Chapter VI: Preface: The Siege at a Glance (5)

Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again, this time in other parts of the field, but the shells and bullets so often passed over him that he came to think of himself as a dead man and lived on only because nature exerted her just law. Like an opossum he feigned death. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair. Then biscuits began falling from his own trenches; one fortunately fell near him. He also managed to get a tossed-over water bottle. To reach it he was obliged to crawl a few feet and as his hand touched it he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and the blood trickled. A bullet had pinked him. Instinctively he fell as if dead.

It was then that there occurred the thing which has inflamed the army as tow is inflamed on bonfire nights. The whole vast amphitheater was quiet. It was sundown. Nature was in her most gorgeous raiment. Both armies were at supper and an involuntary truce seemed to still the hills and valleys so lately fire-ringed. In the midst of this peace and beauty a desultory firing rang from the Russian trenches nearest the bloody angle in which lay the soldier with his comrades--dead and worse than dead. The bullets were directed, not into the opposing trenches, but into the wounded in the bloody angle.

“Stand to your guns, men!” came from the Japanese trenches, and the men sprang as though to resist a sortie.

But there was no sortie. The Russians were killing the wounded, that the bodies might rot and drive their comrades from below.

The moving ceased, the groans ceased, the sun went down, the stars and searchlights came. Impelled by the first law of nature the soldier dragged on, wearily, as he supposed, toward his friends. But the ground was level and he must have gone laterally. Toward dawn he tumbled into a deserted trench and found a sort of sheltered dugout. It was a covered passage to the Russian fort and untenable now by either side. In it were two Japanese so desperately wounded they could not move and could barely speak. He shared his last drop of water with them.

As they were drinking a figure slouched along the trench and blocked the doorway. It wore a black-visored cap, shiny with celluloid--a Russian cap. Searching the gloom the Russian found the three wounded soldiers. Then he poked his rifle in and fired three bullets--one at the brain of each. Two died instantly. The third--the soldier who had already survived as by a miracle--passed into what he thought was the rigor of death. All grew black before his eyes. Never from that moment to this--seventeen days later--has he seen even a glimmer, nor will he ever see again. The bullet passed across his eyes as he lay side down and shattered the optic nerve.

The Russian thought his work complete. Leaving his rifle outside he passed into the dugout and emptied the pockets of the two dead men and the third, whom he believed to be dead. Then sneaking back up the passage, the Russian regained his own lines.

For five days the soldier lay in the dugout, unable to move, unable to see, numb from long suffering. Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he at length severed the arteries of one of his fallen comrades, newly dead, and lived on. He found worms crawling in the wounds of his legs. He tore up the shirt of a corpse and bound them.

Then began as memorable a journey as man ever made, as heroic a combat for life as pioneer or warrior ever underwent. He started to crawl to the Japanese lines. Blinded, paralyzed, his legs shattered, one arm useless, half dead with fatigue, his tongue swollen with thirst, and starving, he made his piteous way a few yards each night.

Directions were useless. Seeing nothing he could not tell whether firing came from friend or foe. He only knew that his way was down. So down he crawled. Bullets and shells passing over him became so common he lost all sense of them. By a terrible mistake--an error that cost twelve days of agony, for otherwise he might have traveled the few essential yards in a night--he missed the captured fort which marked the apex of the wedge driven into the Russian lines. And so his fearful, sublime crawl was for a thousand yards along the front of his own lines, into which at any time, had he turned straight along the face of the hill, he might have come and found sound legs and new, clear eyes. But down was his direction and down he went--a thousand yards in twelve nights. He found a few new dead with biscuit in their pockets and blood in their veins--this saved him.

So history repeats itself. Ten years ago--to the month--the Japanese lay without Port Arthur as they do to-day. Instead of Russians, Chinese were inside. But as the Japanese advanced along the western wall they suddenly at a bend in the way came upon ten bodies--no more--of their own comrades, stripped and mutilated, the heads grinning from pikes above. The Chinese had visited their own vengeance on successful enemies. But the act lost them Port Arthur. The Japanese became an army of fanatics, a tribe of solemn, righteous men, inflamed with the zeal of retribution, blazing with revenge, as did once that ancient civilization founded on the prophetic watchword, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The next day Port Arthur fell. Those ten bodies cost the Chinese a province, a fortune and an island kingdom.

How will the Russians pay? I asked this of a certain Lieutenant-General, who told me some of the details I have just related. He raised his arm and pointed beyond the bombproof in which we sat to where the western harbor, with its magnificent Russian stone dwellings rising beyond could be plainly seen.

“We have a proverb in our country,” said he, “like this, ‘Once won, well won; twice won, never lost.’”

