Yan-gun presented a remarkable sight.  A dozen red crosses waved over houses at different points.  In the main street every shop was closely barricaded, and a cross was pasted on nearly every door.  These crosses, roughly painted on paper in red ink, were obtained from the elder of the Roman Catholic church there.  A week before some Japanese soldiers had arrived and burned a few houses.  They spared one house close to them waving a Christian cross.  As soon as the Japanese left nearly every one pasted a cross over his door.

At first Yan-gun seemed deserted.  The people were watching me from behind the shelter of their doors.  Then men and boys crept out, and gradually approached.  We soon made friends.  The women had fled.  I settled down that afternoon in the garden of a Korean house of the better type.  My boy was preparing my supper in the front courtyard, when he suddenly dropped everything to rush to me.  “Master,” he cried, highly excited, “the Righteous Army has come.  Here are the soldiers.”

In another moment half a dozen of them entered the garden, formed in line in front of me and saluted.  They were all lads, from eighteen to twenty-six.  One, a bright-faced, handsome youth, still wore the old uniform of the regular Korean Army.  Another had a pair of military trousers.  Two of them were in slight, ragged Korean dress.  Not one had leather boots.  Around their waists were home-made cotton cartridge belts, half full.  One wore a kind of tarboosh on his head, and the others had bits of rag twisted round their hair.

I looked at the guns they were carrying.  The six men had five different patterns of weapons, and none was any good.  One proudly carried an old Korean sporting gun of the oldest type of muzzle-loaders known to man.  Around his arm was the long piece of thin rope which he kept smouldering as touch-powder, and hanging in front of him were the powder horn and bullet bag for loading.  This sporting gun was, I afterwards found, a common weapon.  The ramrod, for pressing down the charge, was home-made and cut from a tree.  The barrel was rust-eaten.  There was only a strip of cotton as a carrying strap.

The second man had an old Korean army rifle, antiquated, and a very bad specimen of its time.  The third had the same.  One had a tiny sporting gun, the kind of weapon, warranted harmless, that fathers give to their fond sons at the age of ten.  Another had a horse-pistol, taking a rifle cartridge.  Three of the guns bore Chinese marks.  They were all eaten up with ancient rust.

These were the men—­think of it—­who for weeks had been bidding defiance to the Japanese Army!  Even now a Japanese division of regular soldiers was manoeuvring to corral them and their comrades.  Three of the party in front of me were coolies.  The smart young soldier who stood at the right plainly acted as sergeant, and had done his best to drill his comrades into soldierly bearing.  A seventh man now came in, unarmed, a Korean of the better class, well dressed in the long robes of a gentleman, but thin, sun-stained and wearied like the others.