Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville

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СКАЧАТЬ Mail’s writers and editors assailed critics of Japan’s wartime policy, all the while praising the Japanese armies’ successes in China and Korea and disparaging the barbarity and backwardness of the Chinese troops (on this point at least a view and vocabulary it shared with Western writers). Though de Guerville was never formally employed by the Japan Weekly Mail, that his account of the fall of P’yŏngyang was published by that paper effectively demonstrates that his opinions of the Japanese army and its conduct of the war were quite in line with official outlooks, which Brinkley (the paper’s owner and editor) was at pains to portray.59 De Guerville himself admitted that he sent a copy of his first New York Herald dispatch to Viscount Mutsu, the Japanese foreign minister, so praising was it of Japanese conduct.60

      De Guerville was well aware of the danger of a perceived pro-Japanese bias, especially since he was being accommodated on Japanese troop transports to and from the battlefront, while other foreign correspondents ate their hearts out in Tokyo or Nagasaki, so near yet so far from the action. At one point de Guerville is compelled to emphasize that all he relates about the war in his dispatches is “fact, pure and simple, and without the least colouring.”61 Such coziness with quasi-official Japanese press organs would prove harmful to de Guerville’s reputation later, when de Guerville’s detractors would insinuate he had received bribes from Japanese officials in exchange for his relatively glowing praise of the Japanese war effort.62 As we shall see, Creelman would accuse de Guerville of still worse.

      If de Guerville was slightly “colored” by his preferential treatment—and a sincere love for Japan and its own mission civilisatrice in Asia—we should not consider him a mere pawn of the Japanese. Only days after the fall of P’yŏngyang—and by his account suffering from malaria and dysentery—de Guerville opted to head south to Seoul, the Korean capital, to gauge affairs among the political leaders in Korea. From P’yŏngyang he caught passage to Chemulpo aboard a transport carrying wounded soldiers, and from there by palanquin to Seoul, some thirty miles up the Han River. It was de Guerville’s second trip to Seoul (his first trip in 1892 is recounted in rather comic terms in Au Japon). As the Korean king was apparently ailing, de Guerville instead met with the Taewŏngun, father of the king and perhaps the most powerful—certainly the most forceful, with the possible exception of Korea’s Queen Min—figure in Korean politics, the king himself notwithstanding. With de Guerville, the Taewŏngun exhibited his natural perspicacity. Over cigars the royal patriarch posed many probing questions on the recent military action at P’yŏngyang, not trusting in the reports supplied by the Japanese.63

      Following the fall of P’yŏngyang and the brief trip to Seoul, de Guerville returned to Japan, again courtesy of a Japanese troop ship. Back in Hiroshima, de Guerville toured a Red Cross hospital (which he recounts in Chapter 18 of Au Japon). In early November, de Guerville departed Japan with elements of the Japanese Second Army under the command of General Oyama for the second major offensive of the war: the drive into Chinese Manchuria and the seizure of its crown jewel, Port Arthur.

      James Creelman and the Port Arthur Controversy

      Port Arthur—modern day Lushun—sits at the very tip of China’s Liaodong Peninsula, a triangle of land that juts south from Manchuria into the northern Yellow Sea. Considering its strategic location commanding the sea lanes between China and Korea (a position made more valuable by its linkage to the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway in 1903), its conquest was viewed as essential by Japanese war planners if Chinese—and Russian—influence in Korea was to be decisively checked. In fact, so strategic was the Liaodong Peninsula in the geopolitics of the region that Russian, French, and German pressure after the war would force victorious Japan to retrocede it to China, a check the Japanese would not soon forget nor forgive. Not surprisingly, Port Arthur and the Liaodong Peninsula would play pivotal roles in the Russo-Japanese War a decade later.

      In late November. 1894, much of the world was stunned to receive news that the heavily fortified Port Arthur, the “Gibraltar of the East,” had fallen within twenty-four hours of its siege and bombardment by the Japanese Second Army under General Oyama. However, word of a massacre of Port Arthur’s defenders and inhabitants at the hands of Japanese troops did not follow immediately upon the city’s fall on November 21. The dispatches of Creelman first broke this story when they reached the offices of his employer the New York World on December 21. The accounts of other correspondents such as Frederic Villiers of the London Black and White and Thomas Cowen of The Times soon found their own way into Western living rooms.

      The reports of Creelman proved the most sensational in their details, and not surprisingly garnered the widest attention. The New York World broke the news in alarming headlines: “Massacre at Port Arthur. At Least Two Thousand Helpless People Butchered by Japanese Soldiers. Streets Chocked with Mutilated Bodies of Men, Women, and Children While the Soldiers Laughed.”64 As Creelman described it, “Unarmed men, kneeling in the streets and begging for life, were shot, bayoneted, or beheaded. The town was sacked from end to end, and the inhabitants were butchered in their own houses.”65

      Such accounts were on the whole backed up by Villiers and Cowen, and to a much lesser extent by a few American and British military attachés who also witnessed the fall of the city. Villiers reemphasized the massacre by publishing a long account of it entitled “The Truth about Port Arthur” in an American periodical of March 1895, largely in response to the massacre’s detractors, epitomized by de Guerville.66 The most prominent accounts of a Port Arthur “massacre” are those surviving in Creelman’s book of memoirs, On the Great Highway, and in the reminiscences (almost certainly specious) of James Allan in his slender tome, Under the Dragon Flag. Almost totally forgotten in the debate surrounding the Port Arthur massacre has been the voice of de Guerville, though he was certainly far from silent at the time.

      As Au Japon tells us, and period records confirm, de Guerville, like Creelman and Villiers, was on the scene at the fall of Port Arthur and its subsequent occupation by Japanese troops. Like Stephen and Cora Crane in Greece in 1897, de Guerville even rescued a dog on the battlefield, a puppy that he duly named “Faithful”—Chiu-ji. A period photograph captured de Guerville comforting the pup on the Chinese front. The dog would go on to play a starring role in de Guerville’s New York lectures regarding his Sino-Japanese War experiences.

      In sharp contrast to his fellow correspondents, de Guerville steadfastly denied that any massacre had occurred at Port Arthur. De Guerville’s defense of Japan did not wait until 1904 and the publication of Au Japon. His vocal challenge of the sensationalist accounts of other Western journalists was deferred only by his return passage to America from the now-Japanese Port Arthur in December, 1894.

      As soon as he arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia, de Guerville began to hear the stories circulating of Japanese atrocities at Port Arthur, namely those from the pen of Creelman, Hearst’s man in the Far East. De Guerville immediately wired off his own firsthand account of the city’s fall to the San Francisco Chronicle, which gave it top headline.

      Figure 6. De Guerville’s headlining account of the fall of Port Arthur in the San Francisco Chronicle. 1894.

      De Guerville continued his journalistic riposte as soon as he reached New York City: “Great was my surprise when, upon my arrival in New York . . . I read the sensational stories published in some newspapers about the awful atrocities and frightful massacres committed by the Japanese at the capture of the Chinese stronghold [Port Arthur].”67 De Guerville then proceeded to defend the behavior of the Japanese troops, boldly and emphatically denying that the Japanese “mutilated a single body,” much less that “junks loaded with people were sunk.” In fact, most Chinese commoners de Guerville witnessed “were so happy, so pleased with the Japanese that they would beg of them to remain and to defend them against the awful oppression of their officials, mandarins, officers, and soldiers.” It was a contrast indeed to such accounts as those of Creelman, or even of Villiers, who wrote СКАЧАТЬ