Au Japon. Amedee Baillot de Guerville
The accounts of other correspondents such as Frederic Villiers of the London Black and White and Thomas Cowen of The Times soon found their own way into Western living rooms.
The reports of Creelman proved the most sensational in their details, and not surprisingly garnered the widest attention. The New York World broke the news in alarming headlines: “Massacre at Port Arthur. At Least Two Thousand Helpless People Butchered by Japanese Soldiers. Streets Chocked with Mutilated Bodies of Men, Women, and Children While the Soldiers Laughed.”64 As Creelman described it, “Unarmed men, kneeling in the streets and begging for life, were shot, bayoneted, or beheaded. The town was sacked from end to end, and the inhabitants were butchered in their own houses.”65
Such accounts were on the whole backed up by Villiers and Cowen, and to a much lesser extent by a few American and British military attachés who also witnessed the fall of the city. Villiers reemphasized the massacre by publishing a long account of it entitled “The Truth about Port Arthur” in an American periodical of March 1895, largely in response to the massacre’s detractors, epitomized by de Guerville.66 The most prominent accounts of a Port Arthur “massacre” are those surviving in Creelman’s book of memoirs, On the Great Highway, and in the reminiscences (almost certainly specious) of James Allan in his slender tome, Under the Dragon Flag. Almost totally forgotten in the debate surrounding the Port Arthur massacre has been the voice of de Guerville, though he was certainly far from silent at the time.
As Au Japon tells us, and period records confirm, de Guerville, like Creelman and Villiers, was on the scene at the fall of Port Arthur and its subsequent occupation by Japanese troops. Like Stephen and Cora Crane in Greece in 1897, de Guerville even rescued a dog on the battlefield, a puppy that he duly named “Faithful”—Chiu-ji. A period photograph captured de Guerville comforting the pup on the Chinese front. The dog would go on to play a starring role in de Guerville’s New York lectures regarding his Sino-Japanese War experiences.
In sharp contrast to his fellow correspondents, de Guerville steadfastly denied that any massacre had occurred at Port Arthur. De Guerville’s defense of Japan did not wait until 1904 and the publication of Au Japon. His vocal challenge of the sensationalist accounts of other Western journalists was deferred only by his return passage to America from the now-Japanese Port Arthur in December, 1894.
As soon as he arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia, de Guerville began to hear the stories circulating of Japanese atrocities at Port Arthur, namely those from the pen of Creelman, Hearst’s man in the Far East. De Guerville immediately wired off his own firsthand account of the city’s fall to the San Francisco Chronicle, which gave it top headline.
Figure 6. De Guerville’s headlining account of the fall of Port Arthur in the San Francisco Chronicle. 1894.
De Guerville continued his journalistic riposte as soon as he reached New York City: “Great was my surprise when, upon my arrival in New York . . . I read the sensational stories published in some newspapers about the awful atrocities and frightful massacres committed by the Japanese at the capture of the Chinese stronghold [Port Arthur].”67 De Guerville then proceeded to defend the behavior of the Japanese troops, boldly and emphatically denying that the Japanese “mutilated a single body,” much less that “junks loaded with people were sunk.” In fact, most Chinese commoners de Guerville witnessed “were so happy, so pleased with the Japanese that they would beg of them to remain and to defend them against the awful oppression of their officials, mandarins, officers, and soldiers.” It was a contrast indeed to such accounts as those of Creelman, or even of Villiers, who wrote in March, 1895, of the gratuitous slaughter of innocent civilians, so that all that remained after the Japanese bloodletting were thirty-six Chinese, to be used “in burying their dead comrades or as water-carriers for the [Japanese] troops. Their lives were protected by a slip of white paper stuck in their caps bearing the following inscription in Japanese characters: ‘This man is not to be killed.’”68
For his part, Creelman later expounded on his account in his book On the Great Highway, published in 1901. As a self-professed “witness for civilization,” Creelman, whom one contemporary described as a man “made of the clay from which spring crusaders, reformers and martyrs”69 , damned Japan for its gratuitous cruelty at Port Arthur, although qualifying it as “the only lapse of the Japanese from the usages of humane warfare.”70
Japan denied that any “massacre” had occurred, though it admitted some regrettable transgressions on the part of some lower-class soldiers and coolies. Accounts of the massacre were taken by many in the West as evidence of an atavistic and lingering barbarism beneath Japan’s civilized patina, while Japan’s denials were interpreted by some as evidence of a collective Japanese puerility. The Japanese, wrote Villiers, “like most young children . . . are very sensitive on being found out, and will tell the most deliberate and unblushing falsehoods to shield themselves.”71
De Guerville would have none of this. The details of the debate regarding the putative Japanese massacre, which raged intensely in the world press for the six months or so following the fall of Port Arthur, are too numerous to detail here. As a preliminary, suffice it to say that most studies have concluded that excesses did occur, mainly in the killing of Chinese men in the fallen city. However, the extreme accounts manifested best by Creelman were later revealed to be highly exaggerated.72
It is important to point out that the major points de Guerville made in his attack against the detractors of Japan is largely repeated in the final chapter of Au Japon. One point is worth making, however. In bold words printed in Leslie’s Weekly (words not repeated in Au Japon), de Guerville takes Western critics to task, posing the difficult question of how atrocities by British troops in India during the Sepoy Revolt of 1858, or American atrocities against Native Americans, differed from the alleged atrocities at Port Arthur, even supposing they had occurred. De Guerville even dared pose the question: “Can the Japanese be expected to be more civilized than the French, English, or—than ourselves?”73
De Guerville also took aim at Creelman’s integrity as a reporter.74 He criticized Creelman’s earlier account of P’yŏngyang, in which he had intimated he was an eyewitness to the battle when he was not, as well as his various misrepresentations of the size of the Japanese army and the dates of certain engagements.75 In one article, de Guerville recalled an episode with Creelman in Japan in the weeks before Port Arthur, and suggested that Creelman had arrived at Port Arthur with visions of a sensational story already half-written in his head:
One day I went to Yokohama with Mr. Creelman. He spent his time there calling on the heads of some banks and newspapers. While in the train returning to Tokyo he told me:
“I have found out why they won’t allow us to go the front. The first reason is . . . that the Japanese are being frightfully licked by the Chinese, and the other is that these people, not being yet quite civilized, must act in the battlefield like wild beasts. They must carve each other, prisoners and wounded, into pieces, and we would see the most disgusting sights in the world. On account of the treaty revision the government is anxious that we should not see such sights.”76
Such attacks against Creelman’s integrity and professionalism must have stung the New York World reporter to the quick, but perhaps especially so as they came from de Guerville.
De Guerville soon had more damaging, and personal, allegations to deal with. Not long after his return to New York, stories began to circulate, apparently originating with Creelman, that de Guerville had supplied Creelman’s name to the Japanese authorities as a spy for the Chinese. Such stories found especially wide coverage in the Japan Gazette but were published as well in Creelman’s New York World. The Japan Gazette also made damaging accusations that de Guerville had in fact been bribed by Japanese officials. Naturally, de Guerville denied the charges, and chose the Japan Weekly Mail to refute them. Though there was no evidence ever presented to corroborate such serious assertions, the damage was done. Though he would go on to briefly run The Illustrated American during 1897–1898, de Guerville never found work as a regular correspondent. According to a surviving letter by Creelman, de Guerville attributed his failures in this regard to the specious