Tokyo, June 1st:—Who pays for the war? Here are a few telling one another that they are the bankers. It is at a Sunday concert in the fifth city of the world, a wilderness of sheds flimsy over two million human beings. In the midst rise vast acres of country solitude and rest. A tangle of cryptomeria and fir shade puzzled paths winding through furse of elderberry and hawthorn. Haze and vista spread away past hills and forests, past hothouses and lawns of firm packed earth. A lake dimples a vale, as a smile the cheek of a lovely woman, and its pebbly bed reflects the laughter of the sun. About it fluttering flags, new and gay, festoon the sentiment of all nations, one—Russia—excepted. Thousands, tens of thousands, dot the paths, are merry with the lake, instill from the greenery a quiet joy. Hundreds of voices, atune with instruments, filter the fragrant air with music. Beyond the fence is squalor so dense three sen a month pays for a dwelling; here is leisure so luxurious the senses float in dreams. In a corner a moldy Diabutsu, the calm of Nirvana on his face, nods on a leaf of lotus; “out of the slime itself spotless the lotus grows.”

Tokyo is beautiful—brunette and beautiful. This first day of June she has risen past the cherry blossom, past the wistaria, through the freshness of spring to the full radiance of summer. Pink, like the fleece of clouds in the sky, and heliotrope, like the first flush of sunrise, are past. Now green, rich and deep from a soil of winnowed sustenance, mantles her in Oriental splendor—a splendor simple and elegant with the wealth of the east, shadowy and sunny with the blow of Japan. It folds her about with the assuring clasp of a lover, and she responds with the shy, voluptuous acceptance of a maid o’erwon.

This is a summer of content, a dream of gayety, of insouciance. A million babies gurgle with the baby glory of it. A million mothers coo and coddle at the eternal freshness of it. But here, to-day, in this wilderness of terraced garden, in this bouquet of smiling East, have assembled the daintiest mothers in the land—the peeresses. The son of one is a major-general. Others have captains, colonels, aides-de-camp to tug their heartstrings with fear, to inflate their pulses with pride. Have we not penetrated to the very viscera of war’s nature when we find the mothers of its heroes thus assembled?

One of these mothers, a Princess, passes. Should she buy that delicate lace and lingerie, so charming with all that’s feminine, from boxes labeled and graded, she would choose misses’ sizes, so tiny is she. A toy of a woman, demure and pretty; yet put up by the finest of Parisian makers. The dotted mulle of her veil sweeps slightly away, scallop-like, from a face thin with aristocratic aquilinity. Behind that face, with wax complexion and eyes of bead-like purity, scintillates a mind bred on intellectual fashions. She speaks with the cultured English of Vassar. She knows Omar Khayyam as well as any. The major-general is her son. Beside her walks another son, his gold-rimmed spectacles completing a fine picture of esthetic pride. His silk tie is the envy of every Japanese not bred abroad, for his clothes are from Piccadilly. The garden is full of these and such as these. They are giving a concert for the relief fund.

The music! It is the choicest that the sensuous imagination of man has built out of rules and dreams. “William Tell” thunders its diapason from the hid footholds of the earth. The audacious march of Leroul spits out its song of triumph. “America” murmurs a swelling hymn. A Weber overture sparkles, ascends, leaping crags, whirling diaphanous gayety through cloud and shadow.

Then a Japanese aria, weird with the rapt genius of the land, molten with Malay poise, floats a mystery of ancient longing through the broad day’s haze. It weaves through fir and cryptomeria, assaults the hearts of thousands, and, triumphant, storms the heavens; is lost in the faint sky, a sky blue with the dreaminess Whistler would have etched in immortal phantasy.

The Relief Fund gets fifty sen apiece from these peeresses with Piccadilly sons, brothered by major-generals. And all other manner of folk, down to the little sister, carrying on her back a future soldier of the emperor, daughter of a rice cleaner in a three-sen dwelling beyond the gate, thus while the pleasant hours away.

On the heights of Tokyo they are paying for the war.

