Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun Page 14

  The hurried departure of the boarding party was quickly followed by a rolling volley of rifle-fire from the Kinshiu, apparently directed upon the retreating boats, for I heard cries and groans which seemed to proceed from them. Then, from the Rossia came the sudden, snapping bark of her quick-firers and machine-guns, and a storm of missiles crashed through the transport’s thin bulwarks or flew whining overhead, intermingled with shrieks, groans, and excited shouts from the Japanese soldiers, who had evidently resolved to die fighting, rather than surrender. The sounds awakened the fighting instinct within me; I felt that, let happen what would, I must be among those gallant fellows, doing my share of the work; and I nipped out from under the junk’s short deck, intent upon climbing aboard the Kinshiu again. And then I found that during the short period of my seclusion, the junk had parted company, and was now a good twenty feet distant from the transport. True, I might jump overboard and swim the intervening space, and I was actually poising myself for the dive when the question flashed into my brain: How was I to get aboard, how climb the vessel’s smooth iron side. There were no ropes hanging overboard, save the severed towing hawser, and I had cut through that so high up that even when the steamer’s stern dipped, the end did not reach within a couple of feet of the water. I recognised that whether I would or not, I must now stay where I was, for return to the steamer was impossible. And while I stood there on the junk’s short fore deck, watching the scene with fascinated eyes, that awful, unequal duel went on between the Japanese rifles and the Rossia’s machine-guns; the soldiers frenziedly yelling “Banzai Nippon!” between each volley, while the Russian gunners plied their pieces in grim silence. The Kinshiu’s deck, I knew, must be by this time a veritable shambles, for the Russian cruiser lay close aboard, and her machine-guns could sweep the transport’s decks from stem to stern; moreover, the rapid and ominous slackening of the rifle-fire testified eloquently to the frightful carnage that was proceeding. The cries of “Banzai Nippon!” were no longer thundered forth in a defiant roar, but were raised by a few voices only, which were almost drowned by the dreadful shrieks and moans of the wounded and dying.

  Then, suddenly, there occurred a frightful explosion, the Kinshiu Maru was hove up on a mountain of foaming water which belched forth fire and smoke, the air became suddenly full of flying splinters and wreckage, a heavy fragment of which smote me full upon the forehead and knocked me back into the junk’s hold, and as my senses left me I was dimly conscious of a wailing cry, pealing out across the water, of “Sayonara!” (Farewell for ever). It was the last good-bye to Emperor, country, and all who were nearest and dearest to them of that heroic little band of Japanese infantry-men who preferred to die fighting gloriously, rather than win inglorious safety by surrender. The Russians had made an end of the affair by torpedoing the transport, and she must have sunk within a very few minutes.

  When I recovered my senses it was broad daylight. For a few moments I knew not where I was, or what had happened to me, but I was conscious of the most splitting headache from which I had ever suffered in my life. The next thing that dawned upon me was that I was lying in the bottom of a small craft of some sort, which was rolling and plunging most atrociously on a short, choppy sea, that I was chilled to the very marrow, and that water was washing about and over me with every motion of the boat. I was wet to the skin and, although shivering with cold, my blood scorched my veins as though it were liquid fire.

  I sat up, staring vaguely about me, and then became aware of a curious stiff feeling in the skin of my face. Putting my hands to my head, to still the throbbing smart of it, I found that my hair was all clogged with some sticky kind of liquid which, upon looking at my hands, I found to be blood, evidently my own. This at once explained the curious stiff feeling of my face; it was probably caused by dry caked blood. But, to make sure, I sprang open the case of my watch—the polished surface serving well enough for a mirror—and gravely studied my reflected image. I must have presented a ghastly sight, for my whole face was a mask of blood, out of which my eyes glared feverishly. Then, as I continued to stare at the interior of my watch-case, wondering what it all meant, my memory of the events of the preceding night—I knew it must be the preceding night, because my watch was still going—all came back to me, and I understood where I was.

