In the Clutch of the War God written by Milo Hastings
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Milo Hastings >> In the Clutch of the War God
In the Clutch of the War-God
In three parts, from Physical Culture magazine, July - September, 1911.
PART ONE
In the Clutch of the War-God
THE TALE OF THE ORIENT'S INVASION OF THE OCCIDENT, AS CHRONICLED IN
THE HUMANICULTURE SOCIETY'S "HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY"
By Milo Hastings
FOREWORD: In this strange story of another day,
the author has "dipped into the future" and viewed
with his mind's eye the ultimate effect of
America's self-satisfied complacency, and her
persistent refusal to heed the lessons of Oriental
progress. I can safely promise the reader who
takes up this unique recital of the twentieth
century warfare, that his interest will be
sustained to the very end by the interesting
deductions and the keen insight into the
possibilities of the present trend of
international affairs exhibited by the
author.--Bernarr Macfadden.
"Kindly be prepared to absent yourself at a moment's notice." It was
Goyu speaking, blundering, old fool. He was standing in the doorway
with his kitchen-apron on, and an iron spoon in his hand.
"What on earth is the matter?" asked Ethel Calvert, tossing aside
her French novel in alarm, for such a lack of deference in Goyu
meant vastly more than appeared upon the surface.
"I am informed," replied Goyu, gravely, "that there has been an
anti-foreign riot and that many are killed."
"And father?" gasped Ethel.
"He was upon the grain boat," said Goyu.
"But where is he now?"
"I do not know," returned Goyu, locking nervously over his shoulder.
"But I fear he has not fared well--the boat was dynamited--that's
what started the trouble."
With a gasp Ethel recalled that an hour before she had heard an
explosion which she had supposed to be blasting. Faint with fear,
she staggered toward a couch and fell forward upon the cushions.
* * *
When the girl regained consciousness the house was dark. Slowly she
recalled the event that had culminated the uneventful day. She
wondered if Goyu had been lying or had gone crazy. The darkness was
not reassuring--her father always came home before dark, and his
absence now confirmed her fears. She wondered if the old servant had
deserted her. He was a poor stick anyway; Japanese men who had pride
or character no longer worked as domestics in the households of
foreigners.
Ethel Calvert was the daughter of an American grain merchant who
represented the interests of the North American Grain Exporters
Association at the seaport of Otaru, in Hokaidi, the North Island of
Japan. Three years before her mother had died of homesickness and a
broken heart--although the Japanese physician had called it
tuberculosis, and had prescribed life in a tent! Had they not
suffered discomforts enough in that barbarous country without adding
insult to injury?
Ethel was bountifully possessed of the qualities of hothouse beauty.
Her jet black hair hung over the snowy skin of her temples in
striking contrast. Her form was of a delicate slenderness and her
movement easy and graceful with just a little of that languid
listlessness considered as a mark of well-bred femininity. She knew
that she was beautiful according to the standards of her own people
and her isolation from the swirl of the world's social life was to
her gall and wormwood.
The Calverts had never really "settled" in Japan, but had merely
remained there as homesick Americans indifferent to, or unjustly
prejudiced against the Japanese life about them. Now, in the year
1958, the growing anti-foreign feeling among the Japanese had added
to their isolation. Moreover, the Japanese bore the grain merchant
an especial dislike, for every patriotic Japanese was sore at heart
over the fact that, after a century of modern progress, Japan was
still forced to depend upon foreigners to supplement their food
supply.
In fact, they had oft heard Professor Oshima grieve over the
statistics of grain importation, as a speculator might mourn his
personal losses in the stock market.
* * *
For a time Ethel lay still and listened to the faint sound of voices
from a neighboring porch. Then the growing horror of the situation
came over her with anewed force; if her father was dead, she was not
only alone in the world, but stranded in a foreign and an unfriendly
country; for there were but few Americans left in the city.
The girl arose and crept nervously into the dining-room. She turned
on the electric light; everything seemed in order. She hurried over
to Goyu's room, and knocked. There was no answer. Then slowly
opening the door, she peered in--the room was empty and disordered.
Plainly the occupant had bundled together his few belongings and
flown.
Ethel stole back through the silent house and tremblingly took down
the telephone receiver. In vain she called the numbers of the few
American families of the city. Last on the list was the American
Consulate, and this time she received the curt information that the
consul had left the city by aeroplane "with the other foreigners."
