"I think I will go wash my hands." That, in Japanese, is: "Te-wo aratte kimasho." Now, what he really has said is literally: "Hands having washed I think I will _come back_." Perhaps then our trouble is that the Japanese tells the truth backward and we can't understand. He might even be fighting that way--say, for an alliance with Russia--and we still should not understand--at least, not yet. IV MAKING FOR MANCHURIA It came at last--that order for the front. On the 18th day of July, the Empress of China swung out of Yokohama Harbor, with eighteen men on board, who had been waiting four months for that order, almost to the very day. During those four months there was hardly a day that some one of those men was not led to believe by the authorities in Tokio that in the next ten days the order would come, and never would the authorities say that during any ten days the order would not come; so that they had perforce to stay waiting in Tokio from the freezing rains of March until the sweltering days of midsummer. Many of those men had been in Japan for five months and more, and yet knew absolutely nothing of the land save of Tokio and Yokohama, which, tourists tell me, are not Japan at all. The matter has been passing strange. We did not come over here at the invitation of the Japanese Government, but in simple kindness the authorities might have said, with justice: "This is the business of Japan and of Russia alone. Over here we do not recognize the Occidental God-given right of the newspapers to divulge the private purposes of anybody. We believe that War Correspondents are harmful to the proper conduct of a war. Frankly, we don't want you, and to the front you can never go." No just complaint could have been made to this. We should have seen beautiful Japan and, our occupation gone for this war, at least, we could have struck the backward trail of the Saxon--the correspondent for some trade of peace, the artist to "drawing fruits and flowers at home." And all would have been well. Or: "You gentlemen came over here at your own risk. You create a new and serious problem for us and we don't know how we are going to solve it. If you wish to stay on at your own risk until we have made up our minds--you are quite welcome." For some this would have made an early homeward flight easy. Or again: "Yes, we do mean to let you go to the front, but when we cannot say. While you are here, however, we shall be glad to have you see our country. Just now we are quite sure that you will not go for at least ten days: so you can travel around and come back. If we are sure that you can't go for another ten days, you may go away again and come back--and so on until you do leave." Even this they might have said: