FROM THE YALU TO PORT ARTHUR.
From the Yalu to Port Arthur : a Personal Record. By William Maxwell, lately Special Correspondent of the Standard, now of the Daily Mail. (Hutchinson and Co. 16s. net.)—Mr. Maxwell brings to the compilation of his record of the Manchurian Campaign many special qualifications. The most notable of these is his terse and graphic style ; the next is his large previous experience of wars and the reputation which he deservedly acquired as the special correspondent of the Standard on the Nile and in Ladysmith. Nor is it an empty boast which Mr. Maxwell makes when he tells us in his preface that he alone of all the war correspondents, European, American, or Japanese, was present at every engagement in which General Kuroki took part from the Yalu to the Shaho, and also at the final act in the tragedy at Port Arthur. Mr. Maxwell acknowledges a special debt of gratitude to General Fujii, Kuroki's Chief of the Staff, and in point of fact he was more in that astute soldier's confidence, and saw and beard more of what was actually going on, than any other foreigner, whether Military Attaché or Press correspondent. The natural result of this quite exceptional combination of opportunity and ability is a very interesting volume, the attraction of which is still further enhanced for the lay reader by the skilful use which Mr. Maxwell has made of his kodak, and for the military student by the studies of the Russian and Japanese Armies which were issued by the Intelligence Departments of the rival Armies previously to the outbreak of war. Only the tardiness of its publication, due no doubt to the writer's long absence in India on behalf of the Daily Mail, will prevent this volume from being quite as successful as any of its predecessors. To the military reader, however, the measure of his expectations will, we fear, be the measure of his dis- appointment. Here was one war correspondent at least who had seen everything that there was to see, whose extensive previous experience had surely given him the eyes with which to appreciate a strategical or tactical situation, and from whose former record as a writer a really valuable military report might have been hoped for. How it has come about we do not know, but Mr. Maxwell's volume has no more significance for the pro- fessional student of war than any of the large library of books that have appeared before it. It has failed to bring its author into the rare company of the great military historians. Mr. Maxwell is a born journalist, others are born soldiers. But the soldier who, like Caesar, is his own war correspondent is the rarest of all human prodigies, and when he does appear, in the British Army at any rate, Authority, by some strange freak of jealousy or punctiliousness, forbids him to give the public the benefit of his experience. In our need we turn to the war correspondent, and, perhaps unjustly, are disappointed to find that he acknowledges his own limita- tions. Mr. Maxwell certainly does so ; he claims for his book no more than the title of a personal record. Although there is valuable information scattered up and down in his pages, it is deliberately given in small doses, and the rest is personal record or fine writing. While, therefore, his book may not justify our expectations, it at least justifies its title. It has been written for the moral benefit and delectation of the reading public, and it is, on its merits, fully entitled to achieve the success to which it aspires. After all, it may bo that Mr. Maxwell is right. He reminds us that " our forefathers happily knew not the law of military science that judges the strength of an enemy by its size. They were conscious of another factor that cannot be expressed in figures, in differences of arma- ment, or even in the genius of commanders. This factor is
the spirit of the army without which discipline is but blind obedience, and courage the mere absence of fear." Mr. Maxwell bears full testimony to this spirit among the soldiers of Japan—Bushido, the way of the knights—which "always wins in the last ten minutes because the enemy will not stay long enough." In their mobilisation schemes and their reckoning of the numerical and geographical strength of their enemy the General Staffs of the world are often too apt to overlook that most im- portant of all elements which make for victory,—the spirit and character and personal idiosyncrasies of the man behind the rifle. Yet the determination of this factor is, as Mr. Maxwell reminds us, one of the first duties of military science. So it is that his most valuable chapters are those which illtistrate the working of the Japanese spirit, in hours of suffering and mortal pain (chap. 14), upon the children (chap. 44), and in the inci- dents of battle. In the telling of these the writer rises far above the level of the mere personal record on the one hand, or of the "appreciations " of the scientific Staff Officer on the other, witness the moving short story, entitled "Comrades at Last," with which Mr. Maxwell brings his impressions to a close. But the history of the Manchurian Campaign has yet to be written.
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