  Scrambling giddily to my feet, I looked about me and saw a bucket rolling to and fro on the junk’s bottom-boards. The sight suggested an idea to me and, taking the bucket and the end of a small line which I bent on to the handle, I somehow managed to hoist myself up on to the small foredeck and, lying prone—for I dared not as yet trust myself to stand—I lowered the bucket, and drew it up again, full of clean, sparkling salt-water. Into this I plunged my head, keeping it immersed as long as my breath would allow, meanwhile removing the blood from my face and hair as well as I could. The contact of the cold salt-water made my lacerated forehead and scalp smart most atrociously, yet it relieved my headache and greatly refreshed me. Then, stripping off my wet shirt, I tore a long strip from it and, thoroughly saturating it in the clean salt-water, bound up my wound as best I could, after which I felt distinctly better.

  Then, sitting on the little deck, I looked about me to see if I could discover any traces of last night’s horror; but there was a moderate breeze blowing, and I instantly recognised that the junk must have drifted several miles from the spot where the disaster had occurred. There was nothing to be seen, no, not so much as a solitary scrap of wreckage, within the radius of a mile, beyond which everything was blotted out by a curtain of haze.

  By this time I had pretty completely recovered my senses, and was able to fully realise my situation. I was wet, cold, feverish, and horribly thirsty, and was the sole occupant of a small, leaky junk of about twenty-five tons, without masts or sails, these having been removed in order the better to fit her for the duty of carrying troops. She had a pair of sweeps aboard, it is true; but they were so ponderous that each demanded the strength of four men to work it; they were therefore quite useless to me, even had I known precisely where I was, which I did not. All I knew was that I was some fifty miles, or thereabout, to the southward and eastward of Iwon; but I might as well have been five hundred miles from the place, for all the means I had of returning to it, or even of making a shot at Gensan. The fact was that I was adrift in a hulk; and the utmost that I could do was to keep her afloat, if possible, and patiently wait for something to come along and take me off her.

  Realising this, I proceeded to overhaul the junk, with a view to ascertaining what were her resources. I remembered that a cask of fresh water had been put aboard her for the use of the troops while landing and embarking; and I soon found this, still more than half-full, snugly stowed away under her foredeck, with a lot of raffle consisting of odds and ends of line of varying sizes, a fragment of fishing-net, a few short lengths of planking, and other utterly useless stuff. I drank dipper after dipper of water, until my raging thirst was quenched, and then stripped off my clothes, wrung them out, and spread them to dry in the wind while I rubbed my body dry with my hands, employing a considerable amount of exertion, in order to restore warmth to my cramped limbs. In this effort I was at length successful; and my next business was to search the other end of the junk, in the vague hope that I might find something in the way of food; but there was none; therefore I had to go hungry. I had a bucket, however, and with this I bailed the hooker practically dry, as much to pass the time and keep myself warm, as for any other reason. Then, having done everything that I could think of, all that remained for me was to wait as patiently as might be for something to come along and rescue me.

  My position was by no means an enviable one. I had no food; but, for the moment, that did not greatly matter, since the smart of my wound had made me feverish, and I had no appetite. On the other hand, I suffered from an incessant thirst, which even the copious draughts of water in which I frequently indulged did little to allay. The weather was overcast, and there was a thin mist lying upon the surface
of the grey sea which circumscribed my view to a radius of less than a mile, and the air was keenly raw. I recognised that it was necessary to keep myself constantly active, to counteract the effect of the chilly atmosphere, and this I did, bustling about, overhauling the raffle in the junk, and executing a good deal of utterly useless work, which I varied from time to time by taking long spells of watching, in the hope of sighting some craft to which I might signal for assistance. Also I repeatedly bathed my head in sea water, which did a little toward reducing the feeling of feverishness from which I was suffering.

