Chapter V: Preface: The Siege at a Glance (4)

As we came closer to the Dragon a stretcher was borne down by two red cross men. A bullet had picked a private through a peephole. Just ahead of us two soldiers were walking, one with his full kit, rifle and shovel on his back, the other bareheaded and barebacked. Both wore on their sleeves the two yellow stripes of the distinguished soldier. The finger of the one who was to go was held by the hand of the one who was to stay. Neither spoke. They walked silently and slowly in the full sunlight. He of the full kit was ordered into the thirty-minute trench to take the place of the one who had passed out on the stretcher. He, too, is almost sure to pass, ere long, the same way. As the two comrades walked toward the place of death I saw how true Dickens is, for it was precisely thus--finger in palm--that he sent Sydney Carton and the seamstress to _la guillotine_ in “The Tale of Two Cities”; the one who was to go clasping the finger of the one who was to stay, the one who was to stay looking with kind, brave strength calmly into the face of the one who was to go.

“Ah! Tragique!” cried D’Adda.

The officer said we might one at a time go into the front trench. I started. It was a short climb over shale and debris of sundered shells and of a sudden I hobbled into a hollow space, girt with bags and silent, silent as is the place of execution the morning of capital punishment. It was the redoubt, thrust into the air like the maw of a dragon. The sun beat in beautiful and sure. The rocks, with deadly glare, spat up their challenge. An occasional bullet sang as a ripsaw tears through a pine knot. Then a machine gun rattled and the shale beyond pattered. I was carried back to a boiler factory and an automatic riveter. Of all war sounds that of the machine gun is least poetic, is the most deadly; it has the ring of business.

Silence, blankness, death. At first I could see no life, but the officer spoke a low word--here all words are whispers as they are beside the couches of those about to leave this world--and four spots on the wall that had seemed monotonous and brown as the shale moved. Four simple, peasant faces with the star of Nippon above looked at me. Then one, attracted by something beyond, suddenly kneeled, seized the rifle beside him, leveled it through a chink and pulled the trigger. That deadly rip sawed its knot.

Boldened by the presence of soldiers kneeling as I was, I began to look around. A groan, first aspirate, then low, as of an asthmatic man snoring, brought my eyes across the bag-protected dragon’s mouth and I saw two figures kneeling above a third. Presently the two lifted the third into a stretcher and filed past me with it. I saw a face blood-dabbed, the lips piteously moving. A bandage across the eyes saved me the worst. The officer beckoned for me to peek through the farther hole. The incident was but a bit of the day’s work for him. I followed and saw a shattered field glass under the parapet. It told the story. He was--had been--a non-commissioned officer in charge of the sentry squad and was looking across at the Russians when a sharpshooter spotted the glass. I felt that I was hurt more than he, for I lay awake thinking of it much of that night, only to remember that the surgeon-general had told me that a man shot through the brain is instantly unconscious, though his lips move and he moans for minutes.

“Each day--how many?” I asked the officer.

“Twenty.”

“And how many days?”

“Fifty-nine.”

“How many to take the fort?”

“Four thousand six hundred and fifty-three.”

“With each night a battle to resist a sortie?”

“Yes. Each night a sortie, each night a battle.”

“Thus--by night--how many to hold this awful place?”

“Since the beginning? Perhaps a regiment, perhaps a few more.”

He motioned me to the corner hole--the hole through which a minute before the bullet had sped into the officer’s eye. I emulated neither bullet nor officer, but at a respectful two feet glimpsed a ridge ghastly and glimmering in the sun like any other ridge in this hell hole. Quite near enough to reach in a short dash--200 yards, the officer said--a row of sandbags were backed business-like toward me. Between us were five heaps of blue clothes, four in a huddle and one a bit off--Russian dead killed in the battle of Hatchimakiyama four days ago in the zone where nothing lives. Grass withers there. Vermin alone germinate.

Behind those sandbags and behind these men crouch and have crouched every minute for two months hunting game the most lordly and the most cunning, the most deceitful and the most contemptible, the boldest and the fiercest, the most inspired and the most depraved this earth can boast.

The Russians on three sides held us in a vise. The bottom of the crater was paved with empty cartridge shells and bullets flattened on the rocks. Constantly more knots were being ripped by the saw above. Except for that rasp--a rasp that bore in with crescendic violence on the nerves--the silence was profound. Life was everywhere--intelligence at the keenest pitch, ingenuity the most diabolical, agility the most intense, sacrifice heroic, daring, sublime--but not a sound, not a motion. Everywhere the silence kept--the unendurable silence of the Eternal Dragon. Its insatiable maw thrust up there in the ghastly sunlight, drenched in blood, yet cried for more.

Clinging to the bases of the forts, like barnacles to a ship, these sturdy Japanese existed in miserable quarters throughout the summer, fall and half the winter.]

Sick with the thought that through this bloody angle, bought at so dear a cost, held at so terrible a price, there must yet be fought the supreme fight that will eventually reduce the citadel I turned to go. At the top of the downward trench I paused, kneeling, where three soldiers stood with rifles waiting to relieve the sentry on duty. Down through the plain swept the ten-mile front of the two armies--the might of Russia and the might of Japan, locked in a struggle so desperate there was no sound but the asthmatic wheeze of the ripsaw buzzing above. It was very close to the other world--yet the resources of two empires centered there, the heartthrobs of great people, raging like the wind in from two seas, swept it all into a typhoon of gore and grief.