Chapter Thirteen

FROM KITTEN TO TIGER

Headquarters, Third Imperial Army, Before Port Arthur, Sept. 30th:--We went yesterday to the foremost firing line, where all the venom of war is concentrated in a score of yards among a dozen men. There we saw how the besiegers of Port Arthur are besieging it, how they live, what manner of men they are, and some of the facts of modern warfare which those who want to know about the humanity of science had better not read. Before we went an officer led us to a bombproof on the Japanese side of the great valley across which we were to go to gain the captured fort.

“Look!” said he, turning over his hyposcope, “the way is about a mile and a half. The real danger is in the fort itself, but if you are very careful to crawl with your heads low you are safe. If you decide to go you must relieve our authorities from all responsibility for your lives.”

Across the valley a puff of white spat out a tongue of flame; a shell crashed into the escarpment below us. From across the valley came the intermittent puffing of outposts. A mis-shot bullet lapped up a patch of dust twenty paces to our right.

“Well, gentlemen, will you go? It’s a quiet morning. We had better start soon if at all, for the sun is in their eyes now; soon it will be against us and then they can pick us off like flies.”

Villiers was with me. “What do you say?” he asked. “It’s time to measure risks. Think what you’ll get out of it. A correspondent dead is of no use to his paper, and people remember him as a fool who got shot in some reckless venture. Remember, you’re going into bullet fire for the first time. You’ve had shell fire only, up to now, and shell fire is to bullets what a bluebottle fly is to a tiger mosquito. Forbes used to have a supreme contempt for shell fire and a supreme respect for bullets. A shell buzzes and blows--a bullet flits in quietly, spits through an artery, the heart, the head--and it’s all over. Their rifles fire point blank at 200 yards and up where you want to go the lines are but forty yards apart. They can pick off a ten-cent piece at that distance. Remember, if your head shows so much as an inch above that parapet, you’re only good to sniff at when the wind blows from you, for these people have no extra stretcher for your useless carcass.” Villiers can say these things. Somewhere in his London studio is his order of St. George which the Czar gave him for audacity at Plevna. Also some seven other governments have decorated him for fit war behavior, so he is an expert on battlefields.

“But,” said I, “think of what there is up there: the bloody angle, scene of the death of 3,000 men, heaps of unburied slain, trenches made of corpses, sentries firing, the living sleeping, eating, working among their dead comrades, the enemy on three sides, with this single line of supply and retreat down which only four men can march abreast. This captured fort is to the siege of Port Arthur what Nanshan is to the campaign--its decisive battle. It is the wedge Japan is driving into the heart of Russia and we’ll be on its tip. When the nations hear the truth about this fort--the assault that captured it, the odds against which it was fortified and held for six weeks--it will be the marvel of the age. Think! Would you miss standing on the apex of the world?”

“I was a youngster myself once and I’m not old now,” replied Villiers. “They fake these things in London almost as well as I can do them in the field, so why risk my bones? But I’m as good as a Japanese officer or an American reporter. Up to now we’ve been chaperoned scribblers; here we become war correspondents. It smells of the old days: Forbes, Cameron, Pierce, McGahan, Jackson, Burleigh--and that crowd of gay devils. Lead on.” Perhaps you will be more interested in Villiers to know that he is supposed to be the original of Kipling’s character, Dick the Artist, in “The Light that Failed.”

So we went into the chipmunk’s burrow, up through the cornfields, frowned on by a hundred thousand guns, menaced by two armies, until we nestled in the ragged hole Japan has torn in Russia’s impregnable last stand. Laterally down the line of our advance, but high over our heads, shells often rammed their harsh bewilderment and we could hear them strike, sometimes rods, sometimes miles away. How like a live thing a shell snarls--as some wild beast, in ferocious glee thrusting the cruel fangs in earth and rock, rending livid flesh with its savage claws, and its fetid breath with poison powder scorching the autumn wind! ’Most always it fizzes and funks in shameful waste. Bullets are the nasty things; a who-whit, a dry spat, a thin hole drilled in a frightful way, as snakes sling their venom in sly and easy scorn. When we got halfway up, and into the angle, so that Russian trenches were on three sides, a number sped about us. Hardly a minute but one passed over our heads.

The situation looks well in print. Yet we were in little danger. Our wits kept--we were safe. For this let us profoundly thank the engineer who built that siege parallel--a cunning masterful Yankee of the East, whose name as a military engineer must be handed down to future generations of technical students. He had taken advantage of every rise in the ground and of every depression. Of corn stubble he made a drapery, of hillocks a screen, of ravines an ambuscade, until Nature so aided him that she and not the Japanese infantry was the assaulting force against those heights beyond.

