Soon after dawn the rebel regiments paraded in the streets.  They reproduced on a larger scale the characteristics I had noted among the few men who came to visit me the evening before, poor weapons and little ammunition.  They sent out men in advance before I departed in the morning to warn their outposts that I was an Englishman (really I am a Scots-Canadian, but to them it was all the same) who must not be injured.  I left them with mutual good wishes, but I made a close inspection of my party before we marched away to see that all our weapons were in place.  Some of my boys begged me to give the rebels our guns so that they might kill the Japanese!

We had not gone very far before we descended into a rocky and sandy plain by the river.  Suddenly I heard one of my boys shout at the top of his voice, as he threw up his arms, “Yong guk ta-in.”  We all stopped, and the others took up the cry.  “What does this mean?” I asked.  “Some rebel soldiers are surrounding us,” said Min-gun, “and they are going to fire.  They think you are a Japanese.”  I stood against the sky-line and pointed vigorously to myself to show that they were mistaken.  “Yong guk!” I shouted, with my boys.  It was not dignified, but it was very necessary.  Now we could see creeping, ragged figures running from rock to rock, closer and closer to us.  The rifles of some were covering us while the others advanced.  Then a party of a couple of dozen rose from the ground near to hand, with a young man in a European officer’s uniform at their head.  They ran to us, while we stood and waited.  At last they saw who I was, and when they came near they apologized very gracefully for their blunder.  “It was fortunate that you shouted when you did,” said one ugly-faced young rebel, as he slipped his cartridge back into his pouch; “I had you nicely covered and was just going to shoot.”  Some of the soldiers in this band were not more than fourteen to sixteen years old.  I made them stand and have their photographs taken.

By noon I arrived at the place from which the Korean soldiers had been driven on the day before.  The villagers there were regarded in very unfriendly fashion by the rebels, who thought they had betrayed them to the Japanese.  The villagers told me what was evidently the true story of the fight.  They said that about twenty Japanese soldiers had on the previous morning marched quickly to the place and attacked two hundred rebels there.  One Japanese soldier was hurt, receiving a flesh wound in the arm, and five rebels were wounded.  Three of these latter got away, and these were the ones I had treated earlier in the morning.  Two others were left on the field, one badly shot in the left cheek and the other in the right shoulder.  To quote the words of the villagers, “As the Japanese soldiers came up to these wounded men they were too sick to speak, and they could only utter cries like animals—­’Hula, hula, hula!’ They had no weapons in their hands, and their blood was running on the ground.  The Japanese soldiers heard their cries, and went up to them and stabbed them through and through and through again with their bayonets until they died.  The men were torn very much with the bayonet stabs, and we had to take them up and bury them.”  The expressive faces of the villagers were more eloquent than mere description was.