The phrase struck terror into her heart. If the European population
had flown in such haste as to overlook her, clearly there was
danger. A great fear grew upon her. Afraid to remain where she was,
she tried to think of ways of escape. She could not steer an
aeroplane even if she were able to obtain one. Otaru was far from
the common ways of international traffic and the ships lying at
anchor in the harbor were freighters, Japanese owned and Japanese
manned.
Ethel looked at her watch--it was nine-twenty. She tiptoed to her
room.
An hour later she was in the street dressed in a tailored suit of
American make and carrying in her hand-bag a few trinkets and
valuables she had found in the house. Passing hurriedly through
quiet avenues, she was soon in the open country. The road she
followed was familiar to her, as she had traveled it many times by
auto.
For hours she walked rapidly on. Her unpracticed muscles grew tired
and her feet jammed forward in high-heeled shoes were blistered and
sore. But fear lent courage and as the first rays of the morning sun
peeked over the hill-tops, the refugee reached the outskirts of the
city of Sapporo.
Ethel made straightway for the residence of Professor Oshima, the
Soil Chemist of the Imperial Agricultural College of Hokiado--a
Japanese gentleman who had been educated and who had married abroad,
and a close friend of her father's. As she reached the door of the
Professor's bungalow, she pushed the bell, and sank exhausted upon
the stoop.
Some time afterward she half-dreamed and half realized that she
found herself neatly tucked between white silk sheets and lying on a
floor mattress of a Japanese sleeping-porch. A gentle breeze fanned
her face through the lattice work and low slanting sunbeams sifting
in between the shutters fell in rounded blotches upon the opposite
straw matting wall. For a time she lay musing and again fell asleep.
When she next awakened, the room was dimly lighted by a little
glowing electric bulb and Madame Oshima was sitting near her. Her
hostess greeted her cordially and offered her water and some fresh
fruit.
Madame Oshima was fully posted upon the riots and confirmed Ethel's
fears as to the fate of her father.
[Illustration: "But have I lost my figure?" inquired the lithe
Madame Oshima.]
"You will be safe here for the present," her hostess assured her.
"Professor Oshima has been called to Tokio; when he returns we will
see what can be done concerning your embarking for America."
Madame Oshima was of French descent but had fully adopted Japanese
customs and ways of thinking.
As soon as Ethel was up and about, her hostess suggested that she
exchange her American-made clothing for the Japanese costume of the
time. But Ethel was inclined to rebel.
"Why," she protested, "if I discarded my corsets I would lose my
figure."
"But have I lost my figure?" inquired the lithe Madame Oshima,
striking an attitude.
To this Ethel did not reply, but continued, "And I would look like a
man," for among the Japanese people tight-belted waists and flopping
skirts had long since been replaced by the kimo, a single-piece
garment worn by both sexes and which fitted the entire body with
comfortable snugness.
"And is a man so ill-looking?" asked her companion, smiling.
"Why, no, of course not, only he's different. Why, I couldn't wear a
kimo--people would see--my limbs," stammered the properly-bred
American girl.
"Why, no, they couldn't," replied Madame Oshima. "Not if you keep
your kimo on."
"But they would see my figure."
"Well, I thought you just said that was what you were afraid they
wouldn't see."
"But I don't mean that way--they--they could see the shape of my--my
legs," said Ethel, blushing crimson.
"Are you ashamed that your body has such vulgar parts?" returned the
older woman.
"No, of course not," said Ethel, choking back her embarrassment.
"But it's wicked for a girl to let men know such things."
"Oh, they all know it," replied Madame Oshima, "they learn it in
school."
At this the highly strung Ethel burst into sobs.
"There, there now," said her companion, regretting that she had
spoken sarcastically. "I forget that I once had such ideas also.
We'll talk some more about it after while. You are nervous and
worried now and must have more rest."
The next day Madame Oshima more tactfully approached the subject and
showed her protege that while in Rome it was more modest to do as
the Romans do; and that, moreover, it was necessary for her own good
and theirs that she attract as little attention as possible, and to
those that recognized her Caucasian blood appear, superficially, at
least, as a naturalized citizen of Japan.