  Toward the afternoon the conditions became more favourable. The clouds broke, the sun came out and took the feeling of rawness out of the air, so that I no longer suffered from the cold, and the mist melted away, affording me a clear view to the horizon. But the sea was bare; there was not even so much as a blur of steamer’s smoke staining the sky in any direction; and I began to wonder how long it might be before I should be picked up, or whether indeed I should be picked up at all. I knew, of course, that the non-arrival of the Kinshiu at Gensan would give rise to speculation, and that probably a search for her would be instituted along the course which she might be expected to steer, but I was already several miles from that course, and hourly drifting farther from it. The question of importance to me was whether the search would extend over a sufficiently wide area to take me in.

  The remainder of that day passed uneventfully for me; I could do nothing beyond what I have already indicated; no craft of any description hove in sight; and toward sunset the pangs of hunger began to manifest themselves. I watched the sea until night closed down; and then, when it became so dark that further watching was useless, I crept in under the fore deck among the raffle and turned in upon such a bed as I had been able to prepare for myself during the day, in anticipation of the possibility that I might be obliged to pass the night aboard the junk.

  As might be supposed, under the circumstances, the earlier part of the night at least was full of discomfort for me; but somewhere along in the small hours I dropped off to sleep, and eventually slept soundly, to be awakened by the noise of steam blowing off, close at hand. I started up, listened for a moment to assure myself that the sound was not an illusion, and, satisfied that it was real, scrambled up on the junk’s deck, to be greeted with the sight of several ships of war close at hand. A single glance sufficed to assure me that my troubles were at an end; for the ships in sight were those of Admiral Kamimura’s squadron, the Idzumi being hove-to at less than a cable’s length distant, in the very act of lowering a boat. There were several officers on her bridge, and she was close enough to enable me to see that they were all scrutinising the junk through their glasses; I therefore waved to them, and was waved to in reply. A few minutes later the boat, in charge of a lieutenant, dashed smartly alongside and the officer scrambled nimbly up the junk’s low side.

  I think he had not recognised me until then, although we knew each other very well. He gazed at me dubiously for a moment, then his hand shot out to grasp mine as he exclaimed:

  “Hillo! my dear Swinburne, what does this mean; what are you doing here? And are you all alone?”

  I answered his question by informing him, in as few words as possible, of what had happened to the ill-fated Kinshiu Maru, and then we got down into the boat and pulled across to the Idzumi, where Kamimura and his officers were impatiently awaiting us. They gave me the warmest of welcomes, and would not even permit me to tell them my story, the lieutenant who had rescued me assuring them that he had already obtained all the particulars and could tell it as well as I could. I was accordingly at once turned over to the care of the ship’s surgeon, and made comfortable in the sick bay, the squadron immediately resuming its cruise.

  Now that the tension of looking after myself was relaxed, a reaction set in, with high fever, and for the next four days I was really ill, with frequent intervals of delirium. But there were no complications of any kind, and by the end of the sixth day I was so far recovered as to be able to dress and sit up for an hour or two. Everybody aboard the Idzumi was exceedingly kind to me, as kind indeed as though they had been brothers; and this fraternal feeling of kindly interest was not confined to the Idzumi alone, Kamimura himself informing me, with a smile, that it had become quite a habit for the other ships to signal an inquiry as to my condition, every morning. As the officers of the ship came off watch, they came tiptoeing along to inquire after me; and if I happened to be awake, and the doctor permitted it, they would sit and chat with me for half an hour or so before retiring to their cabins, by which means I gradually acquired all the missing links in the story of the squadron’s abortive cruise.

