osses, roughly painted
on paper in red ink, were obtained from the elder of the Roman Catholic
church there. A week before some Japanese soldiers had arrived and burned a
few houses. They spared one house close to them waving a Christian cross.
As soon as the Japanese left nearly every one pasted a cross over his door.

At first Yan-gun seemed deserted. The people were watching me from behind
the shelter of their doors. Then men and boys crept out, and gradually
approached. We soon made friends. The women had fled. I settled down that
afternoon in the garden of a Korean house of the better type. My boy was
preparing my supper in the front courtyard, when he suddenly dropped
everything to rush to me. "Master," he cried, highly excited, "the
Righteous Army has come. Here are the soldiers."

In another moment half a dozen of them entered the garden, formed in line
in front of me and saluted. They were all lads, from eighteen to
twenty-six. One, a bright-faced, handsome youth, still wore the old uniform
of the regular Korean Army. Another had a pair of military trousers. Two of
them were in slight, ragged Korean dress. Not one had leather boots. Around
their waists were home-made cotton cartridge belts, half full. One wore a
kind of tarboosh on his head, and the others had bits of rag twisted round
their hair.

I looked at the guns they were carrying. The six men had five different
patterns of weapons, and none was any good. One proudly carried an old
Korean sporting gun of the oldest type of muzzle-loaders known to man.
Around his arm was the long piece of thin rope which he kept smouldering as
touch-powder, and hanging in front of him were the powder horn and bullet
bag for loading. This sporting gun was, I afterwards found, a common
weapon. The ramrod, for pressing down the charge, was home-made and cut
from a tree. The barrel was rust-eaten. There was only a strip of cotton as
a carrying strap.

The second man had an old Korean army rifle, antiquated, and a very bad
specimen of its time. The third had the same. One had a tiny sporting gun,
the kind of weapon, warranted harmless, that fathers give to their fond
sons at the age of ten. Another had a horse-pistol, taking a rifle
cartridge. Three of the guns bore Chinese marks. They were all eaten up
with ancient rust.

These were the men--think of it--who for weeks had been bidding defiance to
the Japanese Army! Even now a Japanese division of regular soldiers was
man