To appreciate how great the honor was it will be necessary to explain two conditions: First, wood on the peninsula here is worth its weight in cash. The country is not wooded to begin with, which is the cause of another difficulty the army has to face--scarcity of water. About the villages there are usually a few poplars, but the mountains have nothing but Scotch heather and the plains only Ventura County bean pods and San Joaquin wheat fields. Then two great armies have boiled water and savagely wrangled here for three months, until all the rotten timber of old Manchurian dwellings has gone for firewood. As a consequence a frequent sight is a transport cart with some stubs of spruce tied to the whiffletree, being carried from Dalny, twenty-two miles away. Dried maize stalks are the universal fuel. Cracker boxes sell for a dollar apiece and the other day I found my servant brushing the pencil whittlings from the floor to use for kindling. Second, it was the samurai’s belief that a warrior who sacrificed his life in combat should be honored by cremation on the spot of his vicarious atonement. And the difference between the army of to-day and a samurai clan of a generation ago is far less than the difference between cuirass and bombproof; you can’t wipe out the clinging beliefs of generations in forty years--not in the Orient. It may take hyposcopes and searchlights, wireless telegraphy and machine guns to win victories, but only funeral pyres and Shinto sacrifices will pay for them. 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.