I felt my hand clasped by a palm moist and gentle with feeling, friendly with comradeship. The eyes I looked into were not those of a beast of prey. They were quite pleasant eyes, even lovable. The face was touched with soil. I could see it came from the rice paddies, yet it had sympathy, and pity, and much capacity for happiness. Was there not also capacity for suffering? The low word came and he went off, food for powder. Will he be one of the twenty? The sun was quite as devilish as ever in the Dragon’s maw as he stepped into it. As I scrambled into safety I saw him propped against the wall, his rifle against a chink, his cheek to the breech, “sniping.” It was a salute and an appeal that he pressed into my hand, a reproach and a challenge. I was a white man, he a yellow, and he was killing white. What difference was there between us? Could I not also have found friends two hundred yards farther on? Still the ripsaw buzzed the knots. Again the machine gun rattled, without poetry, business-like and deadly.

“Tragique!” whispered D’Adda, as he came back from the same journey and sat beside me. “Zis ees zee focal point--most eentense, most sublime. Perhaps here Port Art will be taken--and by surprise. I know zee historee. I study Plevna, Sevastopol, Metz, Gibraltar, Vicksburg, Ladysmith. Always by surprise. Zee physical is but zee one aspect of zee situation. Zere are zee three aspect--zee physical, zee mental and zee moral. Zee moral aspect will be--what you call it? zee final decidence. When what you call zee psychologique mo-ment come--in zee wind, zee rain, zee storm, zee quick rush--zen zee high spirit go low--phwaat! like zat--zen Port Art fall. By a surprise. One sergeant he take Dalny, one private soldier he will take Port Art.”

We loiter along the parallel on our way back. The ripsaw strikes a knot above our heads and we shy to windward. D’Adda reminds me that once when Skoboleff, greatest of all Russian soldiers, thus ducked in giving way to a purely physical reflex action, he immediately leaped to the parapet, and walked along in full view of the enemy, until two members of his staff dragged him down as he sputtered out his disgust with himself.

We stop, winded. Again the ripsaw. Again the shrink. Then, content with what breath we have, fearful we may have no more, we hurry on, our knees sprung, our heads drawn in, like turtles slinking through the mud. We have no troops to encourage, no reputations to sustain. We are not Skoboleffs.

Chapter Nine

A BATTLE IN A STORM

Ho-o-zan (the Phœnix Mountain), Manchuria, August 28th:--Ninety-six hours of almost incessant fighting--from sun to moon, from moon to searchlight and from searchlight to dawn--is more than human endurance, backed though it be by Japanese pluck, can stand, and there was nothing to do last night but rest. Only an occasional sentry pop or the roll off to the right of a wheezy cannon whose shot traveled on wheels in need of grease, told us that the sublime panorama of mountains and valleys lying before us hid a hundred thousand armed and warring men.

Until last night the weather has been all sun and moonlight, with dawns and sunsets tinted persimmon russet, and the valleys bright twenty hours out of the twenty-four; fighting conditions ideal for the defense, whose searchlights and star bombs made the other four hours bright and left surprise as difficult as to a poker student playing with his back to a mirror. But mirror or no mirror the Japanese attacked. Night was day to them and daytime hell, as they hurled themselves against that iron chain of forts, only to break as the waves of the sea climb up to shatter upon the rocks. The rocks disintegrate. Yes. Yet hard on the waves--and slow.

Losses? Officially it was admitted that more than twenty-five thousand were done for. Not since Grant hurled his inefficient brigades on Cold Harbor has there been such a slaughter against a fortress. In the Ninth division, which lay in our immediate front and which formed the center of the army, two regiments were entirely decimated and a battalion and a company of artillery put out of action, to a man. For a week the roads at the bases of our mountain dribbled stretchers loaded with masses of flesh, clothes and blood. The soldiers’ “bandaging places” overflowed, and the living were so busy helping others to live, and still others to die, there was no time to bury the dead.

And all for nothing. Not a single permanent fort had been taken, not a prisoner, not a gun from the enemy was in our hands. The opposing mountains, responsive with explosives to the touch, where no art of the engineer was lost, held before us as always, grim, monstrous, calm in mighty strength. On their under-features, between the opposing outposts, lay thousands whom no first aid dared reach, and other thousands whom no burial squad came near. The men of words argued long that week. They could not agree whether it was a reverse or a repulse. The anti-Japanese contended that as we had not gained one point the action was a “reverse.” The lenient were certain that as we had not been driven back no one vain of military technique could call it more than a “repulse.” The fifty thousand interested parents in Japan knew not if it was victory or defeat; presently they are to find that it is death. “Reverse” or “repulse” the commander cared not: he had disobeyed an Imperial order, for the instructions were to enter Port Arthur on the 21st of August. And the caterers of the treaty ports, what cared they of “reverse” or “repulse”? The banquets had been ordered, the five-dollar tickets sold, the day fireworks stored for the fall of the eastern Gibraltar on this pre-ordained day. And now the eggs were no longer strictly fresh, the vegetables were stale, the meats off-color, while the back of Port Arthur was still game and careless in all that brilliant weather.