We walked twenty meters apart, for, should we by any chance lift our heads together and be sighted in a party, the Russians could drop a bit of shrapnel over us. Otherwise we might be off for a morning stroll down a country lane. We crouched as we walked, for the trench was built for Japanese, who average a few inches less in height than a foreigner. The distance as the crow flies was little over half a mile; we went nearly a mile and a half. At one side ran a telephone wire, staked down at intervals with broken, rusty rifles. At every angle a sentry saluted, stepping forth grimly from a dugout. Halfway up we passed a stretcher bearing a body, the face covered with coarse matting, sewn roughly--a corpse of the night before. Farther on came a soldier with his arm in a wet, crimson sling. Half an hour before, feeling secure after days in the ominous place, he had passed into a ravine he thought safe, but out of the path chosen by the clever engineer. He was in the Russian fire zone and presently a shell fragment smashed his arm. From a dozen to fifteen are lost that way every day.

Across the valley we halt at the foot of a hill and then turn into the fort. Chloride of lime is sprinkled here over the human effluvia that nowhere else can be deposited, but a bone sticks out of the trench wall. I look closely. It is a human femur. From it projects a heavy coil of rubber-insulated cable. The officer explains that this formed the electric communications with the barbed wire entanglements through which we are passing, and that on the day of the fight it was charged so that when the Japanese pioneers tried to cut the wire with pincers they were prostrated with the shock and had to wait for glove-handled tools. Beside it is a long strip of bamboo, torn and shattered. This was carried to the attack by two soldiers who with it tossed into the fort a short strip of bamboo stuffed with gun cotton. This, exploding, tore a hole through which the men could charge. It was a more effective bombardment than the shells. As we turned the corner we came upon the men and at last we saw the besiegers of Port Arthur, where they were living, 200 yards from the Russian trenches, in the famous redoubt where enough men have been killed to cover the place four deep with corpses.

The officer took up a pick lying in the trench. “Look!” said he, “the point was sharp as a grindstone could make it to begin with, but in some places, you know, the rock is hard and--” he would apologize. He was very sorry we should find the picks in such bad condition. He was always apologizing. He apologized for the length of the way, the heat of the sun, the annoyance of the shells. But the boys in khaki smiled on. Word passed as to who we were and they greeted us dumbly, spread out their pitiful small blankets, pulled from obscure coats and corners their precious sweetmeats, advanced the cigarettes that mean more than beef to a soldier, offered us their still more precious tea. All over them was written their joy in being recognized, in having someone share their hardships.

Death on the battlefield is the height of this soldier’s ambition. But not uncleanliness on the battlefield, and all the time we sat there I was aware of a pervasive, sickening odor, something strange, something frightfully offensive.

“What can it be?” I said as it bore in upon me and I felt suddenly nauseated.

“Well, in the hurry of building these trenches, in the night, under fire, a few dead bodies--only a few--were rolled into the escarpment. We very much regretted it----.” The officer apologized profusely, but they had been under fire ever since and the trenches could not be torn down. So they stood--human walls. “But I can assure you there is no smell now. The first week, in the hot sun--Ah! then I should not have liked to bring you here.” As I leaned against the wall something crushed, like the snap of a pencil, under my back. I leaped, in alarm, to my feet. As I turned around a blue coat, which I had pushed back in my fatigue, fell over the skeleton of a hand, and at my feet dropped the joint of a forefinger. Villiers pulled me to my knees.

“Look over there,” he said and pointed beyond the trench. I saw fresh earth heaped up. “It is the brow of the Russian works,” he said, “but look in between--that pit of uniforms.” A mound of soiled, tattered clothes, higher than a man could stand, and longer than a company street, lay before us, not fifty feet away. At the base, facing me, detached from the rest, a hideous skull leered. “Unburied dead,” Villiers said, “hugging the ground, sent back into the earth from whence they came.”

Then the officer apologized. Yes, there was no chance to bury the dead. Under constant fire for six weeks, between hostile lines, they slowly rotted away until only bones and rags remained--Russian and Japanese inextricably together on the scene of the last desperate Russian stand, where was concentrated all the machine gun fire of both sides.

Wounded and dying had been mixed with dead. No succor was possible. A general must count his men as fighting units and he could not afford to pay a dozen good lives for one injured. We turned to go--stomach and heart sick, but the boys in khaki smiled. They were used to it. Just then the postman passed. He had a handful of cards, scrawled over with loving messages.

As we saw how complete the service was--mail delivered under the shadow of guns, and as a man goes on to the firing line to offer up his life--we suddenly came to the telephone which made us think how near we were to all we held dear. That line was connected with headquarters, headquarters with Tokyo, Tokyo with New York and London. I suddenly saw myself ringing up the editor to catch an edition.

