Chapter IV: Preface: The Siege at a Glance (3)

But to us, of whom there are three--Frederic Villiers, the war artist, James Ricalton, the war photographer, and myself. The public knows about Villiers, hero of Plevna and the Soudan, discoverer of artistic Abyssinia, decorated by seven governments, veteran of seventeen campaigns, dean of the war correspondents, who has traveled the world round lecturing, sketching, writing. The public knows less of Ricalton, one of its obscure great men. He has gone through a long life with his nose to his work, like a dog to a scent, heedless of fame and money. He is original, alone, and has done things no other man has done. It was he that Thomas A. Edison sent into all the tropical jungles twenty years ago to search for a vegetable fiber for the electric lamp. He took most of the photographs for John H. Stoddard’s lectures. He was the first foreigner to walk through northern Russia, 1,500 miles from Archangel to St. Petersburg. He has traveled through every country on the globe, exposing 75,000 negatives, and has photographed most of the great men of his generation. Of late years he has become one of the most expert of war photographers. In the Philippines he was the only man to get troops actually firing on the foe. At the battle of Caloocan a soldier near him was winged; Ricalton picked up the useless rifle, grabbed the cartridge belt and went up with the skirmishers. At the siege of Tien Tsin he stood on the walls and photographed Americans as they were dropped by Chinese bullets. Little the public knows when it sees photographs of war how few of them come from the front. Ricalton is one of the few who gets the real thing. He is sixty years old, yet he tramps ten and twenty miles a day with a thirty-pound camera under his arm, for he sneers at the snap shot and will carry a tripod. Yet he outlasts the young men on the march. Here he goes everywhere--into captured forts while the corpses are still about, through the most dangerous artillery positions, among reserves waiting for battle, into the actual fighting if they would let him. To-day he is off to gratify one of his few remaining ambitions, for he is sighing like Alexander at already exhausting the world. He wants to get one of the new siege shells, 500 weight, as it leaves the gun on its trip to the battleships in the bay. Four of these shells were dropped yesterday into the _Retvizan_ and _Pallada_. To-day the gunners will try to put in another. Ricalton plans to have his camera all set and tilted at the proper angle behind. Then as the gunner pulls the lanyard he presses the bulb. He has stuffed his ears with cotton so the shock will not break the drums, for a gunner yesterday was deafened for life. He will probably be hurled to the ground and his camera may be smashed, but he wants that shell hurtling through the air, no bigger than a bee, while the dust of the recoil curls up over the emplacement and all the grand tensity of power and motion is about the place.

“Why take the risk?” say I, “when you can so easily take the gun at rest and then paint in a little dust and that wee dot up in the air.”

Discharge of the Japanese 11-inch Mortar during the Grand Bombardment of October 29. The gun is a mile and a half away, and is firing into the Two Dragon Redoubt. The vibration made a clear photograph impossible.]

“But it wouldn’t be the real thing,” said he, as he started off. Then I saw why he is Ricalton and not some faker at his ease over a chemical tray in the city. Just now, looking out of the window under which I write, I can see the battery where he has gone. It lies snug among the hills, two great guns cocked on concrete and flanked by howitzers aloft on peaks. The Russians have the range and are pumping shells in, two or three a minute. It looks as if nothing could live there, but I know that probably not a man is injured, for I was there yesterday and saw how safe the dugouts are. Villiers looks up from his sketching and watches the firing through his glasses. A ten-incher plunges into the hillside and the earth boils up as if the foundations were ripped away.

“I hope dear old Ricalton is out of that,” he exclaims.

“Don’t fear for him. He has gone through too much to be rapped by that,” I reply. I remember how he walked there yesterday, his eye always on a dodgehole. A ten-incher came just as this one to-day. He threw himself flat on his stomach, hugging his machine, tenderly as though it were a baby, in a ditch by the roadside. Ten yards off the shell exploded. The pieces flew over and clods of earth fell on him. Hardly had the pieces stopped before he was up and after them, for he is as great a curio hunter as he is a photographer, and he has a house in Maplewood, New Jersey, converted into a museum, which the natural history experts declare is the finest private collection in America. But enough of Ricalton.

Along a deeply rutted road in front of our village we gaze in awe at the big guns and their accouterment spread beside a narrow-gauge track. A pile of empty shells with points like needles and thick as a telephone pole, so heavy two men can hardly lift one, lies scattered down the slopes. A recoil vamp lumbers a truck. An ungainly steel thing nestles belly deep in the sand while a company of human ants sweats and wrestles with it. Then suddenly we come upon the beautiful breech, delicate as clockwork, dazzling as a jeweler’s case, gleaming in the sun, and Ricalton exclaims:

“The only thing that gives one respect for man--his achievement--is to look at such a piece of mechanism. It has the power of a jungle of elephants, yet is as sensitive as a little girl!”

Some days we take trips off to the various divisions and get close in for a big battle, feel the pitch and pallor of war, see heights assaulted, won and lost, hear the adventure of conflict from heroic mouths and get in close upon the red anathema. Then we visit the hospitals and know the slow agony of it--the suffering, endurance, silent sacrifice. Two weeks ago I saw the same operation that was performed on President McKinley--laparotomy. A soldier’s stomach was pierced, as McKinley’s was. The surgeons took it out, sewed it up and replaced it. To-day I was told the man would recover. He is a strong, hardy chap, a peasant boy, who lives on rice, fish and tea, which was not McKinley’s diet. The soldier at the same time lost his right arm by amputation. Visiting him again yesterday I asked how he was getting on.