With us, to meet an officer was to see a face drawn and grave. Useless to utter sympathy, superfluous to express confidence. They had underestimated a great foe, miscalculated his strength, and were paying the price--a fearful one--with the “two o’clock in the morning” courage of desperately determined men. They did not waver or complain, but it was terrible to see them, calm, patient, silent, suffering, still resolute to go on, meeting each salutation with a hollow smile, ghastly with ache.

“What fine weather,” we say, wanting better speech.

“For him--yes. Bad for us.” “Him” is the enemy, on whom the sun shone gayly and for whom the new moon was a few hours off.

Clouds came with last evening. Slowly the houses on the edge of the old town disappeared against the murky hills. Then the new town went. The huge cranes that marked the western harbor, where lay the hunted warships, evaporated, the docks faded away, the stone quarry was lost. At length the tall factory chimney on the outskirts, which for days had been our chief landmark, went out in the haze. That was the last we saw of the complete Port Arthur, whose beleaguered, respected front had mocked us for eight desperate days.

The moon had a hard time. She came up with a huge cigar in her face--shocking in a lady moon!--which choked her till she spewed and sputtered and went out. She was a new moon and died gamely, filling the air with impudence and bravado, so it was some time after midnight before the rain pattered her off about her business with that silly cigar behind the clouds, and filled the valley with mist. Thus, the rain was our friend and we welcomed it, casting happy and fragrant remarks into the rising storm, singing the mountain to sleep with our lullaby of content, for we knew that “his” searchlights could do little, perhaps nothing, against our soldier boys, already sore and tired, but valiant down there in the huge night. Foiled in the light, we looked for them to do something in the dark.

But even before that we knew the night was big with promise, for eight officers climbed up at dusk to stay the night with us. We lay at length under rubber blankets and rough oiled paper used in Japan for cart covers, with our noses stuck between the rocks, scenting for excitement as deer are fire-stalked in the great woods.

This mountain, the Phœnix, is directly in the rear center of Nogi’s army and about a mile from his advance posts. Thus, with little danger, we command as grand a battlefield as the world has yet produced. From here we have seen, at the same time, exasperating as a three-ring circus, two infantry assaults, three artillery duels, and a naval engagement. The human impetus we knew not until last night. Until then we knew only the sound and color of battle, and its wild glory. So we fell asleep, the rain pattering.

Past midnight and only stray sentry shots have carried out that promise of something big. With difficulty we keep awake, yet the officers behind lie expectant and the night is young. The fresh rain dapples delicious coolness and filters mosquitoes--tiger mosquitoes--more terrible than war. I hear deep breathing--then quiet--and dreamland.

Rain pelting in my face wakes me to greet a flash of lightning. I tuck in the rubber blanket, reach for my watch and by the next flash see the hands at seven minutes past three. I snuggle myself into a ball and crunch the rocks closer. Another flash behind and I spasmodically close my eyes, but open them in time to see the mountain side and road below livid. Two horses are lying in the road, killed, I suppose, by the flash. But, no, I remember that a shell laid them out yesterday. Ricalton cries:

“They’ve begun.”

“No,” I yell, “it’s the storm,” and my voice is lost in the thunder.

Is it thunder? Is it cannon? Who can tell? The vivid flashes, too great for artillery, lighting up the whole mountain, come in now on all sides and as fast as the lanyards of a battery could be pulled.

The horrid grandeur rises. Prayerfully thankful to be in it I desperately resolve not to run. How the molten sheets drag me from that hole in the rocks! Surely every glass in Port Arthur is leveled here! The next instant the Russian fire will concentrate on the Phœnix. Yes. There it is--a flash from Golden Mount, like a dynamic spark from one electrode to another, pointed this way, lost in the ink of night.

A double fear--the fear of shame and the fear of death--consumes me. I shiver. But I grow brave, for I am not alone. Ricalton leaps to his feet, wrapped in the trailing cart cover.

“Sublime!” he cries, waves his arms aloft, laughs at the storm.

More flashes from the Russian hills, the Japanese answer. The vast night is hideously alive. Artillery flicks as fireflies spark, spits tongues of flame, answering thunder with thunder, lightning with lightning. The rain beats down a torrent.

In the intermittent flashes the ugly eye of the searchlight looks in, licks phosphorus about us and ambles off into the valleys, as a cow might run the fur of her tongue over a cocklebur and calmly go to grass. No taste for rocks over there. They are out for softer game. Six more fling their deviltry from the head of Cyclops and down in the valley struggle with mist and rain.

Then, ’mid the sky’s and cannon’s belch, as a fairy into the land of demons, a thin red line is tossed gracefully over the valley from the Russian side. It reaches high over the mountains from the sea forts and above the center of the great plain falls, as a sailor casts a halyard over the yardarm on to the deck beyond. In mid-air bursts the _feu de joie_, the delight of fireworks, in war a spy. On other nights this deathly star bomb revealed all secret movements, but now the Japanese have allies in the mist and rain. Neither searchlight nor star bomb can penetrate the storm veil.

Now comes the crackle of infantry, followed by the pop, pop, pop, of quick-firers, the clatter of Hotchkiss howitzers, the more sprightly click of Maxims. Another assault--and they have had eleven in a week! Will they win this time? They are going for the Cock’s Comb, whose crest stands out ominously against the sky.

Boom! Bo-o-o-m! Far out of the distance a deep voice.

“The navy. That’s a twelve-inch gun. Togo’s with us to-night!” Ricalton ought to know, but who can tell? Is it a Japanese siege mortar, a Russian coast defender, field artillery, star bomb, machine gun, howitzer, or that grand bombardment from the heavens? They are all in action to-night. Is it defeat or victory? Can they take the fort?