“Hello! just arrived at the Eternal Dragon. Quiet this morning. Russian sortie last night. Repulsed. One Japanese, eighteen Russians lost--three wounded between the lines calling for water----”

“Hold on, what’s that?”

“Wait a minute till I stop this infernal racket.” Down with the receiver. To the Colonel: “Can’t you stop that battery a minute? I’m at the ’phone.”

“All right, editor. Wounded man says--Hold on a minute. It’s that blasted volley firing. All right. I was saying, a wounded--Hell, here comes a shell!”

We turned another corner and came upon the commander of the regiment--a lieutenant-colonel, stern-faced, with that eternal smile, a countenance nationally characteristic. He welcomed us to his shelter between two walls--which the Russians had built and which our shells destroyed. His staff--a captain and a major--sat crosslegged on one side. We sat on a red-blanketed bench on the other. Crosslegged, on his red blanket, he was no better fitted than his men. At his side on a nail hung his sword and cap. Behind him suspended from two wires was the regimental flag, in a plush case. It is 30 years old, has been in 18 battles, and is all but gone from bullet fire. To the regiment it is a sacred emblem. This is the illustrious Seventh Regiment which captured the Eternal Dragon, after losing all but ten per cent. of its number and which now, after a month with the reserves when its ranks were replenished, is back for a week on sentry duty. So intense is the service there, one week in four is all a single regiment can stand. We were served with tea in daintily lacquered cups and then the lieutenant-colonel passed saké and tea, asking permission to drink our health.

_Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly_

THE LAST WORD

An officer giving final instructions to his men before the Grand Assault of September 21. This photograph was taken in the front parallel, 300 yards from the Cock’s Comb Fort.]

“Where is the Colonel?” I asked the officer. Then he apologized again. He was sorry he couldn’t oblige me, but unfortunately the Colonel had been killed about twenty yards from where I then sat. His body had been cremated within three paces of my present seat. Just beyond the tent I could see his grave, should I look. I leaned out and in a niche of the wall saw a plain white stick ideographed in black. At the base was a bottle of flowers and a Chinese pumpkin. It contained the ration a soldier calls “iron,” and some sweetmeats beside a can of water. Then we knew what some living soldier had done. The ghost might come wandering back in the night and be hungry. It should not suffer. We went on to more tea with the new live Colonel and some sweetmeats which we utilized differently than the ghost had evidently utilized his. “How was he killed?” I asked. Then we heard the story of the capture of the Eternal Dragon.

“It was a hot August afternoon,” said the officer, our interpreter, “and the general of this division, a very determined man, resolved that the time had come to pierce the Russian center. So he chose the Seventh Regiment for the honor. It is the regiment to which the young Captain, wounded, and rescued by the Russian prisoner, of whom you were talking this morning, belonged. The Colonel made his plan of attack to have his command advance in three battalions, one on each flank and one in the front, the flanks to be the real attack, the front to be a feint. He, himself, commanded the feint, and, as usual, stayed in the rear. He sent his pioneer corps ahead to cut the barbed wire entanglements. They came back with the report of electric charge. They went forward again with insulated pincers and the regiment followed. All the way to the base of the hill, where we now are, they were almost unmolested, when they had expected to meet a fierce shell fire. This made them confident. But the Russian general, as we afterward learned, had ordered his men to reserve their fire till we got within close range, and then to give it to us with machine guns. So the two side battalions got safely well up to the slope, only to meet a terrible rain of steel from the top. The aim was so sure and the firing so heavy that nearly two-thirds of the command was mowed down at once. And the surprise we found was in their construction of the fort. Where we supposed our shells had opened gaps in it, we found it intact and our assaulting party unable to gain foothold, for the Russians had placed boiler plates under two feet of earth and the shells had had little or no effect on it.

“When the Colonel learned all this he got mad, and instantly ordered the third Battalion to assault the front in force. He led the charge. A few of the men got in and fought hand to hand with the Russians. By that time another regiment had arrived with reinforcements, charged through the breach and overwhelmed the Russians, driving them out of the place. Though we are dominated by six of their batteries and have been assaulted by them eighteen times in attempts to recapture, we have ever since held it. The Colonel’s body was found under a heap of slain. In it were twenty-four bullet holes. His sword was broken at the hilt. His cap was missing and we searched for it a long time without success, until one day our lookout spied it between the lines. Certain death seemed the price for a man to try to get it, but as soon as the Colonel’s servant, a soldier, learned where it was, he volunteered and succeeded one dark night in regaining it, so the cremation could take place properly. If you wish now, follow the Captain into the fort and you will see the foremost trenches. Keep your heads low.”