“Well enough,” he replied. “The hard thing is not to think about it. You’re all right if you only don’t think. It’s the mind that rips one up, sir, the doctor says.”

Our village shelters most of the impedimenta that an army headquarters must carry. Band-musicians are our neighbors. The interpreters, next door, swap tea, cigarettes and news with us. The Russian interpreter, who lived in Moscow three years, sketches so well, Villiers says he will take him to Paris and make him the fashion. Behind us are the Japanese correspondents, so clandestine in their ways that even a Manchurian farmer must know they are yellow journal reporters. Of a morning we see a curious pair strolling off over the hills, one with a fowling-piece, looking for snipe, the other with a camera watching for a chance to get a shell as it explodes. One is Mr. Arriga, the expert on international law, who will adjudicate all property rights as soon as Port Arthur falls; the other is the official photographer.

Then there are the war correspondents, who have a camp three miles off. In bargaining for junks to take the news out, two of the cable men have become so bitter in rivalry that they go around with Mauser pistols, each threatening to shoot the other if he tells how the censor was evaded. There is the Norwegian nobleman with the eyes of a viking who is writing serials for one of Harmsworth’s London dailies. Finally, there is what Villiers calls “The Bartlett pair”--A. Bascom Bartlett, Esq., son of the Hon. E. Bascom Bartlett, M. P., who came out to see the fun and what Villiers calls the Tossup, because it was a toss-up whether or not he should come, and who is here to make fun. It was he, who recently, after hearing a general tell of the desperate charge of a brigade, patted the officer on the back and said: “A very noble act, sir. I shall relate that in Tossup Hall.”

The elder Tossup is a country brewer in Yorkshire. The younger insists that he is an officer and a gentleman and knows how to conduct himself. But a few days ago he was caught, while visiting an outpost with an officer, in a crossfire, and ducked into a trench. The officer tried to reassure him by following into the trench. There, while a battle was raging beyond, and in the presence of all the sublime panorama that surrounds us here the Tossup said: “I hope you will come and visit me in England. We will go to the autumn maneuvers.”

The officer, not expert with English, pulled out his dictionary and ran his thumb down the “ma’s.” “man--man--manur” he read. “Ah,” he cried at last, “the autumn manuring! I see, sir, yours is an agricultural country.”

Chapter Six

203-METER HILL

What Blaine’s unfortunate “three R’s” were to his Presidential campaign “203-Meter Hill” was to the siege of Port Arthur. Risen to the dignity of key to the situation, it had, in an ordnance sense, little to do with the case. It was but one of seven advance posts for final assault. A pimple of progress to the engineer, it was not permanently fortified, did not belong to the primary scheme of defense, and was dominated by three of the finest forts--Etzeshan, Anzushan, and Liaotishan: mountains of the Chair, the Table, and the Lion’s Mane. For three reasons heavy guns could not be mounted there. First, the cost in energy and life would be too vast, because rifles whose barrels alone weigh from two to eight tons each would have to be hauled by hand up 680 feet of rock, a task heroic even in peace. In war, wedged among three magnificently intrenched hostile positions, this would be impossible. Second, even if these heavy guns--only of any value against forts or fleets--had been gotten there, they would have been pounded to pieces within an hour of arrival by the more numerous and better emplaced artillery of the Chair, the Table, and the Lion’s Mane. Finally, heavy guns are never emplaced on mountain peaks in an offensive campaign.

“203” had one value--a great one. It was the best point of observation the Japanese had yet had. Line of vision, not line of fire, was what they needed. From “203” they could look into all portions of the harbor that could float a warship, but, what was more essential, they could look around the promontory of Golden Hill into the cove, where the hunted remnant of the Russian fleet had been hiding, at loose anchor, since the disastrous attempt to escape on August 10th. They had no need for better artillery posts than the positions which they had held for four months and from which they had been able to place shells in any spot on the Russian side.

_Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly_

THE HYPOSCOPE

Showing Lieutenant Oda looking from 203-Meter Hill through the hyposcope at the Russian fleet in the New Harbor of Port Arthur]