I can answer none of these questions. I only know that “a child could understand the De’il had business on his hand.”

As the crashes increase, the wind rising, the furor mounting, I throw the cart cover aside wrap the blanket more closely about me and run down the mountain. Ricalton calls, but I hear him not. The reality of this din must be known. Over my shoulder as I run the Phœnix looms up monstrous, haughty, wise and terrible, silhouetted as she was born, anon in fire.

At the foot a regiment is drawn along the road, the men squatting on their heels, ponchos over heads, their rifle barrels, brass-capped, peeping from the corners. I make for the valley.

Seeking a trench where I have been before, between the lines of fire, I hurry for the village of Shuishiying, the location two days before of our outposts. No living thing is to be seen, but overhead the big bullets crash from behind and lumber in from the front. Down here between the two lines of batteries the way grows long, the village distant, the desire to return manifold. The artillery of two armies centers on me; not a pleasant sensation! Not on me, of course, but I am not a Christian Scientist--nor yet a veteran! It gets on my nerves. I turn back. Then through the dark I feel a file of soldiers near and go on.

Starting at every sound, in the purest darkness, not knowing whether we or the enemy occupy the village, and yet so far by this time I cannot return, I enter the village. A dull light around the first corner shows me the headquarters of the infantry line officers commanding the reserves--a place I had been two days before. I go up. Only a sergeant is there answering the telephone.

“My friends? Where?”

He waves an arm toward the front. I tumble out of the village and there are the advanced reserves drawn up, squatting on heels, poncho-covered, rifles uncapped. A movement is beginning. I fall in with the young lieutenant I know. The regiment quickly breaks into charging formation--squads of twelve, and deploys single file into the mealie fields to the left. I am discovered, ordered to the rear. I protest. The sentry orders arms, bayonets fixed. I go--back. The regiment goes--ahead.

But why be foiled? Why come halfway round the globe to be turned back at the summit? There is another way--to the right. I hurry along it as day begins to break. The mists are heavy, the rain drizzling, the first light struggling. I find the conical hill in the center of the plain, quite detached from the fortress proper, taken by our troops the day before and called the Kuropatkin battery. I struggle through battered abattis and entanglement for the elevation. The foss is filled with water--the only moat before Port Arthur that has the traditional morass. The place is deserted and if I can reach the front trench the whole action will lie before me like a chessboard. Across the parapet lies a line sergeant, his head gone. There has been no time for the dead. The trail is thick with khaki bodies. Picking my way slowly forward, halting at each yard to be sure that I am not in range of the musketry whose wild rattle is now filling the air, I at length find myself near a bombproof partially splintered by shells. The plain now luminous, I pause for rest and safety, the din not lessening.

But no sooner do I look around than I scramble quickly on--into danger. Two figures are rigid there in the half-light of the bombproof, one in khaki uniform, one in blue blouse and marengo pants. The one in khaki has his teeth in the throat of the other, whose eyes, popped like peas from the pod, peer over, rakishly curious, at his limp hand dropped over the khaki back and holding a pistol. The khaki hip is drenched with blood, partially dried. The sun is come and gone and is now here again since that happened. The faces are ghastly with bloat. I leave the half-light of the shelter and go out where bullets are.

The star bombs cease, the searchlights die away, the artillery flags, the infantry grows noisier. Then I see the reserves falling back, the squads of twelve escaping from one terrace to another, in good formation, continually firing, but still falling back. This Kuropatkin battery may see other dramas like the bombproof duel. I hasten down. In the village I find the lieutenant busy with trenches, improvising the defense. He throws all his English at me as I come up:

“The Russians--they come--I fix them. They are very wild. Our men are very wild. Ah, it is a wild war.” The telephone rings. He runs to speak with the general. Then the sergeant informs me.

They had attempted an assault in the rain and dark. Beginning with shrapnel they had tried to find the searchlights. Charges burst above two of them nearest the Cock’s Comb, and they expired, as if hit. The guileless infantry then went in, supposing the way clear. Halfway up the glacis every searchlight, including the two apparently hit, converged on them, throwing them out, in spite of the rain, clearly against the red earth. More. They carried nippers able to cut wire theretofore found before Russian positions, but here the wire was as thick as the little finger, not cutable with their weapons. Thus, instead of a lump of dough to be bowled over the first dark night the advance regiment had found, even in the rain, that the Cock’s Comb stood out intact as a racing yacht stripped for her tryout.

Yet another Russian dodge, for a battlefield is as full of intrigue as a ballroom, completed the disaster. Under our fire of the afternoon which preceded the rivalry with the storm Stoessel had his batteries reply, but when we opened up with the storm he ordered his guns to cease, one by one, battery by battery. Soon our forces thought that like the searchlights the artillery was done for. So when the advance, after creeping through the nipper-defying barbed wire, expecting their job done, was about to leap with a “Banzai” over the parapet, they were met by light and fire. Turning to look for their comrades of the second regiment they found these deep in the dunga, attempting, not to come on, but to cut their way back, for a battery of pompoms and a regiment of sharpshooters had sortied, almost segregating them from the command. The whole brigade was threatened with annihilation and at this moment the reserves I had joined were ordered to the relief.

