Mentor, Nice, Ospedaletti near San Remo, Palermo, Pallanza on Lago de Maggiore, Pégli, Abondance in French Savoy, and the list goes on. He tried every known remedy, including the experimental igazola, developed by an Italian physician in Palermo, in which a powder was heated to a gas and inhaled.
It is at Pallanza, however, that de Guerville learned of the remarkable successes being made at a place called Nordach near Baden in the Black Forest by a Dr. Otto Walther. So intense was the demand to get into the limited space of the Nordach Clinic that even for a man who had no trouble obtaining an audience with the Pope, a yearlong wait was required. The personalized treatment of Nordach was also extremely expensive, with the first hundred days having to be paid in advance.36
In September, 1900, de Guerville finally gained his coveted entrée to Dr. Walther’s clinic, and from that time until May of the following year ascribed to the strict regimen that made Nordach so famous, and perhaps so effective: plenty of rest, high caloric intake, open windows, and most importantly, no medicines. This “abode of Spartans” was situated so as to be exposed to every wind. The sanatorium’s Liegehallen received the cool, often as not freezing, blasts day and night and in all seasons in order to dissipate impure air and facilitate the recovery of the lungs. It had a proven track record. By the early twentieth century the clinic’s fame had spread throughout Europe and America, spawning the rise of “little Nordachs” from Wales to Canada.37
It certainly seemed to work wonders for de Guerville, who upon his discharge in May, 1901, felt “totally renewed.” He even climbed Mt. Righi and Mt. Pilate near Lucerne, both well over two thousand meters. But the greatest testament to de Guerville’s newfound health was his pen. He felt well enough to write frankly about his experience with tuberculosis in a small tract entitled La lutte contre la tuberculose, which was later published in English and German editions.38 In 1904 de Guerville was inspired to revisit his experiences in Japan, Korea, and China with the publication of a little volume of reminiscences entitled—‘in Japan.’ Though its publication in 1904, just as another war threatened to erupt in the Far East, smells suspiciously of profit motives, it should also be seen as sign of de Guerville’s return to health. That his mind should turn again to far off Japan is indicative of the place that country continued to hold in his heart and imagination.
Au Japon enjoyed a respectable success, something that seems to have convinced de Guerville to direct his future energies to the writing of travel books. Book writing, rather than the deadline-driven writing demanded by weekly or monthly publications, accommodated de Guerville’s convalescence as well. With tuberculosis in the nineteenth century one doesn’t get that close to death and simply recover. Despite de Guerville’s optimistic accounts of his own “return” to life, his health certainly remained forever fragile.
That de Guerville chose as his next subject after Au Japon the arid lands of North Africa also suggests a still-ailing consumptive. The dry Mediterranean climes of such locales as Algeria and Tunisia were attracting hordes of European consumptives, a reality best illustrated by André Gide’s novel L’Immoralist. Along with an article on the Sudan for a French travel journal, in 1905 de Guerville published a travelogue of Egypt, La Nouvelle Egypt, a journalist-cum-tourist’s account of British Egypt. It enjoyed even greater success than Au Japon, and was soon translated into English and German, two nations that along with France were grabbing up colonial holdings in Africa faster than they knew what to do with them. Cheaper editions continued to appear through 1915.
We hear virtually nothing more of de Guerville after his book on Egypt. Save for an article on the “situation in Egypt,” he writes no more, at least under that name.39 After five years of silence a tantalizing notice in The Times in the summer of 1911 remarked simply that de Guerville had been seriously ill in London for six weeks.40 But after this the silence is total. In all likelihood he died of the disease that had so long plagued him, though probably not in London, for his obituary never appears. Perhaps it was in some corner of North Africa, but more likely he was back on the continent,near his mother one hopes and not in the Spartan halls of the Nordach Clinic.
II. The Sino-Japanese War and the Port Arthur Controversy
It must always be foul to tell what is false and it can never be safe to suppress what is true.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Art of Writing
It will be remembered that A. B. de Guerville’s second voyage to the Far East was undertaken to cover the Sino-Japanese War as special correspondent for Leslie’s Weekly and as a freelance contributor to the New York Herald. As such, he was in the company of a select handful of other foreign correspondents equally eager to get to the frontlines and make headlines. Most notable among these were James Creelman (New York World), Frederic Villiers (The Black and White), Thomas Cowen (The Times of London), a certain Laguerre (Le Temps), and Richard Harding Davis (who arrived too late to see any action).
Late nineteenth century America and Europe were witnessing the emergence of what was then termed “the new journalism”—a more dynamic and more ruthless sort of journalism spurred on by larger urban audiences, faster and more efficient communications, improved technologies, all fed by the development of vast capitalist economies and the concomitant fortunes waiting to be made in advertisement space. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of American dailies increased six fold, from 387 to 2,326 (though it was by no means a uniquely American phenomenon).41 What this naturally meant was a fierce competition among journals and newspapers to increase circulation numbers by entertaining, shocking, thrilling, and titillating their readers in both words and pictures.
It was perhaps inevitable that the foreign correspondent—and by extension the war correspondent—would be a byproduct of this new industry. The new journalism of the late nineteenth century cannot be fully understood without considering the fact that its emergence paralleled what historians often term the “new imperialism,” a second wave of Euro-American colonial expansion that brought with it a period of “dirty little wars” from Venezuela to Cuba, from the Sudan to Korea. In the late nineteenth century the figure of the journalist—particularly the war correspondent—rose to that of public icon, in what one writer later described as “the time of the Great Reporter.”42 Stephen Crane, Jack London, Lincoln Steffens, and even Winston Churchill became household names through their work as journalists, to say nothing of Henry Morton Stanley in Africa or Nellie Bly’s very well publicized 1889 journey around the world in seventy-two days. Never before or since have the newspaper and the journalist held such central places in the public consciousness as they did in those brief decades between the emergence of the telegraph and the radio.
Background: The Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895
Historians still debate the causes and significance of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. In its most general sense it was a struggle between late imperial China and modernizing Japan over hegemony in Northeast Asia, which came to a head in a contest over Korea. On a more symbolic level, it has been characterized as the final showdown between the traditional political order of East Asia, represented by China, and the modern, Western-oriented international order that Japan was earnestly embracing. Or, to put it in the preferred Western terms of the period, a battle between barbarism and civilization.43
For over a millennium China had viewed Korea as a “vassal state.” In the traditional geopolitics of China-centered East Asia, this was not as imperialistic as it might ring in modern ears. Rather, it was a relationship both symbiotic and symbolic: Korea, as did other smaller peripheral states to the “Middle Kingdom,” acquiesced to China’s political and cultural “superiority” in the form of semi-annual tribute missions. In exchange, China was assured of docile and friendly states on its borders. In Korea’s case, China not only allowed that state full political autonomy in the domestic realm but even sent armies to its aid when it was threatened by foreign invaders, such as the Japanese in the late sixteenth century.
The arrival of industrialized Western merchants and missionaries in the early
