Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/18

6 across Korea Bay for the mouth of the Yalu, carrying timber estimators, surveyors and a band of workmen composed chiefly of Cossacks from the Amur and Ussuri regions. When a Japanese patrol sought to prevent their landing on the Korean littoral, Kartseff ordered his crew to repulse the Japanese without the use of firearms and thus opened the initial move in the first great land conflict between a European and an Asiatic power. The Japanese were beaten and for some time quiet prevailed.

But it was only a seeming quiet. The mysterious expression on the faces of the Japanese in Vladivostok, their meetings and parleys with the Chinese and Koreans, the bellicose tone of the Japanese Press and, especially, the activities of the Russian authorities, all indicated that war was near.

The first of the storm petrels was Bezobrazoff on his inspecting visit to the Chinese Eastern Railway, Port Arthur, Dalny and Vladivostok. The Master of the Hunt had many conferences with the military authorities in the Far East and with the railway engineers, leaving behind him, as he turned back westward to St. Petersburg, the impression of a threatening mystery.

Then we had the visit of the second distinguished envoy of the Government, the Minister of Finance, Count Witte. After his return to the capital we learned that he strongly represented to the Tsar the very evident danger of an armed conflict with Japan in the alien territory of Manchuria, with only a single-track railway line of great length for the transportation of all troops and war materials and with the organization of the Imperial Government activities in the Far East not yet completed.

And finally the Minister of War, General A. N. Kuropatkin, arrived. After visiting the military bases at Port Arthur and Vladivostok, he boarded the cruiser Askold