The regiment under fire of the machine guns retreated precipitately, leaving one-half its number on the slope. Turmoil again through the barbed wire and plump into the rear of the second regiment, also retreating, not into its own lines, but into the Maxims and Nordenfeldts. Overwhelmed on all sides, tricked, defeated, two-thirds of the men killed or wounded, grimy with sweat and powder and almost fainting in the muggy August, the decimated brigade, its regiments back to back, fought as Custer fought on the Little Big Horn, with a coolness that comes to men in the supreme hour.

Most of them died as Custer died, for out of that brigade of 6,000 men there are to-day uninjured but 640. These were saved by the reserves from Shuishiying, my lieutenant and his comrades, who, as dawn came in, hammered the Russian rear and drove the Siberians, sullen with the joy of successful trickery, up into their trenches.

Wandering back toward Ho-o-zan, the forenoon well on, the rain almost finished, I wondered was it “reverse” or “repulse”? Coming to a place where the rear guard had been at my descent of the mountain before dawn I looked for them in vain. Instead of the greeting I expected from the side of the road the dust about me, here and there, was flicked up, as if stones were thrown at me.

“Is this a bit of soldier fun?” The pelting kept up. One of the stones struck a few inches from my toe, when I heard the well-known voice of Ricalton yelling from behind a shoulder of rock:

“Here--out of that, you young ass!”

Then I saw him frantically waving, from behind his shelter. But why should he look for shelter there? The artillery fire was down. All I could hear was a counter-attack of infantry a mile and a half in my rear. But as soon as I got near him he ran out and dragged me into the ditch at his side.

“Where are the soldiers?” I asked. Then I saw his fun. “You were tossing things at me,” I cried.

“Those! Spent bullets! You ----!”

At this moment an orderly galloping along fell from his horse several hundred yards up the road, and crawled into the ditch ahead of us. We wormed up to him and found a slug had traveled from shoulder to trunk under his ribs and into his thigh.

They were fighting down the reverse slope of the Eternal Dragon, an outwork of the Cock’s Comb, and the Russian bullets, aimed at the foe above, cut a parabola in the air, and came down with their initial velocity two miles off across the plain--where we stood. The Russians on the reverse, the Rising Sun must be above the Eternal Dragon.

It is now noon. We are back on Ho-o-zan, looking out to sea. Twelve warships are on the horizon. From one, the nearest in, comes an occasional puff of white smoke, then a low, long bo-o-om! A shell drops into the town. The eye follows.

Now we see how the brigade is avenged. The houses of the old town are charred and broken. The new town is gutted and smoldering. A shell has carried away the factory chimney. One leg of the crane is demolished and the other sags. The rain has put out the flames and a dirty brown smoke fills the gap from Golden Mount to Tiger’s Tail.

Between sun and sun the navy, brother of the army, has laid a heavy paw upon the place. Its claws away, the deep scratches show where Port Arthur bleeds.

Chapter Ten

THE CREMATION OF A GENERAL

Before Port Arthur, Sept. 27th.--Major-General Yamamoto was shot and instantly killed two days ago. The brigade he commanded--one leading the right wing of the Army--had captured the outworks of “203.” This mountain had been long in dispute and was dominated by certain Russian forts, which made it, while Japanese territory, yet untenable by our forces. Yamamoto’s brigade, however, clung under the reverse ridges and occupied trenches at the top, keeping the foothold secure until artillery could be advanced to reduce the opposing positions. In this critical situation the General thought it best to be on the ground in person and advanced his headquarters to the base of the mountain, which exists on the map only under the figure “176,” denoting its height in meters, but which his soldiers had cherished “Namicoyama,” because of its resemblance to the trepang or namico, a long angular fish abundant in eastern waters.

The night of the move Yamamoto climbed the mountain and crept into the trenches for a look at the contested heights opposite. He came before he was expected and his engineers had not had time to prepare a bombproof shelter through whose chinks he could look in safety. He would not wait, but put his glasses through a rift in the trenches and settled into a comfortable seat to study the situation. There was no regular firing, but only the desultory popping that is heard night and day along the whole ten-mile front, where sharp-eyed pickets are keen and cautious. The General became bold, raised his head--whit--a bullet through his brain.

Neither officers nor men can be said to be reckless, or even incautious. The army is devoid of that extravagance expected of war, when each man’s courage seems in question and cowardice impels bravado. Evidently, there is not a coward in the army, for the bravery of each soldier and of each officer seems taken for granted. All make of war a serious business, in which lives are units to be kept for the Emperor and skillfully used, as a go-player advances his pawns, saving all he can for final victory. The labor done in a week to build cover would gather all the harvests of Manchuria, which just now are mellow ripe and gloriously beautiful in the keen sunlight. Whole mountains are tunneled, in some places through solid rock; in others through slanting shale, to afford covered ways. At each divisional headquarters, of which the army has three, the lookout has two bombproofs dug in the solid rock on commanding heights, buttressed by three layers of sand bags, covered with two feet of earth, all supported by poplar poles, with the loophole for lookout cunningly slanted so the sun will not show behind and indicate to the enemy--perhaps only 500 yards away--the precious eyes behind. These bombproofs sometimes are made quite comfortable with rugs and improvised stools, but mostly knees suffer and the wretched correspondent traveling from post to post comes to complain not of “writer’s cramp,” but of “general’s stoop.” A month ago on the left wing of the army two staff officers were killed in a bombproof by a bursting shell. The army was scared, for a staff officer is valuable freight. Since then care has been redoubled; sand bags have been laid a layer deeper on all lookouts, ramparts have been heightened, and now venerable, curious heads sink lower as they turn up for a view.

