their ancestors.

In England the War Office and the Education Department have not even a bowing acquaintance, and this is not altogether the fault of the Education Department. Government departments have no souls, no aspirations, no hearts. If Bushido was for sale in the market it might go hang as far as they are concerned. What a department likes is something tangible to show the taxpayer ; a hobbledehoy, for instance, in a cheap red coat, so that answer may be made in due season, " You entrusted me with eighteen pence, see, here is a soldier ! " Whether the poor child was starved into the ranks by the pinch of a hard winter or whether he was naturally attracted to an honourable profession is a matter of no consequence. He has a red coat and he breathes ; Rule Britannia ! If our military system and our educational curriculum continue to neglect cultivating the old natural warrior spirit which first made us a free people, then cowardice, followed by its antidote conscription, will soon be knocking at our gates. I do not envy the feelings of the head masters of public schools in England when they read extracts from the report of the Royal Commission on the war in South Africa, and recollect to what lengths they have gone in their time actively to discourage their best and brightest pupils from embarking in the career of arms. As for the teachers in Government schools, they are, according to their lights, an enthusiastic and patriotic class. But to how few of them has it ever even occurred that the soul of a greengrocer's boy might be fired with martial ardour, which might some day be more useful to his country even than the three great R's !

With our education anti-military, and our armyorganised on a basis of wages, we are marching straight in the footsteps of China, who one thousand years ago became so clever as to see that war was a relic of barbarism. So it is ; but to neglect its precepts on that account is to hand over the conduct of the world to barbarians. The Mandarins discouraged their best from adopting the military career, and thought their worst good enough for the army. Many, many years ago they faced the problems which now agitate our Western peace idealists, and thought they had solved them. Now, in 1904, helpless as Prometheus in the vulture's clutch, China sees a foreign war about to devastate her fairest province ; a war of which she herself seems destined to be, indirectly or directly, the victor's prize. Never was the verdict of Poiskin better exemplified : " All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war ; no great art ever rose on earth but among a nation of soldiers. . . . There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle. . . . When I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men. It is very strange to me to discover this ; and very dreadful ■ — but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together, I found to be wholly untenable. Peace and the vices of civil life only flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilisation ; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse of History coupled together ; that, on her lips, the words were peace and sensuality — peace and selfishness — peace and death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word, and strength of thought, in war ; that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace ; taught by war, and deceived by peace ; trained by war and betrayed by peace : in a word, that they were born in Avar, and expired in peace."

It would be well for us if this extract could be taught by heart to every school-child in England. Here it would be superfluous. At military manoeuvres, when troops march through a district, all the children are given a holiday, and trot down to line the roads along which the soldiers will pass. In Tokio, whenever any especially stirring departure of troops takes place, the tiny mites of both sexes are brought to wish God-speed to " our dear brave soldiers." In their schoolrooms are portraits of heroes and pictures of great battles. The Japanese have behind them the moral character produced by mothers and fathers, who again are the product of generations of mothers and fathers nurtured in ideas of self-sacrifice and loyalty. But they do not on this account trust entirely to heredity to produce them an army. If they wish to have every man in the nation a potential fighter they know they must begin at the beginning, and put the right ideas into the babies as soon as they begin to toddle. The parade march of the 5th German Army Corps impressed me far less than the little Japanese boys and girls I saw marching down in their companies to say good-bye to the soldiers. " There," I said to myself, " go the world-renowned, invincible armies of 1920 ! "