Here are the heights of Nanshan on the 27th of May. It is 5.20 o’clock in the morning and seas of sunlight are hid in a fog across Korea Bay. The fog lifts, and as the day bursts in along the whole line the banner of the Rising Sun is planted on the Russian ramparts of Kinchow. Since midnight the artillery of the third division has been hammering from the right, off toward Talienwan. At intervals the infantry of the first and fourth divisions charge from the front whence they have been advancing for two days. It is the second army of 60,000 Japanese and the investment of Port Arthur has begun. The railway has long been cut. Now Kinchow is taken and the Russians are helter-skelter Dalnyward.

Here, then, is the theater, scene of such sublime assault and conquest as the eye of history has not looked upon since Grant stood on Orchard Knob and watched his thin blue line scale Missionary Ridge; the hill of Nanshan, key to the advance on Port Arthur. Turned in its lock Nanshan confronts the Japanese, impregnable, ghastly grim in the fresh sunlight. We may well pause to inspect the position. It rises, formidable, the height of a church steeple, from a narrow plain. The edges of this plain dip sheer down a hundred feet of slippery rock to the two bays—Talienwan and Kinchow. From bay to bay is scarce three miles. From Nanshan we may see, through a glass, the bay of Kinchow. Riding on it are four of the enemy’s gunboats. Their shells are flying over our heads. They have not yet found the range. To the left in Talienwan, a Russian gunboat, guarding four transports, is enfilading the third Japanese Division and supporting a regiment of its own men flanking the base of the hill. The hill has been cleared of underbrush and terraced, divided into four intervals and on these intervals trenches built. One hundred and ten cannon are there manned. At the bottom are barbed-wire fences, Spanish trocha, not like the fences of a cow pasture, but dovetailed and doubled so that if a man breaks through one he stumbles into the oblique, bloody arms of another.

This the Japanese are to assault before noon. There is no timber, only a few bushes and rock the size of a bull’s head, hard things to wade through, but no defense. They must cross the open plain, 500 yards, in full range of those one hundred and ten cannon, smash the barbed wire, climb the terraced plateaus where they will be picked off like rabbits in a shooting gallery, assault the trenches and finally take the heights. To take one trench seems heroic achievement, four an impossibility. Impossible but for one thing—orders. The navy was ordered at the outset of the war “to exterminate” the Russian fleet, this Second Army went out to “take Port Arthur.” And they obey orders—these Japanese. So why contemplate that to attempt that Hill of Nanshan is folly, to take it madness?

The Russians wait. All is silence—the awed hush preceding carnage, terror, death. Waiting they sing, not light tunes heard so bright and gay on the heights of Tokyo to-day; chansons of France, Italy’s peerless compositions, America’s solemn new-born hymn or Japan’s flute note weird and penetrating. From deep bass throats and barytones majestic rolls organ music of fierce, wild grandeur, as through some vast forest aisle the harmonies of winds and woods and waves unite in mighty pæans, celebrating to the august fastnesses glories yet fresh to man. Schools, traditions, customs civilized have not touched the fiber of that central gauntness, shining up through the spirit of the singers, like dreamland on a tragedian’s afterglow. Siberia with all its wildness, with all its immensity, where aback the mammoth wallowed; the Caucasus tossing aloft primeval ecstasy the long slant of the steppes, and Russia, bold, defiant, revengeful; all rolled in one, are in that note. The clothes of the men are heavy, ungainly, ill-made, nothing serviceable but the boots, which are well adapted for running away. The faces—sodden with ignorance and vice—reflect only stolid endurance; no initiative, no individuality. Only through the song shines the soul.

The singing ceases. There is a dreadful hush. It is eleven o’clock. Off toward Kinchow, which is hid by a fringe of low fir trees, something is moving. Soon hunchbacked dabs can be seen bobbing across the furze, leaping over the stones, pausing, searching, then onward dashing. The firing begins. Two machine guns—only ten of the one hundred and ten are quick-firers—lead off. You can easily tell them. The sound is little, like the popping of a dozen beer bottles in quick succession. Then silence. The strip of cartridges is torn aside, another inserted, again a dozen pops. So it goes until the ten are brought into action and there is no intermission. Flicks of dust are kicked up by the shells, most falling short, a few passing on through the trees. One of the bobbing dabs falls, the rest press on. Now the gunners are getting the range; the shells pick off more hunchbacks.

