Of this war in detail I knew no more than I should have known had I stayed at home--and it had taken me seven months to learn that it was meant that I should not know more. There can be no quarrel with what was done--only with the way it was done--which was not pretty. Somehow, as Japan sank closer to the horizon, I found myself wondering whether the Goddess of Truth couldn't travel the breadth of that land incog.--even if she played the leading part in a melodrama with a star in her forehead and her own name emblazoned in Japanese ideographs around her breast. I think so. I wondered, too, if in shedding the wrinkled skin of Orientalism, Japan might not have found it even better than winning a battle--to shed with it polite duplicity and bring in the blunt telling of the truth; for if the arch on which a civilization rests be character, the key-stone of that arch, I suppose, must be honesty--simple honesty. Right gladly we struck the backward Trail of the Saxon. Transcriber Notes: Passages in italics were indicated by _underscores_. Small caps were replaced with ALL CAPS. Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is. Errors in punctuations and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted. On page ix, "Liaoyang" was replaced with "Liao-Yang". End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Following the Sun-Flag, by John Fox