IN THE WAKE OF WAR.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 11642, 21 August 1905, Page 5

IN THE WAKE OF WAR.

{By Frederick Palmer in Collier's Weekly.) Dalny ( is the boomerang of the^war. If the Rusians intended to perform a great service for the Japanese they could ask for no finer tribute to their foresight than this made-to-order port which called for trade in vain. The favour is the same as building bridges for your (enemy to cross in pursuit of your own ' flying divisions.. When Stoessel fell back on Port Arthur he laid dynamite along the costly pier, but the fuse became wet and failed to ignite. He also had the gates of the dry dock removed. After searching for thorn for days, it occurred to the Japanese to advertise a reward for them as you would for tli'e return of a diamond necklace. Within twenty-four hours a Chinaman appeared with information as to the exact spot where they were sunk in the bay. That illustrates just how proRussian and 'just how pro-Japanese the natives are. WHAT DALNY MEANS TO JAPAN. By grace of a "Lost and Found" notice, then, Togo's tocpedo-boats and destroyers were repaired, overhauled, and scraped in the enemy's dry dock within a- few miles of the harbotir which they blockaded. Alongside the pier Japanese transports now in one week disgorge an amount of freight larger than the total that was ever landed from Russian bottoms. Dalny is busy — busier than Do Witte ever imagined in the fondest moments of his illusion that business could be created by Government order. The first boom passed as quickly as that of a Western mining town when the pay dirt suddenly runs out — the pay dirt in this case being the money spent on buildings, quays, and equipment. Not shanties, but substantial residences and godowns remained. Now Dalny booms again. The residences and godowns are once more occupied. Had" there been no Dalny the Japanese would have had to lighter their supplies to the bare shores of old Junk Bay, with no railroad branch from the Manchurian. line to carry them inland. In the second boom, as in the first, every day's work done is another nail in the coffin of the Imperial ambitions of which this dream city was the crowning satire. Dalny was a Klondyke— a Klondyke with- . out gold — of which the Government was the sole promoter.

It would be cruel to remind a Russian who visits Dalny to-day of the halcyon fatuities of eighteen months ago, when he boasted to high heaven. His puniahment has been bitter if his repentance has not kept pace with its swiftness. And many Russians do visit Dalny. They came as prisoners. In all eighty thousand of them have passed through — a number in excess of the total of Russian emigration to Eastern Siberia and Manchuria in the last ten years. r

• The bulk of , • the Japanese supplies crowded to the roofs of the warehouses and rising in pyramids over a space of two or three acre* in the open, is impressive until you contemplate the size of the stomach to be fed. Every day three or four or five hundred thousand men — no foreigner knows the actual number — must have their breakfasts, their dinners and their suppers-. These they.expect from the commissariat, as a matter of course, that they on their part will fight to the death. A steady stream of food which flows northward from Dalny is divided and sub-di-vided until it .finally reaches the cookpots of a thousand' companies. " " The transport' which carried me from Moji to Dalny was. of 6000 tons and Japanese built. It is not surprising that her skipper much prefers-the regular Seattle passenger run. "We had aboard some two thousand fresh troops. As we left our anchorage in Mojii an incoming transport

with wounded cheered us. And afar out in the Corean straits, f op*; fisHepmen, 'in. a small boat tossed on a choppy sea, stood -up in the cold wind and waved their coolie towels to those so augustly blessed as to have the honour to fight for their Emperor. The soldiers of the new army are not of the same type as those whom *I followed across the Yalu a little less than a year ago — the- men of the regular standing forces, and those who had been only a short time away -from the- colours called back to the ranks. Their officers were of the Academy; the regular finished pattern. The junior officers on the Kagu Maru were cadet candidates or raised from the ranks after the ,severe training of the actual war. Many of the men were in the thirties. Their figurdes had lost the erectness of the drill-ground; they yore bent and knotted by the work of farm and shop. With their officers we disembarked them into lighters which put them ashore at the other side of the bay from Dalny — a two weeks' tramp over the road to Mukden before them.

Only officers who are convalescents returning to their posjts- at the front and others for special reasons ride on the train. The , railroad, once very Ruisian, is now very Japanese. ' On a disused tiding* at the station a»e> three- or four discarded Russian flat-cars. These monsters, with a gauge of five feet, seemed to belong to some prehistoric race of giants. Mn their place run toy cars, with a gauge of three feet six inches. If the Japanese were no better at soldiering than they are at railroading, they would never have taken Southern Manchuria. On this score honors are easy for the, Russians. Although the Japanese have had the railroad as far as Liao-Yang in their possession for six months, they are running only three trains each way a day. The Russians are running twelve from St. Petersburg. It is here that yo\i touch the vital point of Japan's military weakness, [t goes back to industrialism — to money. Under the whin of war a land with our resources could have had four tracks and a maze of sidings at every station. But these three trains, arrive on time. There is no waste, due to haste— never in" things Japanese. Courage with her rather than material is cheap. RAILROAD TRAVEL TO MANCHURIA.

Attached to each train is a third-class car such as you find on the rural, roads in Japan. Across each window-pane is a painted white line to prevent the residents of the country districts who are unusod to glass, cutting their faces and injuring tho" Emperor's . property .at the same time. The time{. required for the journey to Liaoyang is '^twenty-four hours. You sit up all day and night — that is, you do when you do not fall off the seat, which is about the "breadth of a sheet of note-paper. With his legs under him, home fashion, a Japanese officer is able to perch himself much like the balancing rock which, makes tourists travel. But if he node he too falls • like any common mortal.

The cold, if not -the, breadth of the seats, makes sleep impossible. At this season of the year in Manchuria the sun is remotely but not intimately warm, and as soon as twilight comes your nostrils spout steam. ' My interpreter described tho journey as a "terrible voyage." Ho probably spoke with a' view to the motion. There were no springs on the car; the road bed was lumpy. All foreigners agreed that we were probably spending the night of the months -of campaigning to come, when exercise makes the ground a soft bed and there are no false comforts to mock you. Yet thatiride \a one which most of the officers of the armies of the world would gladly make; for it leads to a spectacle without the purview of personally conducted tours. O,ur speed averaged about a mile every five minutes. The remainder of the time we spent 'on sid- • ings, awaiting the down trains, which never came empty at £his period of the progress of the war whSri th% pursuit was already delivering its finishing blows on 'Kuropatkin's scattered -legions in the battle of Mukden. As a matter of economy, if not of comfort, rations two hundred miles from Dalny are too valuable to allow of a prisoner being kept long at the front. From our car window it seemed as we reviewed the whole of the beaten army become helpless peasanfayJ'again. ■ All the novelty captives home to' Japan has worn" off. The commissariat fully appreciates- the -feelings of the man with the elephant' on his handß. Tho feeding of the host taken at Port Arthur and the host taken at Mukden has become a serious burden.

"It is Japan that the Russians are colonising, sot Manchuria and Siberia," said a Japanese officer. Unwashed after weeks of fighting in dust-storms, bearing the greasy increment of unbathed winter's living," dwellers in dugouts while they faced the Japanese across the Hun-Ho, the Russians presented an array as un gallant and unprepossessing as the inmates of a Bowery lodginghouse. Until you have looked into their faces, Tintil you know them — the moujik, yesterday armed, to-day, disarmed — still moujik — however attractive you have found Russian officialdom, you cannot know Russia. , .