The death of the General, Yamamoto, was another warning. It was also a severe blow. He was one of the most competent men in the army, commanded a star brigade and was slated for early advancement. Last night his memory received a most distinguished honor: the corpse was cremated on the battlefield where he lost his life.

To appreciate how great the honor was it will be necessary to explain two conditions: First, wood on the peninsula here is worth its weight in cash. The country is not wooded to begin with, which is the cause of another difficulty the army has to face--scarcity of water. About the villages there are usually a few poplars, but the mountains have nothing but Scotch heather and the plains only Ventura County bean pods and San Joaquin wheat fields. Then two great armies have boiled water and savagely wrangled here for three months, until all the rotten timber of old Manchurian dwellings has gone for firewood. As a consequence a frequent sight is a transport cart with some stubs of spruce tied to the whiffletree, being carried from Dalny, twenty-two miles away. Dried maize stalks are the universal fuel. Cracker boxes sell for a dollar apiece and the other day I found my servant brushing the pencil whittlings from the floor to use for kindling. Second, it was the samurai’s belief that a warrior who sacrificed his life in combat should be honored by cremation on the spot of his vicarious atonement. And the difference between the army of to-day and a samurai clan of a generation ago is far less than the difference between cuirass and bombproof; you can’t wipe out the clinging beliefs of generations in forty years--not in the Orient. It may take hyposcopes and searchlights, wireless telegraphy and machine guns to win victories, but only funeral pyres and Shinto sacrifices will pay for them.

Wood-impoverished, the army cannot honor its humble dead; _i. e._, not immediately; wait till Port Arthur falls--but of that later. It is different with generals. As a daimyo in feudal times received the forehair of all his clan as a final offering, so to-day a general gone gets the camp fires of his soldiers. Last night the brigade which had lost its intrepid head ate its rice dinner cold and went without hot water for its tea. All the mess fires were contributed to make a pyre worthy the deceased.

Just as the sun went down, at the bottom of Namicoyama, whose heights war had swept but a day before, in sight and sound of the grim proofs of his last victory--emplaced batteries and occupied field hospitals--the body of the major-general was given to the flames, while his men in the trenches above sternly held the Russians at bay. Occasional cannon rent the air, infantry popping cracked in the stillness, myriad tent lights twinkled up into the moonlight; the blaze shot up, waned, crackled and died down. The midnight shift of sentries presented silent arms. A donkey brayed out of the valley. Miles to the left a howitzer boomed. The ocean lay black like ink beyond a fringe of shore gray under the moon. A line of coolies passed with bamboo stretchers carrying piteously mangled forms--the day’s harvest to which the coolies had been called from their maize and their millet. Embers gleamed from the brigade’s mess fire. Two orderlies stepped up with a wooden box, kicked the embers away, and placed in it some ashes.

A week hence a family in Tokyo--a quiet, dry-eyed Japanese lady with two half-grown boys--will receive the wooden box. It will be borne a few days later through the streets of the capital on a gun carriage to Aoyama Cemetery. There, after two white-robed priests have said a few words over it, a long shelf in a narrow vault will receive the wooden box. The widow will have notification by special messenger that his August Highness, the Emperor, sees fit to remember the illustrious deeds of the departed by conferring upon him--who is not dead, but who has passed on to wait--the order of the Rising Sun, and, in the absence of the husband the wife will be permitted to receive the pension attached thereto. Japanese history will record that Major-General Yamamoto, after a valiant career in the service of his Emperor, gave up his life at the Battle of Namicoyama, in Manchuria, Sept. 24th, 1904.

Last night the brigade bivouacked in joyous envy. Had not its general received what every soldier longs for--death before the enemy; had he not also received the soldier’s apotheosis--cremation on the scene of his exaltation? This is as near religion as these people get. But the staff and the new major-general, educated in Europe and living in the twentieth century, when they climb Namicoyama to spy upon Port Arthur will wait until the engineers have safe-marked the heights with bombproofs.

Chapter Eleven

THE GENERAL’S PET

He was small, like all his race, and he looked as harmless as a musician. In fact, his eyes had the dreaminess of a musician’s, and the clasp of his hand was like that of a woman. He touched me on the arm one day as I came out of the staff tent at General Nogi’s headquarters, and asked me in fairly good English if I knew San Francisco. Together, with a crooked stick, we traced out a map of the city on the sand at our feet. He knew it as well as I and he pointed to his former home, near the corner of Washington and Mason streets. Then he pulled from his breast pocket a letter sweat-stained and travel-worn, which, read:

“To whomever this may concern, I wish to say that the bearer,
George, is the most faithful servant I have ever had, that he is
a good cook, and that he has a lovely character. I will consider
it a favor to myself if his next employer treats him generously.

“MRS. H. L. HEVENER,

“1180 Mason Street

“San Francisco.”