But there is no stop. This is not reconnoisance; it is battle. The skirmishers deployed and well up, now the main line advances. Out from the trees on a dog-trot springs a battalion. It is going to try that griddle of death. The men dash valiantly on, agile fellows, intense as fanatics. Now the hundred field cannon come into play. Most are Chinese of ancient date, some are modern, rim-firing. Smoke fills the plain. It is difficult to see. The torrent of lead is on. Snatched through the noise of firing you can hear great cries; they grow spasmodic, then cease. The firing slows. Soon only the automatic pops are heard. The smoke drifts off. The foremost man is there on the wire, gutted. He hangs, a frightful mass, limp on the barbs. Here and there a poor fellow is crawling, as you have seen some worm trodden on vainly seek its hole. Not a man of the battalion has survived. A thousand brave, faithful soldiers are gone. So this is civilized warfare!

Yes. They now see it was folly to attempt the hill of Nanshan. So they open up with artillery, a whole regiment of it, infinitely superior to the sixty antiquated cannon, the forty Canet pieces and the ten quick-firers. For an hour they rain that leaden taunt back at dubious Nanshan, who austerely barks out a thin reply, coughs a wheezy growl and ceases. Meanwhile the thousands in leash, battle inflamed, recall that the dead battalion are Osacca men, and, being merchants from the Japanese Chicago, had been hailed as cowards by sons of samurai. A company of Osaccans went down, stuck, like pigs, in the Kinshu Maru. But after Nanshan the pork packers of Osacca will hold their heads decently high with the boldest.

Toward three o’clock the second advance is ordered. Half the third division and a part of the first, nearly 15,000 men, close in. They get across the plain, dropping a few hundreds, and smash the wire. Drunkenly dizzy, flaring with the lust of battle, the vanguard tears clothes, limbs, and tosses on the treacherous barbs.

They have no scissors, no choppers, no axes. Worse, they have no time. They keep on at the fence, gashing shins, stripped of impediments, down to the instincts and passions, all discipline gone, every vestige of civilization lost. Now they are through, half-naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the very muzzles of the first entrenchment they surge, waver and break like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast. It seems no tide or wind can melt that precipitous front. But only seems. A rest, a terrible breathing spell, the slow, wounded gasp of an animal in pain, and again the intrepid Japanese lash their haggard forms against that low trench. Glory! They win! The Rising Sun glares in the afternoon as it greeted the sun of that morning above Kinchow.

Yet only a quarter of the battle is won. Another rest. Another assault. Again and again they go up. Nine times they hammer away, muskets to jowl, heads down like bulls in the ring, with one thought; nay! not a thought, an instinct—to win or die.

The officers are picked off by sharpshooters, as flies are flicked from a molasses jug. Two colonels are killed, the list of done captains swells. Then, through the haze, commanding the first division, looms a prince of the blood, the general whose peeress-mother is but this afternoon smiling serene on Tokyo heights. He below Kinchow, smoke-stained, grimed with death, hears the artillery report that ammunition is about gone, but one round left and Nanshan still Russian. Defeat stares Prince-General in the face. Retreat, disgrace seems right ahead. And orders were to “take Port Arthur.” Smiling, he tells the gunners to wait. “Charge again,” he says.

So up they go, for the tenth and last time. At the top more civilized warfare. Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage. Japanese bayonets clash with Russian sabers. Bayonets struck from hands they grasp knives carried suicidally in belts. Thus, hand to hand, they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of centuries sloughed, as a snake his cast-off skin, they spit and chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man.

The Prince-General waits, ready to fire his last round, and retreat, hopeless. It has been a desperate fight—yes, reckless, unparalleled. If lost he loses nobly. “Are you through, General?” his aide asks. “I have just begun my part of the fighting,” he answers. His name is Fushimi—remember it. As he speaks a weak cry goes up—weak because even victory cannot rouse spirits so terribly taxed.

It was a bloody sun going down in Korea Bay that night, but it saw its rising counterpart flaunting above Nanshan, while the Russians were making use of the best part of their apparel, sprinting towards the Tiger’s Tail.

The cost! The fleeing ones left five hundred corpses in the four trenches. The others paid seven times that price—killed and wounded—to turn across the page of the world’s warfare that word Nanshan, in company with two others, perhaps above them—Balaklava and Missionary Ridge.

Now who pays for this war?