The great military hospital at Hiroshima comprised eight divisions, with a total capacity of seventeen thousand beds. In the largest of the divisions a visitor merely passing the foot of each bed would walk six miles. Nearly all of these beds were now occupied, and Red Cross nurses from the United States passed to and fro among the sufferers, side by side with their dark sisters of the Orient, in gentlest ministration.
Fred Larkin had soon recovered sufficiently to be removed to private quarters, from which, pale and emaciated, but with indomitable pluck and returning energy, he emerged a few weeks later. Letters from the _Bulletin_ recalled him to Massachusetts, and he unwillingly obeyed, realising that the great naval battle was close at hand. He read the news of the destruction of the Russian fleet the day after his arrival in San Francisco.
In a small room--one of those set apart for officers--a Japanese soldier lay on a cot bed, gazing languidly out of the open window toward the east. Walls, counterpane, and the single garment--a kimono--which the patient wore, were of spotless white. Beside the bed sat a little nurse, fanning the sick man, who now and then spoke to her in his own language, though so quietly that his attendant could scarcely hear him.
The sick man was silent for a few moments. Then his eye fell upon a streak of gold which fell upon the wall.
Again he was silent. When he spoke once more he turned his head toward the girl and looked into her eyes.
"And--you must go--you must leave me, Hana?"
"Yes," she answered sorrowfully. "I am ordered. The naval hospital at Sasebo is crowded with new patients from the great sea battle. There are not nurses enough. I am ordered to go to-day."
"If you find Oto--tell him--Oshima sends his love by O-Hana-San. Tell him Oshima--is--ordered home! _Banzai dai Nippon!_"
His eyes closed. O-Hana-San bent over him, then hurried for the surgeon on duty.
"He will not waken," said that official. "He was a brave man."
Two days later a grey-haired man passed slowly out of the door of the villa that had been the home of Oshima's boyhood, in the little town by the sea. He paused beside a red slab which was posted before the house, and on which was written, in Japanese characters, "_Gone to the Front_." Then he stooped painfully and placed beside the first post another, like many in that village, and before other homes, all over Japan. It was black, and bore the simple inscription, "_Bravery Forever_."