FATE and Lord Kitchener are indeed to be congratulated on
their choice of Sir Ian Hamilton as the representative of the Indian Army upon Manchurian battlefields. Others besides Sir Ian will bless the "cutting blasts" which, breathed forth in the Report of the Esher Committee, "swirled through Pall Mall," and wafted the author of this scrap-book to the Far East. As regards the professional aspect of his visit, it is a matter of common knowledge how eagerly expectant the whole Army was of the lessons which he would bring back with him from Manchuria ; and the experience he gained there has already borne good fruit in the altered tactical training which was so marked a feature of the late Army Mauceuvres. Sir Ian has now conferred an additional boon upon us all by allowing us a peep at his private notebook. We might indeed search the whole Army through without - finding such a combination of qualities as this distinguished General brings to the making of his book. Not only is he a soldier revelling, as some old pagan hero would revel, in the grand game of war, but he is poet, humourist, sentimentalist, and descriptive writer as well. The result is that his scrap- book, most fitly so called, is a delightful medley of grave and of gay, of pleasing sentiment and excellent good sense. As a writer Sir Ian reminds us of no one more than Kinglake. The charm of manner in the earlier chapters is the charm of Eothen; in the later chapters, again, the battle-pieces have the rare quality of the History of the War in the Crimea.
Like all the other European representatives and cam- spondents, our General was not allowed to see everything at once. Hence the diplomatic letter indited from Peng- huangcheng, and intended for the eyes of the Japanese authorities even more than for the Chief to whom it was' addressed, which resulted in a gratifying visit from General Fujui, Chief of the Staff to the First Army, and the writer's early translation to the fighting line. Nevertheless, however irritating the period of delay—daring which our cautious allies were doubtless taking stock of Britain's representative both as a soldier and as a man—had he been allowed to go to the front straight, away we should have lost the first half of the book, and therewith more than half of its quite peculiar fascination; and we can therefore afford to be heartily grateful to the authorities who imposed it. Under like irk- some restrictions the war correspondents .became sulky, some of them, we fear, abusive. A war correspondent, says Sir Ian, "like a wolf, does not become really dangerous till he is ravenous." Not so our Staff officer; instead, he spends his time in delighting us with the most charming studies of the Japanese and of Japan. He tells us of the advantages Of a Japanese dinner party—go as you please, eat what you please, and change your seat when you please, a privilege he estimates as worth £50 a year in London—or of passages of gallantry with Miss Flourishing Dragon and the Honourable Miss Sparrow, to which latter lady a British naval officer spoilt a pretty compliment by being a great deal too handy as an interpreter: At another time he is giving us his first impressions of the leading figures of the war—Oyama, Kodama, Fukushima, and the rest—which are perhaps more engaging than discreet. Was it quite prudent of him, for instance, to take the whole world into his confidence about Marshal Oyama and the sponge? Or else it is a description of a Chinese house with which he whiles away the time, the mistress of it "coated with twenty years of dirt, but still not so unattractive as might be imagined " ; the house itself "with awesome things hanging from the ceiling reminding one of the apothecary's shop in Romeo and Juliet. I dare not ask what they are lest I should be told they are my supper,"—the other inmates being cock- roaches which, in comparison with what pass with us under this name, are as a line-of-battle ship to a torpedo-boat, and the "flat fellows" which cause the interpreter to divide the world into two categories, "those whom the Chinese insects devour and those .whom they do not." At other times, again, Sir Ian turns poet. He watches the antics of the frogs in a marsh- A Staff Officer's Scrap-Book during the Busso-Japanese War. By Lieut.- General Sir Ian Hamilton K.C.B. VoL I. With Illustrations, Maps, and Plans. London: Edward Arnold. [18s. net] a succession of passionate love affairs and heroic combats— and reflects how infinitesimal must be the difference between men and frogs in the eyes of the Almighty. "Russians and Japanese struggling for the Motienling—two frogs con- testing for an earthworm, it is all a question- of degree." Or he sits in his little peony garden at Penghuangcheng contemplating les yeux sinistres de la lune, beneath whose "floods of azure light, poured down upon the green- painted roofs and pagodas, these borrow I know not what of mystery and enchantment, until I could believe myself in the city of Aladdin and his wonderful lamp." Even when the real business of his mission has begun, and he is back to the familiar sights and sounds of the battlefield, our General has time to protest against the common theory that war is horrible. Writing of the dead.at the battle of the Heaven- Reaching Pass—the name itself suggests Valhalla and the Valkyries—for the life of him he cannot see the horrors of war. "Is it horrible to see these young heroes, scarcely cold, laid by other heroes beneath the fresh green turf of the Heaven-Reaching Pass ? The death-chamber; the associa- tions; the callous professionals, fill me with awe and even with shrinking. Here all is natural, and if sad, is yet glorious in its sadness." It is good indeed to meet with a British soldier who has himself not lost the old adventurous fighting spirit, the decay of which amongst us he deplores. Like the Samurai himself, Sir Ian knows of many deaths worse than the death in battle with which he has so often stood face to face. Like the Samurai, he is mindful of the traditions of his ancestors, and to him, as to the Japanese, soldier, "the dead lion is one thousand times more enviable than the live dog."
