More and more the thought was borne upon him during July and August that the coming big battle would bring to him a change of fortune--if only a change from one desolation to another. He felt that his war-service was nearing its end. He did not believe that Liaoyang was to end the war, but he thought it would close the campaign for the year; and he planned to conclude his own campaign with a vivid intimate portrait of the battle. Meanwhile he hung afar from the Russian and Japanese lines, and little Pingyang had a fire lit for him and a table spread when he rode in from his reconnoissance. Late in August, when the artillery began, Routledge crossed to the south bank of the Taitse with a pair of good horses, and left them about two miles to the west of the city with a Pingyang servant who had proven trustworthy. On the dawn of the thirtieth he made a wide detour behind Oku, nearly to Nodzu’s lines, and watched the battle from Sha peak--one of the highest points of the range. He had studied Liaoyang long through the intricate Chinese maps; and as the heights had cleared the fighting-field for Bingley, so now did Routledge grasp the topography from his eyrie during that first day of the real battle. Similarly also, he hit upon Kuroki’s flank movement as the likeliest strategy of the Japanese aggression, and he came to regard it as a fact before starting for the free cable at Wangcheng the following night. This day netted nothing in so far as the real battle color was considered. That night he closed up on Oku’s rear, crossing a big valley and climbing a lesser range. Daylight found him in a densely thicketed slope overlooking the city and the Japanese command. In that hot red dawn, he beheld the bivouac of the Islanders--a crowded valley stretching away miles to the east in the fast lifting gloom; leagues of stirring men, the faint smell of wood-smoke and trampled turf, the gray, silent city over the reddened hills, the slaty coil of the river behind. The mighty spectacle gripped the heart of the watcher; and there came to him, with an awful but thrilling intensity, the whole story of the years which had prepared this amphitheatre for blood on this sweet last summer day.... Oppression in Tyrone; treachery in India; the Anglo-Japanese alliance; the Russo-Japanese war--a logical line of cause and effect running true as destiny, straight as a sunbeam through all these huge and scattered events--holding all Asia in the palm of history! Farther back, to the Kabul massacre, was to be traced the red history of this day--the mad British colonel; Shubar Khan!... And what did the future hold? If Russia called the French and Germans to her aid, England, by treaty, was called to the aid of Japan. America might be drawn by the needs of England, or for the protection of her softening cluster of Philippine grapes. Famine in a Tyrone town; a leak in one Tyrone patriot’s brain--and a world-war!...