So, amid blushes and tears, protestations and laughter, Ethel
accepted the kimo, or one-piece Japanese garment, and the outer
flowing cloak to be worn on state occasions when freedom of bodily
movement was not required. Her feather-adorned hat was discarded
altogether and her ill-shapen high-heeled boots replaced by airy
slippers of braided fiber.
Her rather short stature and her hair--which fortunately enough was
black--served to lessen her conspicuousness, especially when dressed
in the fashion followed by Japanese girls; and with the leaving off
of the use of cosmetics and the spending of several hours a day in
the flower garden even her pallid complexion suffered rapid change.
It was about a fortnight before Professor Oshima returned from
Tokio. Upon his arrival Ethel at once pleaded with him to be sent to
America, but the scientist slowly shook his head.
"It is too late," he said; "there is going to be a war."
Thus it happened that Ethel Calvert was retained in the Professor's
family as a sort of English tutor to his children, and introduced as
a relative of his wife, and no one suspected that she was one of the
hated Americans.
* * *
The trouble between Japan and the United States dated back to the
early part of the century. It was deep-seated and bitter, and was
not only the culmination of a rivalry between the leading nations of
the great races of mankind, but a rivalry between two great ideas or
policies that grew out in opposite directions from the age of
unprecedented mechanical and scientific progress that marked the
dawn of the twentieth century.
The pages of history had been turned rapidly in those years. The
United States, long known as the richest country, had also become
the most populous nation of the Caucasian world--and wealth and
population had made her vain.
But with all her material glory, there was not strength in American
sinews, nor endurance in her lungs, nor vigor in the product of her
loins. Her people were herded together in great cities, where they
slept in gigantic apartment houses, like mud swallows in a sand
bank. They overate of artificial food that was made in great
factories. They over-dressed with tight-fitting unsanitary clothing
made by the sweated labor of the diseased and destitute. They
over-drank of old liquors born of ancient ignorance and of new
concoctions born of prostituted science. They smoked and perfumed
and doped with chemicals and cosmetics--the supposed virtues of
which were blazoned forth on earth and sky day and night.
The wealth of the United States was enormous, yet it was chiefly in
the hands of the few. The laborers went forth from their rookeries
by subway and monorail, and served their shifts in the mills of
industry.
In turn, others took their places, and the mills ground night and
day.
Even the farm lands had been largely taken over by corporate
control. Crops on the plains were planted with power machinery. The
rough lands had all been converted into forests or game preserves
for the rich. Agriculture had been developed as a science, but not
as a husbandry. The forcing system had been generally applied to
plants and animals. Wonder-working nitrogenous fertilizers made at
Niagara and by the wave motors of the coast made all vegetation to
grow with artificial luxury. Corn-fed hogs and the rotund carcasses
of stall-fed cattle were produced on mammoth ranches for the
edification of mankind, and fowl were hatched by the billions in
huge incubators, and the chicks reared and slaughtered with scarcely
a touch of a human hand. And all this was under the control of
concentrated business organization. The old, sturdy, wasteful farmer
class had gone out of existence.
Only the rich who owned aeroplanes could afford to live in the
country. The poor had been forced to the cities where they could be
sheltered _en masse_, and fed, as it were, by machinery. New York
had a population of twenty-three millions. Manhattan Island had been
extended by filling in the shallows of the bay, until the Battery
reached almost to Staten Island. The aeroplane stations that topped
her skyscrapers stood, many of them, a quarter of a mile from the
ground.
As the materially greatest nation in the world, the United States
had an enormous national patriotism based on vanity. The larger
patriotism for humanity was only known in the prattle of her
preachers and idealists. America was the land of liberty--and
liberty had come to mean the right to disregard the rights of
others.
In Japan, too, there had been changes, but Japan had received the
gifts of science in a far different spirit. With her, science had
been made to serve the more ultimate needs of the race, rather than
the insane demand for luxuries.
The Japanese had applied to the human species the scientific
principles of heredity, nutrition and physical development, which in
America had been confined to plants and animals. The old spirit of
Japanese patriotism had grown into a semi-religious worship of
racial fitness and a moral pride developed which eulogized the
sacrifice of the liberties of the individual to the larger needs of
the people. Legal restrictions of the follies of fashion in dress
and food, the prohibition of alcohol and narcotics, the restriction
of unwise marriages, and the punishments of immorality were
stoically accepted, not as the blue laws of religious fanaticism,
but as requisites of racial progress and a mark of patriotism.
