“The soldier tried to shake him off, but the old man prayed the more.  ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ he moaned.  Then the soldier lifted his gun and shot the old man, and we buried him.

“One who was near to her hour of child-birth was lying in a house.  Alas for her!  One of our young men was working in the field cutting grass.  He was working and had not noticed the soldiers come.  He lifted his knife, sharpening it in the sun.  ‘There is a Eui-pyung,’ he said, and he fired and killed him.  One man, seeing the fire, noticed that all his family records were burning.  He rushed in to try and pull them out, but as he rushed a soldier fired, and he fell.”

A man, whose appearance proclaimed him to be of a higher class than most of the villagers, then spoke in bitter tones.  “We are rebuilding our houses,” he said, “but of what use is it for us to do so?  I was a man of family.  My fathers and fathers’ fathers had their record.  Our family papers are destroyed.  Henceforth we are a people without a name, disgraced and outcast.”

I found, when I went further into the country, that this view was fairly common.  The Koreans regard their family existence with peculiar veneration.  The family record means everything to them.  When it is destroyed, the family is wiped out It no longer exists, even though there are many members of it still living.  As the province of Chung-Chong-Do prides itself on the large number of its substantial families, there could be no more effective way of striking at them than this.

I rode out of the village heavy-hearted.  What struck me most about this form of punishment, however, was not the suffering of the villagers so much as the futility of the proceedings, from the Japanese point of view.  In place of pacifying a people, they were turning hundreds of quiet families into rebels.  During the next few days I was to see at least one town and many scores of villages treated as this one.  To what end?  The villagers were certainly not the people fighting the Japanese.  All they wanted to do was to look quietly after their own affairs.  Japan professed a desire to conciliate Korea and to win the affection and support of her people.  In one province at least the policy of house-burning had reduced a prosperous community to ruin, increased the rebel forces, and sown a crop of bitter hatred which it would take generations to root out.

We rode on through village after village and hamlet after hamlet burned to the ground.  The very attitude of the people told me that the hand of Japan had struck hard there.  We would come upon a boy carrying a load of wood.  He would run quickly to the side of the road when he saw us, expecting he knew not what.  We passed a village with a few houses left.  The women flew to shelter as I drew near.  Some of the stories that I heard later helped me to understand why they should run.  Of course they took me for a Japanese.

All along the route I heard tales of the Japanese plundering, where they had not destroyed.  At places the village elders would bring me an old man badly beaten by a Japanese soldier because he resisted being robbed.  Then came darker stories.  In Seoul I had laughed at them.  Now, face to face with the victims, I could laugh no more.