visited the battlefields of Port Arthur, where Russia had battled Japan six years earlier in the Russo-Japanese War. In Villalobos's logbook for October 11, 1911, Koehler wrote, "At 0800 Mids. H.W. Koehler, U.S. Navy, boarded the Chinese gunboat to obtain further information regarding the situation at Wuchang... Wuchang... was entirely in the hands of rebels and there was no possibility of communication with the American residents." Two days later, the log continues, "Midshipman Koehler attended a conference of the consular body at which the Japanese rear admiral Reijiro Kawashima presided, the meeting having been called to consider communications of the rebel commander in chief, in which he stated the aims of the rebel party, and offered to send troops to protect the foreign concessions. The offer was not accepted... at 1815 sent ashore two Colt automatic guns to American consulate in order to facilitate landing of armed party.... Incendiary fires in Wuchang throughout the night." By mid-November, the Yangtze and all of China was in control of the rebels and "the gun-boaters could get back to the normal routine of golf, billiards, tennis and light conversation." Koehler was promoted to ensign on March 28, 1912, to date from June 5, 1911. Koehler was equally at-ease and engaging with the unwashed masses as he was with the aristocracy of his time. He wrote to his mother about a "wonderful tiger hunting expedition" in Mongolia that he made in November 1912 when he was on leave. The twenty-six year old ensign was already accepted as an equal by the likes of his hunting partners: Count Pappenheim, friend to King Edward VII; Baron Cottu, financier of the Canton-Hankow-Peking railway and Count Riccardo Fabbricotti, "the best looking man in Europe, the wildest and greatest rake", married to Theodore Roosevelt's cousin, Cornelia Roosevelt Scovel. Koehler described Fabbricotti's wife as "perfectly lovely, adores him and understands him not at all", which could equally describe the woman Koehler married fifteen years later. Koehler was detached from Villalobos and to Saratoga (ex- USS New York), the Asiatic Fleet flagship, on January 2, 1913, Commander Henry A. Wiley, commanding. Koehler was already coveting the billet of naval attaché to Moscow, when he was assigned as translator for an extended tour of Asian ports by Rear Admiral Reginald F. Nicholson, Commander in Chief, Asiatic Fleet (CINCAF), including Saigon, the French port and Tsingtao, the German port. As Koehler wrote, "I