MANCHURIA, August 18th, 1904.
We still are inside this old Chinese town. It has rained
for five days, and this one is the first in which we could go
abroad. Unless you swim very well it is not safe to cross one
of these streets. We have found an old temple and some of us
are in it now. It is such a relief to escape from that
compound and the rain. This place is full of weeds and pine
trees, cooing doves and butterflies. The temples are closed
and no one is in charge but an aged Chinaman. We did not come
here to sit in temples, so John and I will leave in a week,
battle or no battle. The argument that having waited so long
one might as well wait a little longer does not touch us. It
was that argument that kept us in Tokio when we knew we were
being deceived weekly, and the same man who deceived us there,
is in charge here. It is impossible to believe anything he
tells his subordinates to tell us, so, we will be on our way
back when you get this. I am well, and only disappointed.
Had they not broken faith with us about Port Arthur we would
by now have seen fighting. As it is we will have wasted six
months.
Love to Dad, and Chas and Nora and you.
DICK.
[Image missing: R. H. D. and John Fox in Manchuria, 1904.]
In writing of his decision to leave the Japanese army,
Richard, after his return to the United States, said:
"On the receipt of Oku's answer to the Correspondents we left
the army. Other correspondents would have quit then, as most
of them did ten days later, but that their work and Kuroki, so
far from being fifty miles north toward Mukden, as Okabe said
he was, was twenty miles to the east on our right preparing
for the, closing-in movement which was just about to begin.
Three days after we had left the army, the greatest battle
since Sedan was waged for six days.
"So, our half-year of time and money, of dreary waiting,
of daily humiliations at the hands of officers with minds
diseased by suspicion, all of which would have been made up to
us by the sight of this one great spectacle, was to the end
absolutely lost to us. Perhaps we made a mistake in judgment.
As the cards fell we certainly did.
"The only proposition before us was this: There was
small chance of any immediate fighting. If there were
fighting we would not see it. Confronted with the same
conditions again, I would decide in exactly the same manner.
Our misfortune lay in the fact that our experience with other
armies had led us to believe that officers and gentlemen speak
the truth, that men with titles of nobility, and with the
higher titles of General and Major-General, do not lie. In
that we were mistaken."
Greatly disappointed at his failure to see really
anything of the war, much embittered at the Japanese over
their treatment of the correspondents, Richard reached
Vancouver in October. As my father was seriously ill he came
to Philadelphia at once and divided the next two months
between our old home and Marion.
On December 14, 1904, my father died, and it was
the first tragedy that had come into Richard's life, as it was
in that of my sister or myself. As an editorial writer, most
of my father's work had been anonymous, but his influence had
been as far-reaching as it had been ever for all that was just
and fine. All of his life he had worked unremittingly for
good causes and, in spite of the heavy burdens which of his
own will he had taken upon his none too strong shoulders, I
have never met with a nature so calm , so simple, so
sympathetic with those who were weak — weak in body or soul.
As all newspaper men must, he had been brought in constant
contact with the worst elements of machine politics, as indeed
he had with the lowest strata of the life common to any great
city. But in his own life he was as unsophisticated; his
ideals of high living, his belief in the possibilities of good
in all men and in all women, remained as unruffled as if he
had never left his father's farm where he had spent his
childhood. When my father died Richard lost his "kindest and
severest critic" as he also lost one of his very closest
friends and companions.
During the short illness that preceded my brother's
death, although quite unconscious that the end was so near,
his thoughts constantly turned back to the days of his home in
Philadelphia, and he got out the letters which as a boy and as
a young man he had written to his family. After reading a
number of them he said: "I know now why we were such a happy
family. It was because we were always, all of us, of the same
age."
