It was a hot early autumn when I reached Chee-chong.  The brilliant sunshine revealed a Japanese flag waving-over a hillock commanding the town, and glistened against the bayonet of a Japanese sentry.  I dismounted and walked down the streets and over the heaps of ashes.  Never have I witnessed such complete destruction.  Where a month before there had been a busy and prosperous community, there was now nothing but lines of little heaps of black and gray dust and cinders.  Not a whole wall, not a beam, and not an unbroken jar remained.  Here and there a man might be seen poking among the ashes, seeking for aught of value.  The search was vain.  Chee-chong had been wiped off the map.  “Where are your people?” I asked the few searchers.  “They are lying on the hillsides,” came the reply.

Up to this time I had not met a single rebel soldier, and very few Japanese.  My chief meeting with the Japanese occurred the previous day at Chong-ju.  As I approached that town, I noticed that its ancient walls were broken down.  The stone arches of the city gates were left, but the gates themselves and most of the walls had gone.  A Japanese sentry and a gendarme stood at the gateway, and cross-examined me as I entered.  A small body of Japanese troops were stationed here, and operations in the country around were apparently directed from this centre.

I at once called upon the Japanese Colonel in charge.  His room, a great apartment in the local governor’s yamen, showed on all sides evidences of the thoroughness with which the Japanese were conducting this campaign.  Large maps, with red marks, revealed strategic positions now occupied.  A little printed pamphlet, with maps, evidently for the use of officers, lay on the table.

The Colonel received me politely, but expressed his regrets that I had come.  The men he was fighting were mere robbers, he said, and there was nothing for me to see.  He gave me various warnings about dangers ahead.  Then he very kindly explained that the Japanese plan was to hem in the volunteers, two sections of troops operating from either side and making a circle around the seat of trouble.  These would unite and gradually drive the Koreans towards a centre.

The maps which the Colonel showed me settled my movements.  A glance at them made clear that the Japanese had not yet occupied the line of country between Chee-chong and Won-ju.  Here, then, was the place where I must go if I would meet the Korean bands.  So it was towards Won-ju that I turned our horses’ heads on the following day, after gazing on the ruins of Chee-chong.

It soon became evident that I was very near to the Korean forces.  At one place, not far from Chee-chong, a party of them had arrived two days before I passed, and had demanded arms.  A little further on Koreans and Japanese had narrowly escaped meeting in the village street, not many hours before I stopped there.  As I approached one hamlet, the inhabitants fled into the high corn, and on my arrival not a soul was to be found.  They mistook me for a Japanese out on a shooting and burning expedition.