‘He read it and tossed it across,’ the reporter relates. The letter was from Thomas Reid in Hong Kong offering him a job as sub-editor on the China Mail, with the promise of the editorship at a later date.
The reporter advised him, ‘Adventure. Take it.’
Donald signalled his acceptance in a telegram to Reid and received one in reply: ‘apply at china navigation company melbourne for ticket and expense money.’ Donald did not hesitate. He was now 27 and this was his chance to see the mysterious Orient. His decision to change direction did not go down well with the Argus editor who tried to talk him out of leaving. But he had made up his mind. He sailed from Melbourne in May 1903.31 Although he did not know it, he had accepted an invitation that would place him on the world stage at the most critical time in China’s modern history.
‘Small and wiry’ did not do justice to Bill Donald. He was powerfully built, with a bold, purposeful stride which might have seemed like a swagger in a lesser man. He dressed in tweed jacket or navy-blue blazer, grey flannel pants, white shirt, tie often askew. According to his passport, he was five feet nine inches tall with a high forehead, blue eyes, a drooping left eyelid, straight nose and large mouth. His hair was brown, complexion fair. With his rugged Caledonian looks, he and George Morrison could have passed for brothers.
One fanciful version of Donald’s arrival in China has him ‘best described as ambitious but poor. When he ventured to China he was so poverty-stricken that he had to work his passage as the cook’s helper aboard a ship that eventually docked in Hong Kong. There he got lucky and landed a job on the China Mail …’32 Nothing could be further from the truth. Donald travelled to Hong Kong in style with money in his pocket and the guarantee of a good job on arrival.
The China Mail had been founded in 1845 as a weekly newspaper published on Thursdays and was almost as old as the colony itself. Its proprietor since 1872 was George Murray Bain, a 61-year-old Montrose-born Scot, ‘pious, temperate and acutely respectable’, whose business partner and editor for the last nine years was the aforementioned Thomas Reid.33 ‘Its columns are never sullied by personalities,’ the China Mail’s proprietors liked to boast, ‘and, in general, the conduct of the journal is in line with the very best traditions of English journalism.’34
After suffering the vicissitudes of a succession of journalistic barflies, Bain had been anxious to recruit a teetotaller who could be relied on to get the paper to press in good order, while editor Reid was just as anxious to find a successor so he could retire ‘back in Blighty’.
Donald moved into the Hong Kong Club and spent his first few weeks sleeping in a room with a commanding view of Victoria Harbour. He had taken an instant dislike to Chinese food – an aversion which would remain with him for life – and relished the British breakfasts of bacon and eggs, porridge, toast and Oxford marmalade. One of his colleagues later recalled, ‘I once knew him to take a loaf of leavened bread to a presidential banquet and subsist on the loaf and the nut, fruit and other side dishes, while the rest of the company enjoyed the incomparable delicacies of Chinese cookery.’35
As for the colony’s three newspapers, the China Mail, Daily Press and Hong Kong Telegraph, Donald later wrote that they ‘were now with one accord moulded on high principles and thoroughly living down the evil reputation newspapers gained, some not undeservingly, in former years’.36
At the China Mail office, a three-storey building with cavernous arches, long overhanging verandas and shuttered windows at 5 Wyndham Street, he discovered that the newspaper’s China coverage consisted mainly of strident editorials favouring the extension of trade with the West or anonymous articles calling for reform of the Chinese Government. A great deal of space was devoted to items from ‘home’: the deliberations at Westminster, snippets from the Court Circular and the latest cricket scores from Lord’s. It all seemed a bit parochial to Donald, who wondered why no one was authorised to speak on behalf of China.