And while Japan showed no signs of the extravagant wealth seen in
America, she was far from being poor. She had gained little from
centralized and artificial industry, but she had wasted less in
insane competition and riotous luxury.
But in Japanese life there was one unsolved problem. That was her
food supply. Intensive culture would do wonders and the just
administration of wealth and the physical efficiency of her people
had eliminated the waste of supporting the non-productive, but an
acre is but a small piece of land at most, and Japan had long since
passed the point where the number of her people exceeded the number
of her acres. A quarter of an acre would produce enough grain and
coarse vegetables to keep a man alive, but the Japanese wanted eggs
and fruit and milk for their children; and they wanted cherry trees
and chrysanthemums, lotus ponds and shady gardens with little
waterfalls.
[Illustration: In the nineteenth month of the war, the emblem of the
Rising Sun was hoisted over Manila.]
Now if the low birth rate that had resulted when the examinations
for parenthood were first enforced had continued, Japan would not
have been so crowded, but after the first generation of marriage
restriction the percentage of those who reached the legal standard
of fitness was naturally increased. The scientists and officials had
from time to time considered the advisability of increasing the
restrictions--and yet why should they? The Japanese people had
submitted to the prohibition of the marriage of the unfit, but they
loved children; and, with their virile outdoor life, the instinct of
procreation was strong within them. True, the assignable lands in
Japan continued to grow smaller, but what reason was there for
stifling the reproductive instincts of a vigorous people in a great
unused world half populated by a degenerate humanity?
So Japan was land hungry--not for lands to conquer, as of old, nor
yet for lands to exploit commercially, but for food and soil and
breathing space for her children.
Among opponents of Japanese racial expansion, the United States was
the greatest offender. Japanese immigration had long since been
forbidden by the United States, and American diplomats had more
recently been instrumental in bringing about an agreement among the
powers of Europe by which all outlets were locked against the
overflowing stream of Asiatic population.
Indeed, America called Japan the yellow peril; and with her own
prejudices to maintain, her institutions of graft and exploitation
to fatten her luxury-loving lords and her laborers to appease, she
was in mortal terror of the simple efficiency of the Japanese people
who had taken the laws of Nature into their own hands and shaped
human evolution by human reason.
As Commodore Perry had forced the open door of commerce upon Japan a
century before, so Japan decided to force upon America the
acknowledgment of any human being's right to live in any land on
earth. She had tried first by peaceful means to secure these ends,
but failing here and driven on by the lash of her own necessity,
Japan had come to feel that force alone could break the clannish
resistance of the Anglo-Saxon, who having gone into the four corners
of the earth and forced upon the world his language, commerce and
customs, now refused to receive ideas or citizens in return.
And thus it came to pass that the West and the East were in the
clutch of the War-God. No one knew just what the war would be like,
for the wars of the last century had been bluffing, bulldozing
affairs concerning trade agreements or Latin-American revolutions.
There had been no great clash of great ideas and great peoples.
The harbors of the world were filled with huge, floating,
flat-topped battleships, within the capacious interiors of which
were packed the parts of aeroplanes as were the soldiers of the
Grecian army in their wooden horse at Troy, for assembling and
launching them. But the engines of warfare which men had repeatedly
claimed would make war so terrible as to end war, had failed to
fulfill anticipations. The means of defense and the rules of the
game had kept pace with the means of destruction. The flat tops of
the warships, which served as alighting platforms for friendly
planes, were heavily armored against missiles dropped from
unfriendly ones. The explosion of a bomb on top of a plate of steel
is a rather tame affair, and guns sufficient to penetrate armor
plate could not be carried on air-craft. The big guns of
battleships, which had for a time grown bigger and bigger, had now
gone quite out of use, for the coming of the armored top had been
followed by the toad-stool warship, which had a roof like an
inverted saucer, and was provided with water chambers, the opening
of the traps of which caused a sudden sinking of the vessel until
the eave dipped beneath the water level and left exposed only the
sloping roof from which the heaviest shot would glance like a bullet
from the frozen surface of a pond.