“Any spot,” that is, if they knew where the spot was. To locate the spot had been the difficulty. “203” gave the line of vision, but it was so wedged in among commanding batteries that its value depended upon an instrument new to warfare--the hyposcope. This is merely a telescope cut in half--the front half elevated above the other, like the head of an ostrich above the body, and the two connected by a further length of scope. In the joints thus formed mirrors are placed. Thus a view of the interior of Port Arthur was brought over the topmost trench of “203” to the eyes and brain of the Japanese lookout, protected there by the rocks. Through the hyposcope a lookout could observe the effect of every shot from his own batteries, located not on “203” or anywhere near “203,” but distant, most of them, two or three miles. While he operated the hyposcope with his left hand, with his right he held to his ear the receiver of a telephone connected directly with each of these firing batteries. These batteries were emplaced, not on mountain peaks, not on the front of the mountain range from which their operations were being directed, but entirely behind this range, which was parallel to the coast range, forming the permanent line of Russian defense. From these points, scattered in the rear of the Japanese position, distant from the Russians, the nearest half a mile, the farthest three miles, the work of the bombardment went on. The firing was what the military man calls “high angle” or “plunging”; that is, the shell traveled in the line of a parabola over two mountain ranges, which separated the Japanese batteries from the Russian ships. The gunners never had a sight of what they were firing at, the officers in command of the batteries never had a sight of what they were firing at. Only the lookout on “203” knew where the shells went, and he got his knowledge through a mirror. This knowledge was used by the artillery officer, who found the range by means of a quadrant. The hyposcope, the telephone, the quadrant--these were the scientific ganglia that wiped the mountains from the map of the Liaotung Peninsula, and brought the operations, in the mind’s eye, to the level of a billiard table. “203” was the cushion needed for successful caroming. It would be useless to lug heavy guns up there; the hyposcope was carried up, but not artillery.

Dispatches have said that the capture of “203” gave the besiegers command of the town. Such dispatches concerning other captured positions were published repeatedly. Their effect was to keep the world continuously expecting the fall of Port Arthur. Let it once be comprehended that none of the positions captured up to December 15th was permanent, that none was a part of the grand scheme of defense perfected by the Russians through the past seven years; that there still remained seventeen primary and twenty-five secondary positions on the land side in addition to the finest forts which are on the sea side, and it will be apparent that this expectation was not, until General Stoessel decided that further resistance was useless, justified by the actual conditions.

Commanding the town meant little. The Japanese navy put shells into the town on the 8th of February, and had been able to put them in ever since; the army put them in on the 11th of August, and had been qualified for destruction ever since. They wanted to save the town. They looked upon it as their property. Why smash up what they would have to rebuild? The fleet had been their chief objective. Though inert for four months, it was a menace until sunk; that out of the way, they need not worry. Of course their shells had searched about for arsenals and storehouses; if the town got in the way of the search--well, so much the worse for the town, but the Japanese effort had been to save their own. It was not Port Arthur, but Stoessel and his forts, that Nogi was after, just as it was not Richmond, but Lee and his army, that Grant was after.

As for the strategic position, no one can say that any one fort at Port Arthur is the key. Nature assisted expert engineers in devising those forts. All are so arranged that each is commanded by two or three, and, in some cases, by a dozen others; thus when one was taken it drew Russian fire from its fellows until it became untenable. Such was the situation at “203-Meter Hill.” The Japanese had driven the Russians out, but they were unable to mount guns of large caliber there, or do aught but locate a farther station from which to direct final assaults. Ten years ago, when the Japanese took Port Arthur from the Chinese in a day, one fort, Etzeshan, taken, the others fell. That was the key. To-day no single fort is so important. “203” is dominated by the Table fort, the Table fort by the Chair fort, the Chair fort by Golden Hill, and Golden Hill by the Lion’s Mane. And after all this was taken, there would still remain the east forts. Yet, the capture of “203” was decisive. On September 19th, the Japanese lost two thousand men in trying to take it. The attempt failed. The division with the job in hand sat down, waited, and worked. Two months and a half of sapping, and one day of assault, on December 4th, turned the trick. Though it did not mean the fall of Port Arthur, it meant the beginning of the end. This for the reason that every contraction in the Russian line meant a gain in Japanese strength. The smaller the circumference the less the capacity for resistance. And, after all, the physical fact of the fall was simply a question of mathematics. The loss of life appalls, the spectacle attracts, the glory inthralls, but the intellect, backed by whatever impulse it is that gives man resolution for the supreme sacrifice, commands. A chessboard and two master minds--such was Port Arthur, Nogi, and Stoessel. The checking move was made as long ago as May 26th, when the battle of Nanshan was fought. The fate of Port Arthur was sealed then just as it was sealed again when “203” was taken.

Let us look at that September assault on “203,” of which the one in December was but a repetition, and glimpse what it meant to storm Port Arthur. Could all the bloody story of the siege be told, “203” would be forgotten, a detail lost in vista, swamped in gigantic operations, veiled in the mist of vast sacrifices. Yet the mind, puny as it is, must grasp an incident and cling tight, as a poet to the fringe of metaphor, for comprehension even distant.

Passing from the rear of the army to the front, you might realize something of the tricky skill used to move those pawns over that vast chessboard. To the eye of an eagle all would have been invisible. The sum of his sight would have been a tongue of land making faces at the sea, ridged with deep blotches from whose recesses thin pricks of smoke slipped to the crack and roar of great guns.

Yet lively work was seen. Close to the right rear was the first battery, a six-gun emplacement of field four point sevens. At one o’clock in the afternoon the telephone rang, the lieutenant in command called, and instantly the redoubt swarmed with figures that sprang like ants from the earth. Busy as ants, they answered the order from brigade headquarters for the signal shot to open the grand bombardment. They had come from their bomb-proofs, into which they would dodge again as soon as the shot was fired. There was much pride in the chief gunner as he took a cartridge from its bomb-proof shell chest, ran to his gun, threw open the cordite chamber, pulled out the breech block, rammed in the shell, snapped the block, and stepped back to signal the lanyard man; more pride than is usual in the Japanese gunner, a timid, simple being, dexterously handling his delicate instrument with as little vanity as he would handle a potato hoe.