His real name was Eijiro Nurimiya. He had seen me the day before at the General’s tiffin and had read the word, “San Francisco,” on my arm band, but had not ventured to speak to me when in the General’s presence. He was one of Nogi’s bodyguard, and I immediately knew he must be a man of some distinction, for throughout the camp it was well understood that Nogi had about him only those private soldiers who had become eminent for service in the field. That day and the following days when Nurimiya came to my bean shed, we had long talks over the tea and cakes. Thus his story is here set down:

He left the Hevener home nearly a year before the war began and worked in a watchmaker’s shop on Jackson Street in San Francisco. Like all of his countrymen he had ambition and desired to rise above the kitchen. But he was a reserve conscript, subject, as such reserves are, to the call of the Emperor at any crisis similar to the one that his country is now in. So he responded to this call March 23d, sailing on the _Korea_ from San Francisco to Kobe, twenty miles from which his home lay in the Ugi Provinces.

His father, a mender of broken barrels, is separated from his mother, who keeps a tea house in Kioto. There is one sister at the tea house with his mother. He had three days with his parents, the first time he had seen them in six years. Then he sailed for Manchuria, where he joined the famous Ninth Regiment, the Black Watch of Japan, a part of the Ninth Division of the Third Army chosen to conduct the operations against Port Arthur. This same regiment had a number of other American Japanese.

The campaign had progressed two months, when Nurimiya saw his first great battle. It was the grand assault against the permanent forts of Port Arthur, lasting through seven frightful August days. He is one of the fifteen survivors of Company C of this Ninth Regiment, which marched into the Seven Days’ Battle three hundred and fifty strong.

The first day Nurimiya went with his comrades against the north battery of the Cock’s Comb Fort, which was finally captured on December 18th. Thus, it took the Japanese four months of desperate work to accomplish that for which Nurimiya’s comrades were lost those seven days in August. Most of the regiment was wiped out in front of the Cock’s Comb. What was left, including Nurimiya, was ordered to reinforce the Seventh Regiment, operating to the right against the fort of the Eternal Dragon. Against the Cock’s Comb Nurimiya fought in the front line. He also had the same good fortune in the fight against the Eternal Dragon, for to the Japanese such an opportunity is considered good fortune. More of his comrades were lost here, including all that came from America. The following two days he lay with a few others hugging the base of the fort in the broiling sun, cut off from provisions. About this I asked him:

“Were you thirsty?”

He replied: “By-m-by very much want to drink, so I make water--red water.”

With that he struck his wrist mimically showing that he had slit one of his veins to slake his thirst.

But the great act of Nurimiya’s life came on the 25th of August, when he made the ninth assault he had participated in during the seven days--and the first successful one. Each Japanese infantryman carries in his breast a linen flag--a cheap affair that you might pick up in a department store for a few pennies--a red sun on a white field. The first man into an opposing trench or redoubt waves this flag above his head. It is a signal to his own artillery, showing them where they must not fire, and also acquaints the commanding officer, viewing the action from some eminence in the rear, with the situation. Nurimiya was the first man to wave his little flag over the Eternal Dragon. The Eternal Dragon was the only fort which the Japanese held in that permanent Russian line through the three months of August, September and October, and it was the object essential to the engineers in outlining their vast siege operations across the plain. Thus it was the San Francisco watchmaker who planted the flag of the Rising Sun on the key fort at Port Arthur.

General Nogi chose Nurimiya and his fourteen comrades for body servants and relieved them for the rest of the campaign from active duty on the firing line.

This is how I found him at the General’s house. I asked if he wanted to go back to America. He replied:

“War all finish I go. Nogi-San need me I stay.”

Then with great eagerness he told me how he wanted to get back into the fight and for the first time in all our acquaintance his eyes lost their dreaminess and the clasp of his hand became taut with energy.

I did not tell him how I that morning had learned from the General himself that never again should Nurimiya be subjected to the supreme test.

“Is it not pleasant here at headquarters, with the band, and the foreigners, and the nice cooking, and the easy work?” I asked.

He was not interested in what I said. He waved an indefinite arm toward the front and replied:

“By-m-by they make plenty die off there. Then I go back.”

He had not yet learned that he was the General’s Pet.

Chapter Twelve

COURTING DEATH UNDER THE FORTS

Willow tree village, Headquarters Third Imperial Army, Manchuria, four miles from Port Arthur, Oct. 5th:

It was in August that the Japanese took the Eternal Dragon, advanced their outposts beyond its walls, threw up trenches, and settled down this inch nearer the coveted goal. In this fearful fight a certain part of the field was taken and retaken seven times, and finally, for strategic reasons, though the fort which was the bone of contention rested with the victors, a piece of dead ground beyond, over which these repeated charges had occurred, lay partly within the Russian lines and partly within our own. Dead bodies mingled with wounded--Russians jowl by cheek with Japanese--lay over it so thick that a man might have walked from one trench to another without touching the earth. The wounded could not be succored, the dead could not be buried except when they lay behind the opposing trenches. Between, no living thing could exist. The lines were but three hundred yards apart--a distance at which even a poor marksman could shoot fatally, and through all the twenty-four hours the two trenches were lined by sharpshooters a rod apart and on the constant lookout.

The weather was perfect. By day the sun shone; by night the moon, assisted by searchlights and star shells, kept the plain of death as light as day. The light showed the loopholes of the trenches so well that they could not be used, for the moment a shadow appeared behind one a marksman from the other side would put a bullet through it. The men sighted the hyposcope--an instrument first used extensively at this siege--which is a telescope arranged with mirrors at a reflex angle, so the scope goes over a wall while the eye sees in perfect safety twelve inches below. At occasional places, carefully shadowed, they kept chinks covered by stones, which, when the sun sank to the proper angle, or at dawn, could be uncovered to make a peephole large enough for a man’s eye.

