War is to-day the final arbiter in the affairs of men, and it is as yet the final test of the worth-whileness of peoples.  Tested thus, the Korean fails.  He lacks the nerve to remain when a strange army crosses his land.  The few goods and chattels he may have managed to accumulate he puts on his back, along with his doors and windows, and away he heads for his mountain fastnesses.  Later he may return, sans goods, chattels, doors, and windows, impelled by insatiable curiosity for a “look see.”  But it is curiosity merely—­a timid, deerlike curiosity.  He is prepared to bound away on his long legs at the first hint of danger or trouble.

Northern Korea was a desolate land when the Japanese passed through.  Villages and towns were deserted.  The fields lay untouched.  There was no ploughing nor sowing, no green things growing.  Little or nothing was to be purchased.  One carried one’s own food with him and food for horses and servants was the anxious problem that waited at the day’s end.  In many a lonely village not an ounce nor a grain of anything could be bought, and yet there might be standing around scores of white-garmented, stalwart Koreans, smoking yard-long pipes and chattering, chattering—­ceaselessly chattering.  Love, money, or force could not procure from them a horseshoe or a horseshoe nail.

“Upso,” was their invariable reply.  “Upso,” cursed word, which means “Have not got.”

They had tramped probably forty miles that day, down from their hiding-places, just for a “look see,” and forty miles back they would cheerfully tramp, chattering all the way over what they had seen.  Shake a stick at them as they stand chattering about your camp-fire, and the gloom of the landscape will be filled with tall, flitting ghosts, bounding like deer, with great springy strides which one cannot but envy.  They have splendid vigour and fine bodies, but they are accustomed to being beaten and robbed without protest or resistance by every chance foreigner who enters their country.

From this nerveless, forsaken Korean land I rode down upon the sandy islands of the Yalu.  For weeks these islands had been the dread between-the-lines of two fighting armies.  The air above had been rent by screaming projectiles.  The echoes of the final battle had scarcely died away.  The trains of Japanese wounded and Japanese dead were trailing by.

On the conical hill, a quarter of a mile away, the Russian dead were being buried in their trenches and in the shell holes made by the Japanese.  And here, in the thick of it all, a man was ploughing.  Green things were growing—­young onions—­and the man who was weeding them paused from his labour long enough to sell me a handful.  Near by was the smoke-blackened ruin of the farmhouse, fired by the Russians when they retreated from the riverbed.  Two men were removing the debris, cleaning the confusion, preparatory to rebuilding.  They were clad in blue.  Pigtails hung down their backs.  I was in China!