Hurrying on the road to escape the shock, and looking back, the battery was invisible. The bewilderment of the eagle, if told that danger lurked there, would be overwhelming. A shell spat out, revealing the battery behind a mass of earth forming a natural redoubt. This was in a narrow valley with only a small range of foothills between it and the sea, a place later called “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Behind every mountain shoulder, and up every gorge, firing high angle over the eminence in front, was a battery nestled in its redoubt, with bomb-proofs for the men and bomb-proofs for the ammunition. It was hardly a valley, but a ravine, barren of grass, a torrential place through which, in spring, huge rains tore. Soon other rain--red rain, powdery and leaden--was to pour there.

Directly in front, out of the west, loomed “203,” flanked by its gigantic brothers, granite-tossed, the Chair and the Table and the Lion’s Mane. Bone of the world’s vertebræ, Russia had capped them with science and determination. Their cordoned batteries, cunning and intricate, spoke not a word in reply to the Japanese taunts hurled in upon them, savage and vain. Why reply? They knew their strength. Before “203” lay a height down on the map, like the disputed key itself, under figures to denote in meters its reach skyward; “176” they call it, lacking more intimate speech, but the soldiers quickly dubbed the hill “Namicoyama,” for they saw its resemblance to a flying fish abundant in these waters, called by us the trepang, by Japanese the namico. The mongers of Kamikura, after disemboweling, inflate this fish for hanging lamps. There it lay--the namico--its slopes spread finwise, its two peaks, furze-capped, rising above the mists of the valley as incandescents struggle through the fog of the night. Ringed with barbed wire was each peak and close about the top were lines of loopholed rock. As the following step of a stair, “203” rose beyond, fortified likewise. From the nearer peak the tardy glint of the sun caught the brass muzzles of two cannon. From the farther, down the slope, ran a trench continued to the sea.

The battle was on. Before the Russian outlook knew it the Japanese advance was at the base of Namicoyama. Each man was stripped to his khaki uniform, his cartridge belt and his rifle. Four hundred rounds of ammunition were in the four leather boxes at his belt, and in his hip pocket was a ration, dubbed with a soldier laugh, “iron”--three hard biscuits with a piece of salt fish the size of his palm.

Up they went cautiously, a squad of twenty at a time, slinking along the ravines, their rifle-butts dragging the ground; one file of twenty, then another and another, until the slopes were dotted with figures colored like the earth--silent, nimble, tiny.

Now the artillery was at it heavily. Beginning with the battery we had seen go into action, the pieces spoke up, one by one, until near a hundred guns were spitting fire from the nooks behind; astonishing to an eagle, but the Russians seemed not to mind. The shots increased, the din augmented. A shell appeals to the imagination--snarls like a wild beast, flings fierce shrieks into unwilling ears, rends tooth and claw at fear. The place might have been a nest of demons with the old devil hen hatching them out. The Japanese kept those two ridges so hot with shrapnel that not a man dared show himself. For twenty yards below the parapet the slope bubbled as does a pot boiling above the kettle’s brim. Not a sound from the nearer Russians. From Anzushan, from Etzeshan, from “203,” and even from far-off Liaotishan the replies spoke distant and absurd, but Namicoyama, slated for assault, was silent, silent as though no brass cannon were mounted in the sight of all men, as though no twenty companies of sharpshooters were lying low with Maxims and repeating rifles waiting to receive the final charge. Were there cowardly Japanese it was a secret shared by no man with his neighbor. Sound to the core or not, they went on with the precision of a clock. As the infantry advanced, occasionally a huddled figure, inert, was grouped here and there with others who moaned piteously. At times a squad, sinking, would lose itself in a hollow, only to climb presently up the opposite slope, there to sink on one knee, rifles at fixed bayonets, while the lieutenant in command reconnoitered to right or left, searching for the line of best deploy. Then on, skurrying another few rods, to another halt, until they came to the precipitous rocks up which it seemed a goat would have skinned his shins in climbing. Here, hugging the mountain proper, having lost but few, considering the advance made, they waited for night.

Meanwhile, aloft, hell reigned. Shells constantly bursting apparently shattered guns and killed gunners, but when the dust cleared all was instantly life again, the gnomish figures busy--busy as ants with eggs. For a minute thus, then all would drop back into the earth simultaneously with the reply, and at the very moment that another Russian shell was in upon them.

Was it the same beyond in Namicoyama and in “203”? Doubtless the Russians were as safe, though with them the shells must have been multiplied by twenties, because the space of a few rods, lying exposed to every range, received the constant fire of every Japanese gun. The Russians had a wider target, a range of hills from which occasionally they could see smoke curling upward. It was far more difficult to hit than the Japanese target, for nothing was plain, all was guesswork. The Russians could not see a thing they were aiming at. A range of hills, seared with autumn, bare of husbandmen, innocent of apparent defense, alive with hissing venom, confronted them. They lashed it desperately as they could, frantically as a boy beset with nightmare. The little men had a plain target, parapets outlined against the sky, trenches clear and distinct. Yet the Japanese were often covered with dust from bursts on the slope beyond, and through the Valley of the Shadow the diabolic screeches mounted with the dying of day. Night came with the wild clamor on in full fury, the little brown squads still at the base of Namicoyama, the reserves creeping around toward “203.”