On 14 June 1903 Sir Henry Blake and his wife Edith entertained the new viceroy of Canton, Tsen Chun-hsuan, to Sunday lunch at Government House. ‘He seems an energetic and determined man and is said to be very honest,’ Lady Blake wrote to George Morrison. ‘He is a strong anti-Opium smoker and anti-Foot Binder.’37
Tsen Chun-hsuan was the son of the former viceroy of Yunnan who had brutally suppressed a revolt by the emperor’s Muslim subjects which had ravaged the province for 18 years from 1856 to 1873 and reduced the population from eight million to three million.38
Tsen had inherited many of his father’s traits. According to Morrison, he was not only ‘absolutely fearless and clean-handed’ but also ‘a man of violent character’, so much so that several mandarins who were noted for ‘squeezing’ the citizens of Kwangtung and Kwangsi resigned their offices rather than answer to him.39
As the Manchu’s representative in the two Kwangs, Tsen was the mortal enemy of Tse Tsan Tai and the revolutionaries, so it was probably just as well that the latter had withdrawn from the movement since the failure of the Canton coup and the death of his father. On 6 November 1903, Tse and Alfred Cunningham launched a new English-language broadsheet, the South China Morning Post, as ‘the mouthpiece of China’s reform movement’.40 Tse wrote in his memoir that he decided to change tack to give ‘Sun Yat-sen and his followers a free hand’, while he pursued a pro-reform path through the Hong Kong press with the help of sympathetic financial backers.41
It was an uphill struggle. Within four years of the launch, Cunningham, an experienced foreign correspondent but a hopeless manager, was sacked and Tse was retrenched in a cost-cutting purge as the newspaper struggled for survival in the ultra-conservative Hong Kong market.42
The big issue in the first years of the new century was China’s vain attempt to reclaim the three Manchurian provinces from the Russians who had made them the centrepiece of a vast new Eastern empire incorporating Siberia, northern China and Korea. The problem had arisen in November 1900 when the dissolute and corrupt Russian governor of the Liaotung Peninsula, Admiral Evgeni Ivanovich Alexeyev, forced the local Chinese authorities at the ancient Manchurian capital of Mukden to sign a secret agreement which allowed a virtual Russian takeover of the Manchu’s homeland.
The Americans protested that such an encroachment posed a threat to the cornerstone of their foreign policy – the ‘Open Door’ under which countries trading with China were supposed to have equal access to all treaty ports. Tsar Nicholas II, however, having invested a large portion of his fortune in Manchuria, ignored Washington’s protestations. By 1903, he had added 480,000 square kilometres of Manchuria to his empire and the great eastward trek of Russian immigrants, accompanied along the new Trans-Siberian Railway by thousands of political exiles in iron-barred carriages, had assumed gigantic proportions.43
Nicholas then appointed Alexeyev as viceroy of the Far East and commander-in-chief of Russia’s fighting forces there with instructions to exploit the region’s natural resources of timber and coal. ‘The appointment was the height of absurdity,’ Count Sergei Yulyevich Witte, the Russian finance minister responsible for building the Trans-Siberian Railway, noted. ‘Alexeyev was not an army man. He could not even ride on horseback.’44
Indeed, Alexeyev had risen to the top of the Russian hierarchy thanks to his friendship with the Grand Duke Alexis, younger son of Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II. As a young man, Alexis had gone on a drinking spree in a Marseilles bordello and been arrested for violent behaviour. Alexeyev, then a young naval officer, persuaded the French police that he was in fact the guilty party and took the punishment himself. During the reign of Alexander III, Alexis was appointed naval minister and his protégé rose to general-admiral and then governor of the Kwantung leased territory in Manchuria (not to be confused with Kwangtung province in South China).45
George Morrison exposed Alexeyev’s secret treaty with the Chinese in The Times, with the result that it was never rat
ified. Under pressure from the other powers, Russia agreed to withdraw her troops from Manchuria in three stages over a period of 18 months. The first detachment pulled out in October 1902, but when Morrison visited Manchuria in April 1903 after his trip to Australia he discovered that Alexeyev had deferred further withdrawals while he tried to wring a new set of concessions out of the Chinese.46
Morrison promptly disclosed this latest act of Tsarist bullying. With the support of Britain and her new treaty partner Japan, China refused to comply with Russia’s demands. Alexeyev then pushed Russian forces along the wide, meandering Yalu River, thus threatening Japanese interests in Korea.
