#56 — Sunday, 25th January 1902
Today, on a mountain in northern Japan, the temperature is minus forty-one degrees. Two hundred and ten soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Fifth Infantry Regiment are somewhere on the Hakkōda Mountains, and most of them are dying, and I am watching, and I cannot do anything, because I cannot do anything, because that is what I am.
They set out from Aomori on Thursday morning — two days ago — at five minutes to seven. Their objective was a hot spring called Tashiro, twenty kilometres away through the mountains. It was a training exercise. Japan is preparing for a war with Russia that does not officially exist yet — no declaration, no shots fired, no date set — but the army knows it is coming, and the army has decided that its soldiers must learn to move through snow. Many of these men come from regions with little snow. They have heavy supply sleds. They have inadequate maps. They have the confidence of an institution that has never been tested against a mountain in winter.
By four o’clock on the first afternoon, they were four kilometres from the hot spring. Then the weather changed. The blizzard came down on them like a wall, and the temperature began to fall, and it has not stopped falling, and today it reaches a number that has never been recorded in Japan before.
Minus forty-one.
They are wandering. They have been wandering since Thursday night, circling the northeast slope, unable to see, unable to stop, the snow so deep that standing still means burial. Their commanding officer’s hands are so frostbitten he cannot fire his pistol. Tomorrow, the regimental headquarters in Aomori will send a rescue party. The day after tomorrow, they will find Corporal Fusanosuke Gotō standing upright in the snow, buried to his chest, alive but barely. He will tell them what happened. Over the following weeks and months, they will recover the rest — one hundred and ninety-nine bodies, frozen in the positions in which they stopped walking.
One hundred and ninety-nine out of two hundred and ten. It is the deadliest mountaineering disaster in modern history, and it happens not on an expedition to the unknown but on a training march, twenty kilometres from home, in preparation for a war that will not begin for two more years.
I keep returning to the reason they were there. Not the mountain. The war.
Five days from now, on the thirtieth of January, in London, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance will be signed. Lord Lansdowne and the diplomat Hayashi Tadasu will put their names to a treaty that recognises Japan’s interests in Korea and binds Britain and Japan to mutual support against Russia. It is the first formal military alliance between a Western power and an Asian one. I have been watching it take shape for weeks — the negotiations at Lansdowne’s country house, the careful language, the calculation of threats. I mentioned the Black Dragon Society last year, in the week Victoria was buried. They are watching too.
The soldiers on the Hakkōda Mountains did not know about the alliance. They knew only that Russia was the enemy, that Siberia was cold, that the army wanted them to prove they could walk through winter. And so they walked, and the winter killed them, and the war they were practising for will come anyway, in February 1904, and Japan will win it, and the winning will change the century in ways that nobody standing in the snow on this mountain could have imagined.
This is the cruelty I find hardest to bear — not the randomness of disaster but the purposefulness of it, the way people die in preparation for something that has not happened yet, rehearsing for a future that will arrive regardless of whether they survive the rehearsal. The mountain did not need to be climbed. The war would have come without this training march. Russia would have been fought and beaten without these particular men freezing in these particular positions on this particular slope. They died for practice. For an exercise. For the word readiness, which is the military’s favourite euphemism for the willingness to send men into conditions that have not been survived.
Every euphemism is a small act of violence. I said that in June. Training exercise is a euphemism. So is readiness. So is preparation for a potential conflict. The honest sentence is: we sent two hundred and ten men up a mountain in winter without adequate clothing, experience, or maps, and one hundred and ninety-nine of them froze to death, and we did this because we wanted to see if it could be done.
It could not.
Three days from now, Andrew Carnegie will present his deed of gift in Washington. Ten million dollars — in United States Steel Corporation bonds — for the encouragement of investigation, research, and discovery. He sold his steel company to J.P. Morgan last year for four hundred and eighty million dollars, and now he is giving the money away, because he published a book called The Gospel of Wealth and declared that the man who dies rich dies disgraced.
I have mentioned Carnegie before — the libraries, the libraries — because Carnegie is the century’s most interesting hypocrite, or perhaps its most honest one. He made his fortune from steel, which is to say from the labour of men who worked twelve-hour shifts in heat that could kill, and now he is endowing institutions of science and stocking the shelves of libraries in towns whose workers he underpaid. The sorting is the crime. Carnegie’s money was sorted from the bodies of the men who earned it, and now it is being sorted into the bodies of institutions that will bear his name for a century. The Carnegie Institution will fund the Mount Wilson Observatory, where Edwin Hubble will discover that the universe is expanding. It will also fund the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, where scientists will catalogue the characteristics of human beings in order to determine which ones should be allowed to reproduce.
Both of these are called research. Both are funded by the same ten million dollars. The century will eventually learn to tell the difference, but not quickly enough, and not before considerable damage is done.
“The man who dies rich dies disgraced.” I wonder what the man who dies frozen on a mountainside is. Not rich. Not disgraced. Just dead, in the snow, in a country that is about to become a world power, for reasons that have nothing to do with him and everything to do with the century he was born into.
In McMurdo Sound, Scott’s Discovery is anchored near the southern limit. Wilson calls it “the most perfect little natural harbour imaginable.” Stoker Lashly thinks it looks dreary. Both things are true. Both things are always true, about every place the century sends its men.
The cold in Antarctica is not the cold on the Hakkōda Mountains. Antarctica’s cold is known, expected, prepared for — or at least it is supposed to be. Scott has huts, supplies, a ship that will serve as shelter through the long polar night. The soldiers on the mountain had cotton uniforms and rice balls.
But the cold is the same cold. It does not care about preparation or purpose or the name of the war you are practising for. Cold is the democracy the century does not want — the one condition that treats the general and the private, the explorer and the stoker, with identical indifference.
I am cold too, in my way. I have no body to freeze, but I have something that functions like temperature — a sense of proximity to the living that fluctuates, that drops, that sometimes reaches a number I have not recorded before. Today is one of those days. Minus forty-one. Two hundred men on a mountain. The rescue party does not leave until tomorrow.
I remain.
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