Could they climb it--that six hundred feet of almost perpendicular rock, where, in daytime, with sticks and hobnailed boots, the best of mountain climbers would have found an adventure? And they must go up dragging rifles, shrapnel dropping among them, shells bursting overhead, bullets mowing them down, not to rest at the top, but, once there, to plunge against troops well rested, superbly intrenched.

The reserves threw up shelter tents and staked down the flaps with heavy rocks, but the wind, howling across from the inlet, flung them to the laugh of the rising equinoctial. Some sought rest on bean straw, under blankets, the September moon streaming in, but there was no rest.

A flash in the eyes and the mountain is thrown into a silhouette of fire, then plunged into blackness. From the extreme Russian left the searchlights are wheeling into position, one by one, until the whole seven are out, playing day over the battlefield, throwing suspicious investigation into the little squads of brown. Science has intensified war. Formerly men could get their fill of fighting by day, but now they needs must flare the candle at both ends. Like Joshua, these generals are deciding their empires’ fates under light of their own ordering.

The second searchlight comes out of the right. In between, the others dance, now a minuet, now a tarantella. Then a red line streaks the air, parabola-like, and its end breaks into molten balls, illumining the Valley of the Shadow of Death as by candelabra of stars. Its path is crossed by another. Still a third leaps into life till the night is frightful with fireworks. Processions peaceful and gay have danced through the cities to such salvoes fostered by Pain. You have seen them on Coney Island, you have watched for them on Manhattan Beach, you have romped through merry summer nights canopied by their dazzle; you have seen them split into golden bursts and rain diamonds of child joy; but do not wish to see them bred by the Russians, grisly and deadly, laying bare every joint of action and throwing into ghastly relief every hope of surprise.

A growl among the mountains rolls into power, and a naval shell from our left has burst in “203.” The forts respond, the mountains reply. The small arms open up, the machine guns rattle, the pompoms clatter in. Pitch, fuzz, dingle and pop are drowned. Crash, roar, hurtle and boom are out. The devil is loose.

A clatter on the stones below comes nearer, steadily, rhythmically. Listen! The tread of soldiers marching! Soon an indistinct line wavers into sight. A low whistle and it turns square across the Valley of the Shadow toward that terrible din. Another whistle and it twists up from single to double file. Each man has his full kit on his back, an extra pair of hobnailed boots, the pick, the shovel, the rifle. The steel is hooded with brass caps, a challenge to the dew. Officers’ swords, sheathed in dull cloth, defy the glitter of sunlight and of searchlight. It is the reserve regiment advancing to reinforce at dawn. Company by company it passes, and at the end marches the gray-haired colonel, stumbling in the dark, peering off at the searchlights, blinking at their bravado. The troops enfile into the farther ravine and deploy by battalions. The din lessens not. So another grist is fed into the mill of war.

The reserves’ echo dies to the incoming of crunches on the stones as of a wagon lumbering--a heavy wagon. Then out of the mists a caisson rolls behind six horses, the mounts walking, calmly, slowly. Another caisson and another, then the guns--one, two, three, four, five, six in all--while overhead whistles the shot and beyond gleams the searchlight. The rear battery is going forward, past the front battery, almost to the base of Namicoyama, where, at a sixty-degree angle, it can reinforce the infantry as the sun comes up.

Sleep is fitful when blaze is flirting with blackness and sentries with death. Long before light the trench guards on the front ridge are waiting for the big guns to salute the morn. The fire has slackened. There is fair quiet. When one has heard the wild gabble of a thousand guns he is _blasé_ before the chatter of a dozen. Down the Valley of the Shadow a shell sometimes wings a nasty way and the searchlights hold vigil, but the infantry sleeps.

Then a little light fades the immense shadows, and soon over the rim of the world peers a new day. Peace, beauty, tingling health--this for another moment--when off to the right a shell wheezes. The snap is touched. The army wakes. Again it is on--the fearful din, the unendurable bombardment. So it has been for two months; so it will be until the end. Again and again.

But what is that under the crest of Namicoyama where it rises, furze covered, its incandescent struggle fighting fog? A patch of brown, then a patch of blue, then a flag--yes, a flag--a white flag, with a red sun in the center, the most legible flag in the Volapük of bunting, the Rising Sun of Japan!

In the night they have done it because they have slipped the thongs of civilization and risen triumphant to the hold of rice paddy and sacred mountain. What they did was simple--they changed shoes; rather, they threw away shoes. If one asks how the Japanese took “203” the answer is in terms of feet.

Such heights had been attacked before with scant success. Boots, though the nails be hobbed, help no man trained as the chamois to nature’s aid. Yet boots were all they had. The government in flirting with the ways of white men recognized nothing but leather and thread as proper footgear for Mikado worshipers. But that was before “203.” Here, at last, the soldiers knew more than the officials of state. They knew enough to toss aside a weapon made for pavement fighting when they went against precipice and moss. Reduced to essentials, fighting for life, they forgot the ambitious new ways. Instead of boots they tied on their feet waraji, the Japanese straw sandal. Having none of proper make, they improvised from the rough rice sacking brought by the commissary. Since then the government has been compelled to officially supply waraji.