Now for a month, under a torrid sun, unmarred by a day of rain or scarce a fleck of cloud, hundreds of dead have lain rotting in that compact space. A flag of truce to bury them was out of the question. The Japanese had far the worst of it, as their lines, drawn in a lunette, partly surrounded the charnel house below which they lay, steeped in its noisome drains. Moreover, in hastily throwing up their trenches the night of the battle, corpses, loosely covered; had been used to improvise the walls, so bodies and stones together formed a shelter which in life the men thus commandeered could not have made. Well the Russians knew of the disease the sun was breeding, and refused a truce, for the dead played well into their hands. Stench could be a weapon more effective than bullets or strategy. So, day after day they held the Japanese there, as a dog’s nose is rubbed in his own mess.

Watch on sentry posts was cut from four hours to two, and at the worst portion of the line to one hour. The pickets swathed their thin brown faces in towels and the commissary supplied smelling salts. An officer who served on that picket line twelve days told me that the sun alone was enough to defeat an ordinary man in four hours. Added to that the slightest zephyr bore a fetid breath more foul than the lowest of a city’s sewers.

During the first day groans could be heard occasionally from the contested ground. Wounded--no one could guess how many--lay there dying. To have attempted succor would have been suicide. The pickets did all they could. They threw rations of biscuits beyond the trenches, scattering them along the ground, blindly, of course, but carefully as a farmer strews a field. A company divided itself; one part sacrificed its water bottles, slinging across their shoulders beer bottles, instead of the handy and handsome aluminum ones furnished by the army. Then the aluminum bottles, that would stand the shock of striking, which might shatter a beer bottle, were tossed over to the starving, thirsty wretches.

The second morning there came some desultory groans from the farther side. The groans suddenly ceased. Successive rifle pops told that the Russian sharpshooters had picked off the wounded. Picket duty in the trenches became more deadly. The army had settled, with quiet determination, into a siege. One night, as the moon rose over another division of the army, two thousand yards to the west, there appeared above the trenches a cap. A bullet pierced it instantly, but it was only a feint cap on the end of a stick. The picket nearest saw it was a Japanese cap, and called his challenge, “Who goes there?”

“Tomodachi!” (a friend) came the response.

“Show your arm.”

A small grimed hand on an emaciated forearm was thrust above the parapet. The picket grasped it and pulled sharply. With a groan of agony and relief a bundle of rags, dirt and clotted blood tumbled into the trench. The picket forgot his duty as he knelt over his comrade, for, ground in filth and caked as it was with dried blood, he could not mistake the universal brown khaki, and under an arm was slung a bit of cotton-incased wood--a Shinto emblem, for this time, at least, triumphant. The wounded soldier fainted.

_Copyright, 1905 by Collier’s Weekly_

HOW THEY GOT IN

Eighteen miles of these trenches were dug through the plain before the Russian forts.]

In a field hospital this afternoon I was privileged and honored in looking upon and talking with this hero. He is a distinguished soldier of the famous Ninth Regiment, the Black Watch of Japan, which lost all but ten per cent. of its forces in that illustrious assault under the Chinese wall. So marvelous is the recovery of the wounded that the soldier smiled as he lay, speaking occasionally a few words in response to my interpreted questions. His head and legs were swathed in bandages and he was sipping saké--a present from his Emperor. How these soldiers love their Emperor! Well they may, for a week ago there sailed into Dalny harbor a transport laden with presents from His Majesty to his sick soldiers. All the privates got saké, all the officers brandy. In addition, every private received a present of three yen in cash, the non-commissioned officers from three to ten yen, and the commissioned officers from ten to sixty yen each.

Here is the soldier’s remarkable account:

“I was one of the few who reached the Chinese wall that terrible August afternoon. There were but a few of us left, scarce half a company out of a regiment, when the Captain in command ordered us to scale the wall. I had but reached for the stones when my legs went from under me--melted away. A shell fragment had smashed them as a bamboo pole is smashed under a hammer. The pain was little, but it gradually spread over my body. I became numb, then unconscious, and though shells were busy all about me, lay for hours with no further hurt. I came to, under the stars.”

The soldier told little of what he felt and saw, but it can be imagined; the vast plain, silent but alive with hostile trenches; the gloomy fortress above, bristling with cannon, but silent; the concealed batteries--his own--miles beyond, from which an occasional boom and whiz startled the gaunt and shivery searchlights in their fantastic pencilings; then his sense of comrades lost, of dear ones perhaps dead within sound of his voice, with memories of home and better days; then desolation at defeat, the foe victorious, pride alone resolute, triumphant to the last.

He could hear sounds of pick and spade scratching the chilly earth, clamping into the shale. Only a few rods away the reinforcements were hastily throwing up earth-works to hold the hard-won ground. He saw indistinct forms groping in the dusk, pulling about other forms, inanimate ones, and hastily covering them with earth. The dead were being used to more quickly fill in the embankments. In a few days those carcasses--rotting--would charge usurious toll for all the improvised help they were this fatal night.

The soldier tried to crawl toward his comrades, but he could move only a few inches at a time, so intense was the agony in his legs, for the cool of night and renewed circulation had brought back his senses in full keenness.