Fiam had been with me about a month when I was ordered to go to the war.

You know, this was just the time when a great war had broken out between Japan and another empire, and I was ordered to go out and describe what I saw there. While writing up the important events that sent two armies to the front I couldn’t stop to narrate the adventures of my little friend, and so I never put a word about Fiam in any of my writings. Besides, grown people are so incredulous!

The war took place in a part of China called Manchuria. In order to get there you have first to travel by railroad to a seaport, then on a ship to China, then on horseback or afoot, crossing plains and mountains for about a hundred miles, and so to the field of battle.

In telling his story Fiam had shown so much fear of war that I hadn’t dared to tell him where we were going. He fairly flooded me with questions.

[70]

“Why do we travel so much?” he asked me one day in the train when I had put him up on my collar so that he could see the country out of the window. I made him look at it well so that he could give me a description of it, as, in fact, he did.

“We are traveling to amuse ourselves,” I replied.

“Beautiful amusement,” he ............