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covered his face with his hands. The end was too terrible. He turned and fled back to the trench. Here he collected his raincoat and water-bottle, and then, with the horrible picture ever before him, went south to collect his thoughts.

The Foreigner was still lost. Fighting had prevented him from rejoining after witnessing the untoward end of the Russian battalion. He found food and lodging for the night with some Buddhist monks, and at daybreak on the following morning, now that the enemy had completely evacuated it, climbed to the nearest position. A Japanese fatigue-party was toiling,-carrying the corpses of their comrades up the slopes. At the top stood Kamimoto. The same old smile, the same pleasant, mild, and friendly Kamimoto. He greeted the Foreigner warmly; but no reference was made between the two to the yesterday.

His men were carrying were carrying corpses up the hill and throwing them into the enemy's trench to mingle with the Russian dead.

"Would it not have been simpler to have burned or buried them at the foot of the rise?" the Foreigner asked in all simplicity.

"Of course; but you must remember that at ten o'clock their excellencies the honourable foreign attachés will come round to see the positions which our infantry won with the bayonet. Therefore, most honourable Foreigner, it were better that you went back to your camp. It would not please any of the staff to know that you had already been here. It is very unfortunate that one so humble as myself should have to request your honourable good self to remove!"

There was a merry twinkle in Kamimoto's eye. But he was expecting an officer from the staff immediately. The

Foreigner made his way down the hillside deep in thought. The speculation uppermost in his mind was whether Kamimoto would have the first field-dressings taken off those corpses.

117

X.

THE FALL OF THE MIGHTY.

TSIN-TAU, September.

THE flag-lieutenant leaned wearily on the rail. It would have been difficult to adequately analyse his thoughts. They were conjured up by the weariness of life which possessed his body, and the fierce despair and utter humiliation which had crushed his soul. The rim of the beam from the search-light on Golden Hill, as it was lighting the water-way for the passage of the last of the battleships, flooded the superstructure of the flagship as she rode at anchor. Yet it was more than the intensity of the unnatural light that blanched the faces of the little group of officers on the bridge. It was not fear,-Russians are

not cowards: besides, the officers of the Russian Pacific Squadron were past fear. It was the utter hopelessness which knowledge of physical incompetency breeds in the vicinity of death. The crestfallen consciousness of impotency that might be seen in the face of an inexpert motorist if the chauffeur suddenly had fainted; but not what one would have anticipated in the faces of men to whom a great nation still looked for the successful shaping of its destinies.

It was a weird scene. Three great white beams of light pierced a background that was otherwise impenetrable in its inky blackness. They focussed their concentration upon one point, and illuminated with dazzling contrasts the gaunt hull and heavy tops of a battleship in their every detail, as with laborious toil it was towed between the artificial sags, legacies of Japanese efforts to obstruct the fairway. In front of it three launches were dragging a mine

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