ompound and the rain. This place is full
of weeds and pine trees, cooing doves and butterflies. The temples are
closed and no one is in charge but an aged Chinaman. We did not come
here to sit in temples, so John and I will leave in a week, battle or
no battle. The argument that having waited so long one might as well
wait a little longer does not touch us. It was that argument that kept
us in Tokio when we knew we were being deceived weekly, and the same
man who deceived us there, is in charge here. It is impossible to
believe anything he tells his subordinates to tell us, so, we will be
on our way back when you get this. I am well, and only disappointed.
Had they not broken faith with us about Port Arthur we would by now
have seen fighting. As it is we will have wasted six months.

Love to Dad, and Chas and Nora and you.

DICK.

In writing of his decision to leave the Japanese army, Richard, after
his return to the United States, said:

"On the receipt of Oku's answer to the Correspondents we left the army.
Other correspondents would have quit then, as most of them did ten days
later, but that their work and Kuroki, so far from being fifty miles
north toward Mukden, as Okabe said he was, was twenty miles to the east
on our right preparing for the, closing-in movement which was just
about to begin. Three days after we had left the army, the greatest
battle since Sedan was waged for six days.

"So, our half-year of time and money, of dreary waiting, of daily
humiliations at the hands of officers with minds diseased by suspicion,
all of which would have been made up to us by the sight of this one
great spectacle, was to the end absolutely lost to us. Perhaps we made
a mistake in judgment. As the cards fell we certainly did.

"The only proposition before us was this: There was small chance of
any immediate fighting. If there were fighting we would not see it.
Confronted with the same conditions again, I would decide in exactly
the same manner. Our misfortune lay in the fact that our experience
with other armies had led us to believe that officers and gentlemen
speak the truth, that men with titles of nobility, and with the higher
titles of General and Major-General, do not lie. In that we were
mistaken."

Greatly disappointed at his failure to see really anything of the war,
much embittered at the Japanese over their treatment of the
correspondents, Richard reached Vancouver in October. As my fat