At Britain’s urging, Japan attempted to solve the matter peacefully through diplomatic channels. ‘I am profoundly disappointed with Japan who, influenced by our Government, seems likely to throw away its last and only chance of grappling with Russia,’ Morrison grumbled in a letter to J. O. P. Bland, the Times correspondent in Shanghai. ‘Why did our Government make this alliance with Japan if the result of it was to be the strengthening of Russia’s power in Eastern Asia? I still hope and pray there will be war.’47
To Morrison’s delight, Japan’s diplomatic efforts became bogged down in the slush of a St Petersburg winter. Valentine Chirol, the Times foreign editor, wrote to him, ‘I think Japan would be justified in selecting the moment most convenient to herself [to go to war] without reference to our convenience and as far as I can judge Russia is likely to give her every opportunity of doing so.’48
Russia’s obstinacy continued to frustrate the Japanese into the New Year. At a soiree at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, the Japanese Ambassador, Shin’ichiro Kurino, begged Count Witte, who had been dismissed from office for opposing the Tsar’s Far Eastern policy, to impress on the Foreign Minister, Count Lamsdorff, the necessity of replying to Japan’s latest note without delay. Witte wrote in his memoirs, ‘Japan was at the end of her patience, Kurino declared, and if within a few days no reply was given, hostilities would break out.’49
Lamsdorff could do nothing to break the deadlock – the Tsar had handed negotiations over to the man least likely to settle the border dispute with the Japanese: Admiral Alexeyev. By now, however, the Meiji Emperor and his advisers had realised just how beneficial it would be to the Japanese economy if Japan were to defeat Russia and claim Manchuria for herself.
With war imminent, Bill Donald sailed to Shanghai on 31 January 1904 on his way to Japan to cover the story for the China Mail, the Sydney Daily Telegraph and other Australian newspapers. At Shanghai, he read in the North-China Daily News that Kurino had quit St Petersburg on 3 February after issuing a final warning to the Russians. The sympathies of British Shanghailanders were with the Japanese, largely because of the Anglo-Japanese treaty, but also because they feared the Russian threat to British trade in East Asia.50
Donald landed at Kobe on the west coast of Japan on 5 February and made his way to Tokyo, where he checked into the Imperial Hotel. He soon had the company of a host of Western correspondents, photographers and war artists, all squabbling over who should be in the first press batch to go to the front with the Japanese Army.
War fever had electrified the Japanese. The prospect of fighting Russia had united the country behind the emperor, who believed his modern, foreign-trained forces would bring the arrogant Russian bear to its knees. Overlooking the immense logistical difficulties involved in fighting a war so far from Europe, the Russian public took victory for granted: a popular Muscovite illustration showed Cossacks crushing Japanese pygmies,51 while Nicholas scoffed at the Japanese as macaques, a small species of East Asian monkey.52
At midnight on 7 February the First Pacific Squadron of the Russian Navy was at anchor in the roads outside the harbour walls at Port Arthur. Two destroyers were on routine patrol and searchlights played across the freezing waters. It was the lights that told Admiral Heihachiro Togo’s striking force that it had found its target. Twenty minutes later, at 12.20 am on the 8th, blacked-out Japanese destroyers attacked with torpedoes, inflicting serious damage on the fleet’s newest battleships Retvizan and Tsarevitch and incapacitating the cruiser Pallada.
The audacity of the attack caused great indignation in St Petersburg, where the Japanese were stigmatised as ‘traitors and aggressors’ for launching an attack without first declaring war. The unenviable task of informing Tsar Nicholas about the disaster fell to Admiral Alexeyev. ‘I most devotedly inform Your Majesty,’ he cabled from his headquarters at Port Arthur, ‘that about midnight on 8 and 9 February Japanese torpedo boats delivered a sudden mine attack on the squadron lying in the Chinese roads at Port Arthur, the battleships Retvizan and Tsarevitch and the cruiser Pallada being holed.’53
In Peking, George Morrison could ‘hardly write with the excitement’. He yearned to cover the conflict as a war correspondent but Moberly Bell, the Times manager, had made other arrangements. He appointed Major-General Sir Alexander Tulloch, former military adviser to the Australian colonies, as the Times military expert on the spot and ordered Lionel James, a veteran of the Boer War, to charter a ship, equip it with advanced wireless technology and get as close as possible to the new theatre of operations. The idea was that James would visit the front then gallop back to the ship and radio his reports to another Times man, David Fraser, at a receiving station at Weihaiwei, now a British concession on the Shantung Peninsula.54
Prior to the attack at Port Arthur, the Russian Navy had boasted seven battleships in the Pacific to Japan’s six. She had now lost her naval superiority and a second torpedo attack on 14 February and the sinking of four old stone-filled steamers partially blocking the harbour entrance kept the Russian fleet bottled up. The Japanese were able to land troops and supplies in Korea for the coming land battles without interference from the enemy.
