And so, while many foreign correspondents found themselves distressfully stranded in Japan during the course of hostilities, de Guerville—thanks in great part to his connections nurtured as Honorary Commissioner for the World’s Fair—had an eventful wartime experience. De Guerville was afforded the “privilege” of accompanying the Japanese First Army to P’yŏngyang aboard the troop transport Nagato Maru, “the oldest, slowest, dirtiest” of them all.53 Slow as it may have been, Creelman, who also received permission to accompany Japanese troops to P’yŏngyang, was only allowed to depart after de Gueville and on a later troop transport, as a result arriving there several days after his rival from the New York Herald. De Guerville’s head start would later give rise to serious accusations on the part of Creelman.
The massive walled city of P’yŏngyang, one of Korea’s most important cities, was the primary Chinese stronghold in Korea and its capture was critical to the success of Japanese war plans. At P’yŏngyang, which de Guerville reached following a soggy night’s journey up the Taedong River aboard a Korean sampan, the New York Herald correspondent encountered death and destruction such as he had never witnessed. Approaching the already fallen city by sampan, his senses were assaulted, and overwhelmed, by the stench of rotting corpses, mostly of the city’s fallen Chinese defenders. De Guerville prided himself as the only foreigner to have reported first hand on the fall of P’yŏngyang and took the time to heap almost preternatural praise on the Japanese for the mercy and moderation shown their defeated Chinese counterparts. He also praised the work of the Japanese Red Cross, enthusiastically writing, “If these facts do not call forth the admiration of the world, I am at a loss to know what will do so. I do not see how Japan can be refused the place she rightly claims among the civilized nations of the world.” At the same time de Guerville condemned the brutality and ingratitude of the Chinese, who not only left P’yŏngyang a scorched and ravaged shell but were wholly ungrateful to the Japanese for the kind, even pampered, treatment they received as their prisoners.54
Following a few days in the city of P’yŏngyang de Guerville turned south, curious to visit the Korean capital of Seoul to see if he might secure an interview with the Korean king, as Creelman had done some weeks previous.55 In Chemulpo—which the indefatigable travel writer Isabella Bishop Bird had left only weeks earlier, fleeing the approaching war—de Guerville the journalist found himself the object of an interview by a Japan Weekly Mail correspondent, likely the result of de Guerville’s friendship with that journal’s owner Captain Frank Brinkley (something he reveals in Au Japon). A few days later, de Guerville related his P’yŏngyang experience in fuller detail in a personal article for the Japan Weekly Mail.56
Figure 5. An artist’s rendition of the fall of P’yŏngyang that accompanied de Guerville’s newspaper account. San Francisco Chronicle (19 December 1894).
The Japan Weekly Mail was the most respectable of the English papers in Japan. Founded by the Irishman Frank Brinkley—who at times also served as The Times (London) correspondent in Japan—it was largely pro-government and its war coverage echoed official policy and accounts. Circulation wars were no less intense in Japan than in America of the period, and the Japan Weekly Mail certainly had its rivals and detractors. Prime among these were the Japan Gazette and the Japan Herald (which actually predated the Japan Weekly Mail), whose articles tended to be more sensational and more critical of Japan and its policymakers. Both the Japan Gazette and Japan Herald were unabashed in their disdain for the Japanese and their support for the maintenance of the unequal treaties between Japan and the Western powers. (56) The wife of one diplomat wrote of the Gazette and Herald, “I have stopped reading these rags, which always attack us, or the Home Government, or the Emperor, when news is scarce. I can stand intelligent abuse, or good-natured ignorance, but the two nouns in unqualified conjunction make me tired.”58
Throughout the Sino-Japanese War the Japan Weekly Mail’s writers and editors assailed critics of Japan’s wartime policy, all the while praising the Japanese armies’ successes in China and Korea and disparaging the barbarity and backwardness of the Chinese troops (on this point at least a view and vocabulary it shared with Western writers). Though de Guerville was never formally employed by the Japan Weekly Mail, that his account of the fall of P’yŏngyang was published by that paper effectively demonstrates that his opinions of the Japanese army and its conduct of the war were quite in line with official outlooks, which Brinkley (the paper’s owner and editor) was at pains to portray.59 De Guerville himself admitted that he sent a copy of his first New York Herald dispatch to Viscount Mutsu, the Japanese foreign minister, so praising was it of Japanese conduct.60
De Guerville was well aware of the danger of a perceived pro-Japanese bias, especially since he was being accommodated on Japanese troop transports to and from the battlefront, while other foreign correspondents ate their hearts out in Tokyo or Nagasaki, so near yet so far from the action. At one point de Guerville is compelled to emphasize that all he relates about the war in his dispatches is “fact, pure and simple, and without the least colouring.”61 Such coziness with quasi-official Japanese press organs would prove harmful to de Guerville’s reputation later, when de Guerville’s detractors would insinuate he had received bribes from Japanese officials in exchange for his relatively glowing praise of the Japanese war effort.62 As we shall see, Creelman would accuse de Guerville of still worse.
If de Guerville was slightly “colored” by his preferential treatment—and a sincere love for Japan and its own mission civilisatrice in Asia—we should not consider him a mere pawn of the Japanese. Only days after the fall of P’yŏngyang—and by his account suffering from malaria and dysentery—de Guerville opted to head south to Seoul, the Korean capital, to gauge affairs among the political leaders in Korea. From P’yŏngyang he caught passage to Chemulpo aboard a transport carrying wounded soldiers, and from there by palanquin to Seoul, some thirty miles up the Han River. It was de Guerville’s second trip to Seoul (his first trip in 1892 is recounted in rather comic terms in Au Japon). As the Korean king was apparently ailing, de Guerville instead met with the Taewŏngun, father of the king and perhaps the most powerful—certainly the most forceful, with the possible exception of Korea’s Queen Min—figure in Korean politics, the king himself notwithstanding. With de Guerville, the Taewŏngun exhibited his natural perspicacity. Over cigars the royal patriarch posed many probing questions on the recent military action at P’yŏngyang, not trusting in the reports supplied by the Japanese.63
Following the fall of P’yŏngyang and the brief trip to Seoul, de Guerville returned to Japan, again courtesy of a Japanese troop ship. Back in Hiroshima, de Guerville toured a Red Cross hospital (which he recounts in Chapter 18 of Au Japon). In early November, de Guerville departed Japan with elements of the Japanese Second Army under the command of General Oyama for the second major offensive of the war: the drive into Chinese Manchuria and the seizure of its crown jewel, Port Arthur.
James Creelman and the Port Arthur Controversy
Port Arthur—modern day Lushun—sits at the very tip of China’s Liaodong Peninsula, a triangle of land that juts south from Manchuria into the northern Yellow Sea. Considering its strategic location commanding the sea lanes between China and Korea (a position made more valuable by its linkage to the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway in 1903), its conquest was viewed as essential by Japanese war planners if Chinese—and Russian—influence in Korea was to be decisively checked. In fact, so strategic was the Liaodong Peninsula in the geopolitics of the region that Russian, French, and German pressure after the war would force victorious Japan to retrocede it to China, a check the Japanese would not soon forget nor forgive. Not surprisingly, Port Arthur and the Liaodong Peninsula would play pivotal roles in the Russo-Japanese War a decade later.
In late November. 1894, much of the world was stunned to receive news that the heavily fortified Port Arthur, the “Gibraltar of the East,” had fallen within twenty-four hours of its siege and bombardment by the Japanese Second Army under General Oyama. However, word of a massacre of Port Arthur’s defenders and inhabitants at the hands of Japanese troops did not follow immediately upon the city’s fall on November 21. The dispatches of