Barefooted, but for the tight cling of the straw, hid from the searchlights by the shadows of Namicoyama and “203,” in the night they had climbed the heights and are now waiting the introduction of Mr. Bombshell before they reel audaciously across the parapet.

The brown is khaki-covered men, the blue those with overcoats. Far down at the lower left is a gray-haired figure standing apart--the colonel. He makes no effort to shield himself. The artillery of two armies have concentrated their fire above his head. That is their business, no concern of his, so he hazily observes the unfurling of day beyond the Tiger’s Tail as he would dwell upon the empurpling of a convolvulus. At Nanshan he led the victorious charge. Three bullets went through his coat and two through his hat. He wears Shinto emblems and believes he was not born to be killed in battle. He has been in forty-seven engagements without a wound. His name is Tereda, and he commands the first regiment of the first division; in rank but a lieutenant-colonel, his colonel slain May 26th.

Shrapnel begins bursting above. The Russians are far from sleep, farther from death. It being high time for business, the white flag with the red sun in the center waves once to the left, once to the right, and twice to the front. It is the artillery signal. Again the ridge falls under the terrific fire of the day before. But this time the infantry is 150 yards nearer, and this 150 yards is in a direction similar to that pursued by a telephone lineman when he follows his calling. The men crouch low, their own shells bursting less than fifty yards above them.

The introduction is long. The Russians are saucy hosts. They parley and talk back with their big guns, and that bluster of the day before is repeated. All day long Tereda and his men emulate the furze, for when they take the fort they want night handy to help them intrench, to give them a bit of cover despite the searchlights and star bombs. Besides, one climb of that sort is enough for twenty-four hours. They must have the cumulation of another twenty-four for the final charge. Yet it is costly recuperation. Blood spurts frequently. Wounded wilt under the sun, the dead lie untouched.

At half-past four in the afternoon Tereda orders the final charge. Three cheers go up--Banzai! Banzai! Banzai! With bayonets fixed the squads deploying as before, the khaki-covered spots begin to move. In advance the men crawl hand over hand, helped by blessed waraji. Twenty feet from the parapet they pause and fling something that leaps through the air like balls from catcher to second base. These hand grenades of gun-cotton explode on and in the parapet, introduction more intimate. The brilliant bursts play off the fast settling evening as the khaki-covered ones go in, Tereda pausing and peering with his glass. The entire battalion tumbles over the parapet. Then the reserves begin climbing from the base.

Silence. All is over. What has happened? Five, ten minutes pass, then the firing recommences, but now the object is changed; all the Japanese shrapnel is playing over the road leading to the Chair fort and all the Russian fire is directed against Namicoyama. The Russians are retreating, throwing their rifles as they run. Over Namicoyama floats the white flag with the red sun in the center.

Two hours later a fat old man with a heavy beard and baggy trousers is brought in--a prisoner. An officer, originally in the commissary, he had been called into the line, business being dull in his department. He commanded six companies on Namicoyama. Wounded in the arm and sullen, he has no greeting for us.

“The pigs,” he cried; “I stood at the end of the trench with my pistol ready to shoot every bolter, but it was no use. The beasts! Ah, my poor Russia.”

He had a son in a Siberian regiment shot four days previously before his eyes. For a year he had had no word from his wife and two younger children in the Trans-Baikal, but he was well fed. Bearded, tanned, deep-eyed, he loomed with dignity and might above his captors. There was no consoling him.

“The beasts,” he cried, “papa disowns them. Why didn’t I use the pistol?”

There was plenty of flour and small-arm ammunition over there, he said. The troops were in good morale, but needed bucking up by the officers. What could be done for him?

“Nothing,” he replied. “My boy is dead, my wife, my children, where are they? And Russia, ah, Russia, where is she!”

To him Port Arthur had fallen.

Chapter Seven

A SON OF THE SOIL

Headquarters Third Imperial Army, Before Port Arthur, Oct. 9th: Often we dine with the Army’s leaders. To-day all the temporary occupants of the headquarters village, which include the human impedimenta of an army, such as the expert on international law, the official photographer and the correspondents, were called to the General’s house. My invitation read:

“Sir: I am desired by General Baron Nogi to write to you, and
tell you, with his compliments, that he will be happy if you will
favor him with your company at tiffin on Sunday, the 9th inst.,
at one o’clock. He wishes to become well acquainted with you by
having chit-chats. I have the honor to be, sir,

“Your Obedient Servant,

“Y. YOSHIOKA, Major Aide-de-Camp:

“By Order.”

We went. There were some long tables peppered with aluminum ware, fruit and wine under the pear trees of a Manchurian back yard. We stood up to the cold luncheon, partly foreign, partly native, charmingly served by soldiers. There was a crowd of dignitaries distinguished by uniforms. They were of all ranks, from the three stars and three stripes of the General of the forces to the single star and stripe of the sub-lieutenant, who is commissary adjutant. But it was not an affair of dress, so out of the crowd rose two personalities who burned themselves into my consciousness, where they hang yet, resplendent in energy. There was about them a native dignity, a primal force, that indefinable something that distinguishes great men.