  From these conversations I gathered that after the squadron and the Kinshiu parted company off Gensan, while we in the transport headed for Iwon, the squadron proceeded toward Vladivostock, being much delayed by a dense fog, through which it steamed at half-speed, each ship towing a fog buoy as a guide to the ship immediately following, though, even with this assistance, keeping touch was only accomplished with extreme difficulty. Thus they proceeded until, by dead reckoning, they arrived at a point seventy miles south of Vladivostock, when, the weather being much too thick to permit of fighting the enemy, even should the two fleets blunder together, Admiral Kamimura decided to retrace his steps, arriving at Gensan two days later. Here the Japanese consul boarded the Idzumi and imparted to the Admiral the startling information that on the previous day four strange warships, accompanied by a couple of destroyers, had appeared off the port, the warships being later identified as those constituting the Vladivostock squadron. The destroyers had entered the harbour, boarded a small Japanese craft loaded with fish, ordered her crew to get into her boat and go ashore, and had then torpedoed her; the expended torpedo being probably at least as valuable as the ship which it sank! Later on, the Russian cruisers had entered the harbour, but had left again without doing any damage. In reply to an inquiry concerning the Kinshiu Maru, the consul replied that neither she nor her escort had yet returned. This information caused Admiral Kamimura some uneasiness, since there had been time for us to do all that we had been ordered to do, and to get back to Gensan; and the squadron was actually getting its anchors, preparatory to its departure to hunt for the transport, when Commander Takebe with his torpedo-boats arrived. Questioned as to the whereabouts of the Kinshiu, he expressed surprise at her non-arrival, briefly relating particulars of the discussion which had resulted in the transport leaving Iwon, unescorted, while he remained in harbour to see what the weather developments were going to be.

  This was enough for Kamimura. Takebe’s story, in conjunction with that of the consul at Gensan, convinced the Admiral that something very serious had happened; and he at once gave orders for the torpedo flotilla to proceed along the coast to hunt for news of the transport, while he, with his squadron, started off in chase of the Russians.

  It was on the morning following this second departure of the squadron from Gensan, that they sighted the junk from which I was rescued. It is possible that, in his eagerness to overtake the Russians, he might have pushed on without pausing to examine a small, apparently derelict junk, but for the fact that, fortunately for me, two or three of the Idzumi’s officers recognised her as the junk which the Kinshiu had taken with her to facilitate the landing operations at Iwon.

  After they had taken me off the junk, the Japanese had pushed ahead direct for Vladivostock, in the hope of arriving there before the Russians. But in this hope they were disappointed. Upon their arrival, the Russian cruisers were seen to be already back in harbour; and all that was accomplished was to drive precipitately back into the harbour two Russian destroyers which had the impudence—or the courage—to come out and threaten them; and also to exchange a few shots with the Russian forts.

  Chapter Ten.

  ITO’S YARN.

  We arrived at our rendezvous among the Hall Islands on the afternoon of May 3rd, and found the place practically deserted, those who were left behind reporti
ng that Admiral Togo and the fleet had left for Port Arthur, the previous day, for the purpose of making a third attempt to seal up the Russian fleet in the harbour. I was by this time making excellent progress toward recovery, but the Idzumi’s surgeon considered that I should do still better in the hospital ashore; I was therefore landed within half an hour of the ship’s coming to an anchor, and that evening found me comfortably established in the roomy convalescent ward, in charge of an excellent and assiduous medical and nursing staff. The latter was composed of young Japanese women, than whom, I think it would be impossible to find more gentle, attentive and tender sick-room attendants. I don’t know whether they were more than usually kind to me because I happened to be a foreigner who was helping to fight Japan’s battles in her hour of need, but it appeared to me that they were vying with each other as to who should do the most for me. Had I been a king, they could not have done more for me than they did.

  On the following morning, having been assisted to rise and dress by the two nurses whose especial charge I was, and established by them near an open window overlooking the roadstead, I was making play with a particularly appetising breakfast when, glancing out of the window, I saw a big fleet of transports arriving—there were eighty-three in all, for I had the curiosity to count them; and while they were coming to an anchor another fleet appeared, consisting of the warships which had been to Port Arthur to assist in the attempt to seal up the harbour. So interested was I in these arrivals that, in watching them, I allowed my breakfast to go cold, and nothing would satisfy my nurses but that they must get me another breakfast, which they did.