Then we saw the kitten become a tiger. We passed from the hospitable soldier, with his sweetheart’s letters, his welcoming smile, his innocent and friendly telephone, his harmless tea and cakes, to the firing line, to death, and to worse than death.

It was hands and knees into the fort and the front trenches. This is the tip of the bloody angle, with the enemy on three sides. Bullets passed over us continually. Shells were bursting far away. Twice we passed half ruined chambers built of timber below ground--Russian food and ammunition shelter. It was high noon. At length we lay, panting, under a pile of sapling poplars; above us were sand bags six deep.

“We are perfectly safe here,” said the officer, and we looked out.

“Except from ricochet bullets,” added Villiers. “The zone of fire of those chaps yonder is away from us and as long as they exchange we’re all right. Shells can’t reach us, even shrapnel would be nullified by this covering, but when those bullets strike a stone no one can tell how they will come. They can shoot around a corner from a flat stone as easily as in the open through a loop-hole.”

I heard nothing. Standing up, secure, my eyes came upon him suddenly--the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who does the trick--at work. He was crouched under the parapet in front, rifle to cheek, its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. The tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down that barrel in deadly aim made me think of nothing but a great cat pausing for a spring. One leg was drawn up, his cap was pulled down viciously over his eyes, the sun beat upon him and he lay, venomous with pent-up passion, cut in silhouette against the trenches, a shade darker than the shale. A minute before he had offered me tea and a cigarette; now he was dealing out hot lead. Yet, who could suspect danger, with all so still and clear! But life most intense and death the most terrible and swift dwelt all about us. Through chinks in the wall a row of sand bags on a mound of earth could be seen. They marked the Russian trenches behind which the enemy lay as silent and deadly as the boys on our side. Not a minute passed without its bullet. Forty meters was the distance, the officer said, the closest place in the whole ten-mile front of the two armies. By day, when the Russians stay quiet, sentries stand three yards apart, by night, shoulder to shoulder. They are changed every thirty minutes so intense is the strain. A regiment can stay in the fort only seven days because the Russians are above and on three sides, and they must keep them out, while they stew in their own juice and their comrades rot beyond the wall. When a sortie is made neither side asks for quarter nor expects it. The Russians know that unless they regain their trenches they will not live, for to be wounded and fall in the bloody angle means slow death where no aid can come; to meet the Japanese line means instant death. The Japanese know their chances, if wounded, are the same, and if they reach the Russian lines they accept only two things--victory or death. So it is that here through long weeks the siege has concentrated its bitterest essence, living has come to be a burden and death a joy.

Then came the thud of a bullet. It was a different thud from any we had had up to that time, and though I had never before heard a bullet strike flesh, I could not mistake the sound. It goes into the earth wholesome and angry, but into flesh ripping and sick with a splash like a hoof beat of mud in the face.

I turned to look. I saw the nearest sentry sinking to his knees. His rifle had dropped and was leaning against the wall, butt down. He sank together all in a heap and his head hung limp, his chin against his breast.

“Poor chap,” said Villiers, “he was looking at us and got in front of the loop hole. I suppose we are so great a novelty in his strained existence that he could not resist the temptation to neglect his duty for a minute.”

We crawled back and out silently and quickly, bade a hurried good-by to the Colonel, hastened past the smiling, oblivious men--they are used to it--and over a mile and a half of chipmunk burrow. The General was waiting tiffin for us in his tent. There was a jar containing strawberry jam like grandmother used to make. With a flash it brought back all the comforts of home. An empty shell in the center of the table held some field daisies and wild chrysanthemums. All the fragrance of the fields and the beauties of nature came with them. At my mess plate lay an American newspaper, just delivered by this incomprehensible field post. With it civilization, its myriad passions and joys, floated in. As the cigars were passed I opened the paper. I found an interview with Dr. Nicholas Senn, of Chicago, in which he said:

“All the talk of inhumanity which some correspondents are sending out from the Orient is foolish. Statements of soldiers being wounded in the mouth and reports of all similar acts of atrocity can be set down as being without foundation. Russia has the best Red Cross Society in the world and the Russians are an extremely humane people. Likewise, this war is going to be a humane war. As for the Japanese, the worst that can be said of them is that they are a proud people.” I read this aloud. It was translated and the officers, Lieutenant-General Oshima and his staff, listened. None of them replied. Finally Villiers said:

“The question is not: Are the Japanese or the Russians a humane people, or not a humane people? It is: Are individual men, under conditions the most terrible the imagination can devise, Christians or savages? Both Japanese and Russians socially are delightful people. I’ve lived with the armies of both nations and their soldiers are delightful and humane. But that is not the question.