The first two years of war dragged on in the Pacific. American grain
was of course cut off from Japan and the government authorities
ordered the people to plow up their flower gardens and plant food
crops.
The Americans had too much territory to protect to take the
offensive and their Pacific fleet lay close to Manila, where, with
the help of land aviation forces, they hoped to hold the possession
of the islands, which according to the popular American view was
supposed to be the prize for which the Japanese had gone to war.
The test of the actual warfare proved several things upon which
mankind had long been in doubt. One of these was that, with all the
expert mechanism that science and invention had supplied, the
personal equation of the man could not be eliminated. Aviation
increased the human element in warfare. To shoot straight requires
calm nerves, but to fly straight requires also agility and
endurance.
The American aeroplanes were made of steel and aluminum, and when
they hit the water they sank like lead, but the Japanese planes were
made of silk and bamboo, and their engines were built with multiple
compartment air tanks and after a battle the Japanese picked up the
floating engines and placed them, ready to use, in inexpensive new
planes.
* * *
In the nineteenth month of the war, Manila surrendered, and the
emblem of the rising sun was hoisted throughout the Philippine
Islands. The remnant of the American fleet retreated across the
Pacific, and the world supposed that the war was over.
But Japan refused the American proposals of peace, which conceded
them the Philippines, unless the United States be also opened to
universal immigration. And so it was that when Japan, in addition to
accepting the Philippines, demanded the right to settle her cheap
labor in the United States, the American authorities cut short the
peace negotiation and began concentrating troops and battleships
along the Pacific Coast in fear of an invasion of California.
* * *
With Ethel Calvert's adoption into Professor Oshima's family there
came a great change in her life. At first, she accepted Japanese
food and Japanese clothes as the old-time prisoner accepted stripes
and bread and water. But her captivity proved less repulsive than
she expected and she was soon confessing to herself that there was
much good in Japanese life. Professor and Madame Oshima were not
talkative on general topics but the books on the shelves of the
Professor's library proved a godsend to the awakening mind of the
young woman. Indeed, after a mental diet of French and English
fiction upon which Ethel had been reared, the works on science and
humaniculture, the dreams of universal brotherhood, the epics of a
race in its conquests of disease and poverty were as meat and drink
to her eager, hungry mind.
As the war went on, the horror of it all grew upon her. She read
Howki's "America." She didn't believe it all, but she realized that
most of it was true. She wondered why her people were fighting to
keep out the Japanese. She marvelled that the Japanese who had
adopted such lofty ideals of race culture could find the heart to go
to war. She wished she might be free to go to the government
officials at Tokio and Washington to show them the folly of it all.
Surely if the American statesmen understood Japanese ideals and the
superiority of their habits and customs for the production of happy
human beings, they would never have waged war to keep them out of
the States.
* * *
"In three days we leave Japan," said Professor Oshima, as he sat
down to dinner one evening in the early part of April, 1960.
"All?" asked Komoru, the Professor's secretary.
"We four," replied Oshima, indicating those at the table, "the
children will stay with my mother. I'll need your assistance, and as
for Miss Ethel, she cannot well stay here, so I have had you two
listed. Although it's a little irregular, I am sure it will not be
questioned, for I know more about American soils than any other man
in Japan."
Ethel glanced apprehensively at Komoru. She had never quite
understood her own attitude toward that taciturn young Japanese whom
she had seen daily for two years without hardly making his
acquaintance. She admired him and yet she feared him.
Professor Oshima was saying that she had been "listed" with Komoru
for some great journey. What did it mean? What could she do? Again
she looked up at the secretary; but far from seeing any trace of
scheme or plot in his enigmatical countenance, she found him to be
considering the situation with the same equanimity with which he
would have recorded the calcium content of a soil sample.
As for Professor and Madame Oshima, they seemed equally unruffled
about the proposed journey, and not at all inclined to elucidate the
mystery. Experience had taught the younger woman that when
information was not offered it was unwise to ask questions, so when
the Professor busied himself with much ransacking of his pamphlets
and papers and his wife became equally occupied with overhauling the
family wardrobe and getting the children off to their grandmother's,
Ethel accepted unquestionably the statement that she would be
limited to twenty kilograms of clothing and ten kilograms of other
personal effects, and lent assistance as best she could to the
enterprise in hand.