“Let us charge the Chinese with our bayonets,” cried So.  The Japanese captain joyfully assented.  But Takezoi now asserted his authority.  He pulled from his pocket his Imperial warrants giving him supreme command of the Japanese in Korea and read them to the captain.  “The Emperor has placed you under my command,” he declared.  “Refuse to obey me and you refuse to obey your Emperor.  I command you to call your men together and let us all make our way back to the Legation.”  There was nothing to do but obey.

While the Chinese were still hammering at the front gate, the Japanese and reformers crept quietly around by the back wall towards the Legation.  The people in the building, hearing this mass of men approach in the dark, unlit street, thought that they were the enemy, and opened fire on them.  A Japanese sergeant and an interpreter were shot down on either side of General So.  Not until a bugle was sounded did the Japanese inside the building recognize their friends.  The party staggered in behind the barricades worn out.  So, who had not closed his eyes for four days, dropped to the ground exhausted and slept.

He did not awake until the next afternoon.  He heard a voice calling him, and started up to find that the Japanese were already leaving.  They had resolved to fight their way to the sea.  “I do not know who it was called me,” said So, afterwards.  “Certainly it was none of the men in the Legation.  I sometimes believe that it must have been a voice from the other world.”  Had he wakened five minutes later, the mob would have caught him and torn him to bits.

The Japanese blew up a mine, and, with women and children in the centre, flung themselves into the maelstrom of the howling mob.  The people of Seoul were ready for them.  They had already burned the houses of the Progressive statesmen, Kim, Pak, So and Hong.  They tried, time after time, to rush the Japanese circle.  The escaping party marched all through the night, fighting as it marched.  At one point it had to pass near a Chinese camp.  A cannon opened fire on it.  At Chemulpo, the coast port twenty-seven miles from Seoul, it found a small Japanese mail steamer, the Chidose Maru.  The Koreans who had escaped with the party were hidden.  Before the Chidose could sail a deputation from the King arrived, disclaiming all enmity against the Japanese, but demanding the surrender of the Koreans.  Takezoi seemed to hesitate, and the reformers feared for the moment that he was about to surrender them.  But the pockmarked captain of the Chidose drove the deputation from the side of his ship, in none too friendly fashion, and steamed away.

The reformers landed in Japan, expecting that they would be received like heroes, and that they would return with a strong army to fight the Chinese.  They did not realize that the revolutionist who fails must look for no sympathy or aid.