Wood-impoverished, the army cannot honor its humble dead; _i. e._, not immediately; wait till Port Arthur falls--but of that later. It is different with generals. As a daimyo in feudal times received the forehair of all his clan as a final offering, so to-day a general gone gets the camp fires of his soldiers. Last night the brigade which had lost its intrepid head ate its rice dinner cold and went without hot water for its tea. All the mess fires were contributed to make a pyre worthy the deceased.
Just as the sun went down, at the bottom of Namicoyama, whose heights war had swept but a day before, in sight and sound of the grim proofs of his last victory--emplaced batteries and occupied field hospitals--the body of the major-general was given to the flames, while his men in the trenches above sternly held the Russians at bay. Occasional cannon rent the air, infantry popping cracked in the stillness, myriad tent lights twinkled up into the moonlight; the blaze shot up, waned, crackled and died down. The midnight shift of sentries presented silent arms. A donkey brayed out of the valley. Miles to the left a howitzer boomed. The ocean lay black like ink beyond a fringe of shore gray under the moon. A line of coolies passed with bamboo stretchers carrying piteously mangled forms--the day’s harvest to which the coolies had been called from their maize and their millet. Embers gleamed from the brigade’s mess fire. Two orderlies stepped up with a wooden box, kicked the embers away, and placed in it some ashes.
A week hence a family in Tokyo--a quiet, dry-eyed Japanese lady with two half-grown boys--will receive the wooden box. It will be borne a few days later through the streets of the capital on a gun carriage to Aoyama Cemetery. There, after two white-robed priests have said a few words over it, a long shelf in a narrow vault will receive the wooden box. The widow will have notification by special messenger that his August Highness, the Emperor, sees fit to remember the illustrious deeds of the departed by conferring upon him--who is not dead, but who has passed on to wait--the order of the Rising Sun, and, in the absence of the husband the wife will be permitted to receive the pension attached thereto. Japanese history will record that Major-General Yamamoto, after a valiant career in the service of his Emperor, gave up his life at the Battle of Namicoyama, in Manchuria, Sept. 24th, 1904.