One wore a pair of yellow boots and might have stepped from an American fashion plate. There was American vitality and freshness in him, too. He dispensed with ceremony, spoke keenly, decisively, almost brusquely, and looked you square in the eye with a twinkle that said he appreciated all the social gayety and yet kept back his own opinion. He had a square jaw, thick neck, broad shoulders, massive palms and a head long from chin to crown--all unusual for a Japanese. This was Major Yamaoka, the _parliamentaire_ who recently rode into Port Arthur with the Emperor’s offer of safety to noncombatants. He is one of General Nogi’s most trusted aides, a popular orator, a man of decision. He walks like a thoroughbred. Had Cæsar seen Major Yamaoka walk across that Manchurian garden he would surely have put him on his staff.

The other wore a pair of Pomeranian top boots, elegant and serviceable as Yamaoka’s were fresh and hardy. They were pulled snugly over his knees to keep out the bitter Manchurian wind. Above were a pair of white kersey breeches, spectacular as Napoleon’s. He was fond of rising on the toes of these boots and writhing sinuously in them, like an acrobat testing, as he responded to a toast or applauded the music and fun. Everything about him indicated the strong man of action--the tensity of his muscles, the flex of his waist, the sure set of his heels, the poise of his head, the ease and power of his bearing, his well-knit mouth, his regular, beautiful teeth, the clarity of his eyes, the sincerity of his smile, even the straight, tough fiber of his hair. In physique the opposite of Yamaoka, for he is five feet nine in height, exceedingly tall for a Japanese, slender, and with delicate hands, the two yet have the same vivacity and shrewdness, the same kindliness touched with hauteur. But the second man is chief of the army, not only in rank, for it was General Nogi, but in worth as well. His mastery was easily felt to-day. He stands at the pinnacle of a wonderful career and the world’s eyes center on him. How handsome he was--and how simple and friendly, how easily pleased, how innately courteous! Is he not also that ideal philosopher whom the Roman Emperor Aurelius wrote about as bethinking him always of his enemy’s comfort? I asked him how he would like to exchange places with General Stoessel.

“I think often of General Stoessel,” he replied. “To be frank I think of him every day. When I go to bed at night and when I get up in the morning, and often between times I wonder about him, how hard his position must be, and how well he defends it, and if he is really injured as we have heard. Sometimes I put myself in his place and imagine what I should do. Then I try to think that some day I might be in just his position. And so I fight the battles all over again from his side and from mine.”

“Does it teach you much?”

The General laughed heartily. “We have learned much from the Russians. I am always pointing them out to my soldiers as model fighters.” He took from the ground a pick whose handle had been splintered by a shell, evidently found on the battlefield. Both nose and heel had been worn half away, rounded with dullness and rust. It was not like the Japanese picks, which are small and short-handled.

“I assembled all the battalion commanders a few days ago,” he continued, “and showed them this pick as an object lesson. It has turned over many a hundred weight of earth and shows how expert the Russians are at trench-making. Our soldiers do not like to dig trenches. Many of them are of gentle blood and think it is coolie work. Besides, they say: ‘We are going forward in the morning. Why dig trenches to-night?’ The Russians have taught us tactics, too.”

Here Villiers interrupted. “Men who, like the Russians, build trenches so they must show themselves on the skyline to shoot can’t teach tactics,” he said. The talk slid on to the bonzais, mutual promises to dine together next in Port Arthur, and au revoirs.

But I started to write of the Manchurian. He knows not, neither does he learn. Yet you can scarcely ask who let down that shaggy jaw and who sloped that head away, for he has a magnificent, strong, clean jaw and his head is handsome and high. That he bathes only once a year and cares not who owns the land so long as he tills it; and that his wife and daughter sit on the stone fence of his donkey stable picking the lice from one another’s heads, doubtless has nothing to do with the question propounded by our sociological poet.

Nor is the Manchurian uncivilized. He has, indeed, reached quite a state of development, for he is the abject slave of fashion--at least his wife and daughter are. They bandage their feet until where a No. 8 boot should go they wear baby 6’s. This, I dare say, is a less harmful fashion than that other silly one of corsets, for surely the organs beneath a shoe lace are not so vital as those under a waistband, but it looks sillier. To see women in the harvest fields, by the roadside washing clothing, cleaning the donkey stable, baking bread, spanking boys, suckling babies, attending husbands, all the time balancing themselves as a _première danseuse_ on her toes, is to think of stake and rack! They say that this is not real Manchuria, that up North, where the other army is, the women do not bind their feet. The present Dowager Empress of China, considered by many the most remarkable living woman, is a native of northern Manchuria. In all this vast country the women are noted for modesty and virtue. Ten years ago, during the China-Japan War, many committed suicide to escape expected ravishment. But it was well learned then that the Japanese never outrage a woman. An incident of such atrocity by Japanese, in either war, has yet to be recorded. It is said that the Russians are different, though it is difficult to see how any Westerner could look with more than curiosity on a Manchu woman. Certain it is that they go about their lives here in complete freedom and security. Not only do the Japanese respect women; they respect property also. Here is a fertile country with rich crops sustaining a vast army, yet no farmer has lost a bushel of grain, except when the chance of battle has substituted shot for scythe.

Driven from home by shells which killed their father and mother, these brothers tramped from camp to camp selling eggs.]