“Now, is it possible for soldiers living as we saw them to-day--in their own filth, unable to succor the wounded, preyed on by stenches from the dead, until battle in which they neither ask nor give quarter is a welcome relief--can the word ‘humane’ be uttered in speaking of lives such as theirs? Or can it be uttered of the Russians--driven into a trap, half-starved, night and day in the trenches, confronted by overwhelming numbers, with certainty of no relief, yet defending a lost hope with lives easier lost than lived? Would you be ‘humane’ under such conditions? I am sure I would not.

“No. The truth about war cannot be told. It is too horrible. The public will not listen. A white bandage about the forehead with a strawberry mark on the center is the picture they want of the wounded. They won’t let you tell the truth and show bowels ripped out, brains spilled, eyes gouged away, faces blanched with horror. The only painter fellow who ever told the truth about war was Verestchagin, poor chap, drowned over there in the harbor. He in paint and Zola in words told the truth and they were howled down and ostracized all their lives, simply because the theorists, like this surgeon, fed up with themselves, nursed in the belief that science is all powerful, will always assure the public that modern war is humane.

“Scientific warfare! Let me tell you the facts about science. Archibald Forbes predicted twenty years ago that the time would come when armies would no longer be able to take their wounded from the field of battle. That day has come. We are living in it. Wounded have existed--how, God alone knows--on that field out there, without help, for twelve days, while shell and bullets rained above them, and if a comrade had dared to come to their assistance his would have been a useless suicide. The searchlight, the enginery of scientific trenches, machine guns, rifles point blank at 200 yards with a range of 2,000--these things have helped to make warfare more terrible now than ever before in history.

“Red Cross societies and scientific text-books--they sound well and look pretty, but as for ‘humane warfare’--was there ever put into words a mightier sarcasm!”

This was translated. The officers--Lieutenant-General Oshima and three of his staff--listened, gravely. No one said anything. Finally, we walked home silently as the sun went down.

Chapter Fourteen

SCIENTIFIC FANATICS

Noon found me well up toward the firing line, assured by the staff that it would be the day of days. To get there I passed a mile and more of batteries--the Osacca guns vomiting balls of fire, puff-balls of smoke and fat, heavy balls of steel; the howitzers--coyotes of artillery--spitting from peaks, snapping, louder than the monsters growl below; the naval six-inch turret firers, rakishly sunk in valleys, their greyhound noses dappled with mud, baying out reverberations at which even the sulking sun might have shuddered; the field four-point-sevens, bag-redoubted, conventional as pictures, flinging forth the business barks of house dogs; then, finally, the hand one-pounders, hauled well up the parallels, their bodies angled half-wise and as forlorn amid such colossal music as a penny whistle before a symphony orchestra. To be in it, to pass through it, to feel this whiz and boom people the air above with demon gossip, to sniff from ravines the gusts seeped with cordite and with phosphorus, while in the far-stretched vistas bluecoat files wind through the fierce, vain taunts hurled in among them--ah, this is the atmosphere--the grand, the fearful, the unspeakably sublime atmosphere of war.

Cloudy! Yes, but what day could smile in the face of such a row as this? The grand bombardment has been on for five days. We call it the “grand” bombardment, to distinguish it from that other trifling bombardment of a few hundred field guns that was on for nearly three months. Now the big coast defense mortars from Osacca, hurling shells the size of donkeys, are ripping the lining from the doomed fortress. We cry for rest, but there is no rest. Night and day the fearful din keeps up. The paper windows of the Manchurian house where we live, two miles away, have been blown out twice by concussions. The mountains tremble. If you get within a hundred yards of the guns, you must wear cotton batting in your ears and walk tiptoe to save ear-drums. This for a ten-mile front, with infantry and regular artillery hammering the spaces out, was enough to discourage the sun. Sun, however, is an incident. War waits for no weather.