We cannot help feeling that it was due to his own per- sonality, and not so much to his diplomatic letter, to his military reputation, or to the dignity of his official position, that Sir Ian succeeded so comparatively soon in being privileged to see so much of the actual fighting. After all, the little British Army does not enjoy that precedence in the eyes of the world which some of us fondly imagine; of the quite remarkable number of Japanese officers who have com- pleted their military education in Europe, few indeed have thought it worth while to attend the toy manceuvres at Aldershot. But the hearts of our allies must have gone out to a foreign soldier who—as shown by the quotation we have given above, and by the many passages in which he holds up as a shining example to ourselves the transcendent patriotism which, far more than any mere skill in strategical or tactical dispositions, was the cause of the astonishing triumphs of Japan—was so clearly in sympathy with all that they held to be really important in their scheme of life. True, he frankly tells us that, like the Japanese, he had some prejudices to overcome. He is puzzled by their impenetrable reserve : "it is the most exhausting uphill work in the world to get any tangible opinion or indication of character out of Japanese." We cannot imagine that Sir Ian was really baffled by the invariable politeness and extreme suavity of manner of his hosts, for in these en- gaging arts he is himself a past-master ; nor could one who is often skilful at using these as a cloak for his thoughts seriously quarrel with the reserve of the Japanese. At the outset, again, he confesses to a pang, on meeting the first Russian prisoners, to see the white man captive to the Asiatic. But he 'excuses the feeling as instinctive and in- herited perhaps from the Crusades, and declares he must live it down ; and certainly the uneasy feeling passes away directly he is allowed to see these Asiatics fight. Then, indeed, he writes with enthusiam : "We have every reason to feel proud and confident regarding the behaviour of our allies In this fierce little engagement every one, from Captain to private, in the Japanese com- panies knew his duty to himself and his country, and did it like a man, nay more, like an intelligent soldier." The old prejudices are, in fact, of no more real account than the protest of the European man against an excessive rice diet ; the British stomach may be "thoroughly pro-Russian," but the British heart is pro-Japanese. We may at least be certain that the opinion of a General of Sir Ian's standing, frank in its criticism as in its appreciation, will be far more valuable, because more genuine, in the eyes of our allies than pages of the fulsome and ignorant flattery to which we have too often been treated in the daily Press. Whatever the cause, however, the fact remains that from the date of Kuroki's advance upon the Motienling in July, 1904, till his return in the spring of this year, Sir Ian Hamilton saw a vast deal of fighting. The interest of what he has to tell us of the campaign itself is very great, and the value of his clear and eminently readable narrative is much enhanced by Captain Vincent's excellent maps and sketches—the beau-idjal of what such things should be- amd by the photographs with which the volume is well sup- plied. So far as the narrative takes us, it confirms to a very remarkable degree the account with which we were supplied at the time by the Military Correspondent of the Times, and causes us to marvel more than ever at the astonishing accuracy of that wonderful tour de force. But of course it is very much fuller than the Times story could hope to be, while the gallant author is undoubtedly right in claiming that in some respects these words by an eyewitness will represent the details of what he, or his officers, actually saw far more accurately than any later official history. "On the actual day of battle naked truths can be picked up for the asking; by the following morning they have already begun to get into their
uniforms." •
We are not going to discount the reader's enjoyment of Sir Ian's account of what he saw of Kuroki's earlier battles ; it is sufficient to say that the story of these could not have found a better teller. As regards his estimate of the Japanese in battle, their bravery is proverbial ; their stubborn power of endurance is also well known. But these virtues, vital as they are to the fighting value of all troops, could not have produced the marvellous Japanese infantry. What impresses Sir Ian most of all about this infantry is the intelligence and power of initiative in all ranks, and more particularly in.the rank-and-file. It is clear from Sir Ian's account that the higher leading of the Japanese armies, though good, was not unprecedented in the annals of war. At times there was an excess of caution ; at other times, as at Port Arthur, there was over-confidence. There was an inelasticity in the schemes of the Headquarters Staff which cropped up at the battle of the Yalu, and pre- ferred " the digestion of the joy caused by victory" to a relent- less pursuit. In short, superior as they were to the Russians in this as in all other respects, it was not with their Head- quarters Staff that the Japanese have astonished the world. On the contrary, success in many a smart struggle was more often due to the intelligent seizure by individuals or by comparatively small parties of men—the 5th Company of the 24th Regiment at Hamaton, the 6th Company of the 16th at Gebato—of points of tactical vantage on their own initiative, and to the stubborn resolve to hold them against all comers. Sir Ian avoids odious comparisons, though he hints that the British Army is too often what he euphemisti- cally calls "at its second best," and he refuses to discuss the ethics of surrender. But it is not altogether without reference to recent expisodes that he tells of many instances where small parties of Japanese were suddenly overwhelmed by a thousand Russians, and never thought for an instant -of surrender ; and he feels that "it should be clearly understood that, ceteris paribus, the surrender type of army may be expected to be handsomely thrashed by the no-surrender type whenever and wherever they may meet."
Sir Ian promises in a second volume to advance with Kuroki "through conflicts fiercer and bloodier far,"—to wit, the titanic engagements round Yentai and the Shah°. • We shall await the fulfilment of his promise with more than ordinary anticipations.
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