At the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Bill Donald met up with Lionel Pratt, a former colleague from Sydney who was covering the war for Reuters, and two other Australian journalists, Alfred ‘Smiler’ Hales, representing the London Daily News, and Martin Donohoe of the Daily Chronicle. Hales, an Adelaide-born prospector, war correspondent and author of nine novels, had been serving in the Balkans with a band of Macedonian revolutionaries of which he had been made captain.
He was a big man, with a large moustache and a close-cropped head bearing the mark of a Mauser bullet that had creased his scalp in an earlier conflict. He had been with William Lambie of The Age in South Africa when he was shot dead by Boers in March 1901, making him the first Australian war correspondent to be killed in action.55
Hales and the excessively bright and lanky Donohoe56 had sailed across the Pacific from San Francisco in the steamer China, arriving at Yokohama on 13 March with a contingent of Americans, including Richard Harding Davis and John Fox Jr. Davis was ‘a big man of about 13-stone, high complexioned, dandified in dress, with a clean-shaven, round face’, while Fox was ‘a jolly little fellow, with a keen expression on a sharp face, underlooking a pair of pince-nez’. Both men had become successful novelists after covering Theodore Roosevelt’s legendary charge up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders in the Spanish–American War of 1898 (an episode that had lent itself to imaginative writing).57
Davis had brought his wife Cecil with him. ‘I am almost hoping the Government won’t let us go to the front,’ he wrote in a letter to his mother, ‘and that for a week at least Cecil and I can sit in tea houses with our shoes off while nesans bring us tea and the geishas rub their knees and make bows to us.’58
The Japanese did better than that: they registered all of the foreign newsmen in Tokyo, placed them in three columns which, they were told, would leave progressively for the front – and then left them sitting in their various watering holes. Things were so quiet that the Imperial Hotel was nicknamed ‘the Imperial Tomb’ and one reporter, to the envy of the others, dubbed himself ‘the Cherry Blossom Correspondent’.59 Davis regretted his desire for a holiday. ‘In the day
we shop and ride,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘but all day and all night we the correspondents plot and slave and intrigue over the places on the columns.’60
Then on April Fools’ Day 1904 the first column of war correspondents packed their goatskin coats, rubber boots, cloaks, riding pants, caps, revolvers and cartridge belts and sailed from Yokohama for Chemulpo (now Inchon) on the Korean Peninsula to join the First Japanese Army which hoped to storm across the Yalu and engage the Russian forces in Manchuria. Martin Donohoe was with them but Smiler Hales and Bill Donald had been left behind in Tokyo.
The Battle of the Yalu was fought just upstream from the Manchurian village of Antung through 26–30 April 1904. Although the newsmen got no closer than four kilometres to the fighting, they had their first war story ‘from the front’.
As instructed, Lionel James had installed the latest transmitting equipment in the 1200-ton SS Haimun, which had been hired for £1500 per month, plus another £500 for crew and provisions. Unfortunately, the unsporting Japanese refused to allow the ship anywhere near the Manchurian coast. Even then, the on-board Japanese censor slashed James’s reports so heavily that the vessel might as well have stayed in its Chinese port.
The Russians had also heard about Moberly Bell’s secret project and Admiral Alexeyev warned that correspondents using ship’s wireless to file news reports on the war ‘shall be regarded as spies and the vessels provided with such apparatus shall be seized as lawful prizes’.61 The jingoistic Sir Alexander Tulloch proposed that James mount a 12-pounder on the Haimun’s deck ‘to sink any Russian torpedo boat that dared to interfere with us’.62
Morrison met up with Tulloch at Chefoo, where the 65-year-old Scottish warrior had come ashore ‘fully armed against Chinese brigands and pirates’, and fully intending to run the blockade of Port Arthur in a Chinese junk. ‘I’m afraid he is older than he thinks,’ Sir Claude MacDonald, now British minister to Japan, wrote to Morrison, ‘[and] a bowl of rice and one pickled plum will not hold the old warrior together for long.’63
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