Halfway in among the batteries I paused for guidance. There were certain lines between our batteries and the Russian batteries which were called “lines of fire,” and these lines were good places to avoid. Soon two soldiers, each with a rice bag on his back, came along, and I picked up their trail. There was a narrow valley which led to the Ninth Division, whose firing line was to be the center of the attack and for which I was bound. Along the center of this valley seemed to me the right way, but the soldiers headed straight across it, business-like, stolid, as if they knew where to go, and I followed. We were fair in the midst of it then. In ravines on both sides the Osacca mortars were hid. From behind and directly over our heads a naval battery was firing, and in front of us there were four or five batteries of field artillery, opening the engagement. There was never a moment without two or three shells in the air directly over our heads. So long as they were friendly shells--imagine a shell being friendly!--no one seemed to mind. (That “seemed” is a good word to describe my state.) But directly they came viciously from across the valley--look out! Presently one did come that way. I knew it was coming. How? I felt it. So the ground in front found my stomach and my nose sniffed the gravel. It could not have passed very far above our heads--this shell--for when it exploded behind the dust showered over us, and I thanked myself for lying down, else a fragment might have rapped me so I would have cared nothing for dust or dirt of stale encampments. Of course, the soldiers must have lain down, too--they surely must have known the danger. I looked up to laugh with them, but they were trudging on stolidly, as if they were carrying a pound of meat home from the butcher’s. When the dust came they blinked--that was all. I was so ashamed I hardly dared show myself; yet I needed my legs to get on out of the line of fire, and there are times one forgets his pride. I ran; but no need to be ashamed; they had not seen me fall, had neither quickened nor lessened pace, had turned not so much as an eyelash to left or right. They had orders to take that rice to the battery, and to the battery they were going. So I paused--amazement surviving fear--and looked at them, cogs of the machine, secret of an army’s strength, of its indomitable bravery. As well expect the shafts of an engine to cry quits when the trucks spring a hot box!

At length I found myself where the pewit of bullets beat a quickstep for the inferno aloft. It was on the crest in front of the farthest field artillery, at the rear of the parallels in which the infantry lay, huddled masses of blue dabbed above with glints of bayonet steel, waiting for the assault. Occasionally the sun came out and sent a heliograph message from those bayonets to me, and then, like myself, sought cover again. The four forts slated for attack by the two divisions in my view lay directly in front, about a mile and a half by parallels and approaches, but, as my vision went, eight hundred yards for the nearest, fifteen hundred for the farthest. From the rear that assorted pack of war-dogs flung suspense and agony, surprise and death, over my head. Beyond, the forts, hung like a corona of barbarous gems on the brow of the mountain range, gushed forth pain and disgust.

The Pine Tree fort (Shodzuzan) on the extreme right was afire, had been for two hours, and the smoke from it, blown by a northwest wind, lifted raggedly square across the field. Through the slight haze each explosion opposite could be seen, as it tore out, now a chunk of a mountain and now a crater from a parapet. About half-past twelve the star bomb chamber of the south battery, the one nearest, was struck, and for ten minutes an explosion of day fireworks held the line. On the north battery two guns hung across the parapet, their backs broken, useless. On the two smaller forts between, the P and M redoubts, men could be seen feverishly working at a rear intrenchment. Evidently they were preparing to retire from the front line, where they already scented danger. But they as evidently showed determination to fight to the last ditch--which they did. All four of these forts, spread fanwise halfway down this mountain slope, formed the group called the Cock’s Comb (Keikan, Japanese; Keekwan, Chinese), and above them on the skyline the comb could be plainly seen, lacking only the dab of red, later to be given its approaches, to give it the cock color. It was on the Cock’s Comb that half of the great losses in August occurred. Some ten thousand Japanese had already been mowed down there, for every slope was prepared for enfilading by two batteries, the moats were deep, the fortifications of masonry and the glacis sheer and slippery. Yet the Cock’s Comb once taken, the Russians must yield, for it was to the siege of Port Arthur what Nanshan was to the campaign--the decisive position. Once driven from there, the enemy’s back would be broken. The fall of the Cock’s Comb and the Two Dragons, on December 31st, forced Stoessel’s surrender.

_Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly_

PREPARING FOR DEATH

A superstition holds that the Japanese soldier who dies dirty finds no place among the Shinto Shades; so before going into action every soldier changes his linen, as this one is doing, preceding the battle of October 29.]

At one o’clock the bombardment seemed to have reached a climax of intensity. The parapets of the four forts were alive with bursting shrapnel. A hundred a minute were exploding on each (at fifteen gold dollars apiece). The air above them was black with the glycerine gases of the mortar shells, and the wind blowing toward the sea held huge quantities of dust. Timber splinters were in the air and rocks were flying. Not a fort replied, and from the entire eight-and-one-half-mile front of the Russian line there were few answers. Once about every ten minutes a wheezy battery off on the Liaotishan Peninsula sent a shell promiscuously into our vast field, apparently to show that the defense was yet at least gasping for breath.

