Not far in the rear were Red-Cross workers, and the silent figure of the brave officer was borne swiftly to a hospital tent, where he partly regained consciousness. He was shot through the body, and the surgeons shook their heads as they examined the wound. Still, there was a chance for his life, and Oshima was despatched to the coast, the first part of the way in an ambulance, then by railway. At Antung he remained until the hospital ship was ready to sail with its sad freight of torn, pierced, and mangled soldiers. The staunch vessel--painted white, with a broad green stripe along its hull, like the sash of a military surgeon--conveyed him safely to Hiroshima, where he was placed in a cot near an eastern window. Kind hands ministered to him, and gentle faces bent over him. As he recovered full possession of his senses he saw one sweet face that was familiar to him. "Hana!" he whispered. "O-Hana-San, is it you?" Day after day the battle raged in Manchuria. Shells began to fall in Moukden, and in an hour the city was a scene of ghastly confusion and panic. Hospital trains, loaded to the doors with wounded and dying, pulled out of the station, the groans and shrieks of the sufferers mingling with the clank and clatter of the iron wheels. Men and women rushed to and fro in the muddy streets--for this was the first week in March, and a few warm days had turned snow and ice to mire, ankle deep--and fought each other in a frenzied fear as they struggled for places in carts and railway cars, with such of their personal effects as they could carry in their arms. Thieves and drunken soldiery looted shops and private houses boldly. It was rumoured that the awful Japanese line was closing in on the north, and that the railroad would be cut. This added to the panic. Dazed, mud-stained, deafened with the roar of battle, half senseless with intoxication, thousands of stragglers and camp-followers staggered through the city, joining the mad rush. "To the north! To the north!" was the one thought, the one wild cry. Emerging from the densely populated town, the throng of refugees fled up the valley. Wherever the defile narrowed, the crowd crushed together, screaming, pushing, fighting their way on; through back alleys of little villages on the route; along the railroad track, separating to allow a train to roar through their midst, shaking frenzied fists at it as it passed and left them behind; flinging away food, clothing, household treasures to which they had thus far clung mechanically; shouted at by retreating battalions whose progress they blocked, and cursed by artillery-men as the horses sprang forward over the clogged and miry road, or crashed through the low willows and over mud-walls surrounding the hovels of the natives; still on and on, through the black night and the chill grey dawn, the frantic multitude streamed northward toward Harbin and safety.