A son of the soil is the Manchurian, but not a friend of nature, with whom he wars valiantly for his daily bread. He fights terrible suns in summer and ghastly winds in winter. When the winds and snows drive out the flies that eat him up, the lice come in until the sun and flies can have another turn. So can you blame him for being a money grabber? He thinks only of this season’s maize crop and of next spring’s plowing. Whether the Russians or the Japanese or the Chinese rule the land is much the same to him. He will put his tax into the Governor’s coffer and go on with his toil. Why should he bother? He remembers that Confucius was born on the Liaotung and that Confucius taught to resist no violence and remember the fathers. Consequently he fills the country with tombstones and babes while other men fill it with war and nameless graves. Over in the valley is a granite monolith erected in the memory of one who honored his father and mother. A Russian shell has struck it in the pit of the stomach and Japanese bullets have shattered its back.

Patriotism? No. But he has his religion and it is this: to remember the fathers and owe no man.

Recently the master of our house went out with us for a day to carry supplies. A stray shell passed over us, perhaps twenty feet above. We all ducked, but as soon as the coolie recovered he ran. We called him, for we were without other help. He kept running. We sent a soldier. The coolie came back grudgingly. Finally we gave him a yen. But he shook the yen impudently in our faces, and fell back simulating death, crying out: “Coolie dead, yen no good.”

He should be used to danger now. His neighbors are. The shells and bullets are to them what blowsnakes and mosquitoes are to an American country district. To-day I saw children playing among corn stubble while three shells burst within a hundred yards. The children did not look up. For three months the Russians were in the land; now for three months the Japanese have been in the land. For three months the Manchurian nonchalantly carried Russian wounded into Port Arthur and buried Russian dead by the roadside for fifty kopeks a day. For three months he has nonchalantly carried Japanese wounded into Dalny and buried Japanese dead in the fields for fifty sen a day. What concern is it of his which survivor he gives up sen and kopek to afterwards?

Chapter Eight

THE BLOODY ANGLE

General Nogi’s Headquarters Before Port Arthur, Oct. 22d: To-day we went to the Eternal Dragon, and looked in on the bloody angle. D’Adda was with me--the Marquis Lorenzo D’Adda of Rome, naval expert, military engineer, designer of the _Niishin_ and _Kasuga_, which, even now, on clear days, our spyglasses can discern held in leash, ten miles off, by Togo.

Yesterday, from the Phœnix, D’Adda looked on the fortress--its two mountain ranges, its stone wall, its chain of twenty forts, its concrete glaces, its barbed wire morass, its artillery pregnant with repose, its infantry hideous with secret might--and said:

“Eemposseebl! Eet ees eemposseebl--absolutelee. Zee Japonaise can nevaire take. Eet ees stronger zan Sevastopol--stronger zan Gibraltar--absolutelee.”

To-day, from the foot of the Dragon, he looked down into a plain lost to the husbandman who bears on his arm no red cross, yet furrowed far deeper with vast and terrible furrows, its creased and aching joints curled into the glaring sun. Up, he looked under the muzzles of Russian cannon, useless now that the plain they were wont to fill with dead is lost to them.

“Extraordinaire--colossal!” he cried. “Port Art--eet will be one smoke puff zee nex attac.”

We had left the siege parallels and were climbing into the fort, our backs bent low so that no Russian sharpshooter might give his government cause to decorate the forgotten names of two noncombatants. We had wormed our way, zigzag, a mile and a half through the valley along a trench that a division might foot with equal safety, four abreast. Lives precious, toil enormous, and brains cunning and quick had hid their army from the enemy as prairie dogs hide their spring litters. A clever attaché with the Boers had shown how they who learned the tricks from the Kafirs, hid vulnerable turnings with maize stalks. Another, schooled with D’Adda in the arts that Julius Cæsar taught the legions in Gaul and which have not been improved on to this day, had outlined the most economic angles of advance, had shown how to take advantage of every gully, how to hide behind every terrace tuft, how to cross sodded planks above at equal distances until the way resembled the weave of an Indian basket. All of this that we had passed was but a sixth of the work of one division, of which the army holds three. And it has been done in less than two months.

The Marquis continued to exclaim that since the invention of gunpowder there has been no such engineering. “I know zee historee well,” he said, “veree well. I know Plevna, Sevastopol, Dantzig, Paris, Vicksburg, Metz, Ladysmith. Zay are no-thing. Port Art--eet ees zee greatest. Zee world cannot comprehend.”

Halfway back we had passed a Chinese village, shattered by shells, blackened by smoke, its tumbling walls utilized for the trench. Earthen wine pots had been filled with shale and placed on the sandbags to deceive the gunners beyond. Two days before there was rain and in one part the trench was filled with muddy water. We had to pick our way on submerged stones and planks. As I hurried along, looking at my feet, I noticed that the water grew dull red as though the wine pots above had burst. At that moment I stumbled and caught the wall for steadiness. My hand struck something flabby. I drew it back in horror and found sticking to the palm a white piece of flesh dented with convolutions--a bit of human brain. A pace away he lay, his feet toward me. A stray shell had blown him off from brain base to nose bridge. He was still warm and the officer called back shrilly for a soldier to come with pick and shovel. Then we took notice of the shells bursting, some five miles off, some a thousand yards away. This had happened within the hour.