In the front parallels the infantry seemed on the move. There was a shifting of rifles, and in three of them, from end to end, a man could be seen running. The night before I had been up there to find all of the soldiers changing their linen and sponging themselves off as best they could with old towels and soiled handkerchiefs. They were purifying themselves for death. A superstition as old as Japan says that a man who dies dirty finds no place among the Shinto shades. Now they were waiting calmly, each with an overcoat and spade across his back. Why the spade? Will it be necessary to hastily intrench for the night far up the slope? Each had an “iron” ration in his pocket, and a pint of cold tea in his flask. Two hundred rounds of ammunition in his three leather pouches go to help the bayoneted rifle that he slings by its strap, its butt dragging as he goes up the hill. What a job it is, this, of living in a pocket handkerchief, on compressed air, giving and receiving death, for three cents a day!

At one-fifteen our fire changes. The four forts are left to their silence and devastation, and the fat balls travel westward to the Pine Tree and the Two Dragons. For a moment the slopes stand out, ghastly with smoke, pitted like strawberries, each pit a shell hole deep enough to give a man shelter.

Before anyone knows it the assault is on. The four get it at once. From the bottom of each, out of the approach sapped there in the night, a handful of men is fed, as corn might drop, grain by grain, ground from a hopper. They get a few rods up when another handful is fed, then another, until the whole face of the hill is swarming with tiny figures, their blue turned in the distance to black, the space between each at no place less than two yards, at none more than two rods. Not in battalion phalanx, as the picture books show, shells dismembering, arms thrown aloft, faces wild with battle’s glory, terror, agony, but steadily, sanely seeking every cover, deploying with skirmish formation, they go on and up, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell. Not a life is thrown away, not a precious head wasted.

Not fifty yards up the Russian lookout scouts them, and then we see we are not facing a beaten foe, but a waiting one. Until that moment no sound came from the enemy. No shells chucked away at hidden batteries, no rifle ammunition plumped into the sandbags of parallels, no shrapnel sent hit-or-miss over the fields searching for an unseen foe--not any of that stupid, wild game for them. They have let the preparation go on, all the fuss and fury, the bombardment, the sapping, and now we see what they are up to. It is all hit with them, no miss, they have no ammunition to waste. Their backs are to the wall. Their defense is determined, great. Deadly purpose is in that silence.

The sun is out for a moment, the smoke has lifted. Through my glass I see it all as perfectly as though on a chessboard; the sprawling blue ants creeping up, rifle-butts dragging, the line officers ahead, the field behind. Far in advance of the squad on the P fort a young lieutenant is running, carried out of himself in passion, foolish in zeal, waving his sword. Almost fifty yards behind him, his nearest file-sergeant lumbers stolidly on, as stolidly as my two companions of the morning lumbered with their bags of rice. At that moment they meet what they changed their linen for the night before. From all the Russian batteries, from silent nooks, from huge, open emplacements, from mountain recesses, from the entire line of parapets, it comes--the Russian reply. So here is the why of that previous ghostly silence. Every shot must tell. Bursts directly above send vitreous blue shoots of smoke as of strata sidewise, then curl voluminously upward, the edges unfolding to the breeze; the deadly shrapnel downward shooting bits of lead and steel. Enfilading from all crests, over the shoulders of the slopes, come shells, plowing the ground, hurling stones and fragments. From above rattle the Nordenfeldts and Maxims, spraying bullets into the advancing ants as kerosene is sometimes sprayed from a hose nozzle on the tribe of real pests.

It was to be expected. Not a man lives. The fire ceases. They all lie prone--some hid in the shell holes, some lost in the gullies, some face down bare on the open sand. Most of them lie lengthwise, their heads upward, shot apparently as they stumbled forward. On the second slope in one place the legs and trunk of a man are sprawled, armless, headless. An entire shell must have met him halfway. Occasionally the figures are huddled, piteously deprived of action, sending upward the silent, unanswerable appeal that death makes. But most of them have that curious upward slant, bodies rigid, as of determined men hugging the ground. Were they bulleted straight? Anyway, it is a glorious death--this of the infantry soldier storming Port Arthur, lifted on the crest of the world’s fiercest passion, puffed into vapor as the crest of a storm-tossed wave! Painless, too. A touch and all is over. But can they all be dead, all of those figures slanted curiously upward? There must have been remarkable sharpshooters above to pick every man off, for shells are notoriously extravagant of bravado and bluff.

Ten minutes pass--fifteen--twenty--and only the giant shells wheezing through the sky to distant, unseen marks remind one that here is indeed a battlefield.

Then suddenly those figures with the curious upward slant come to life. Another handful of war corn is fed from the human hopper below. The young officer waves his sword. The line-sergeant stolidly climbs. The deploying lines curl their microbe grip more firmly into the slope. There was a hitch in the machine. Now it moves, slow, inexorable.

The piteously huddled figures remain. The comrades go on, with never a look down, never a look behind, half-stooped, rifle-butts dragging, laboring with the terrific climb. Ten paces from the fresh start, and that hail of bursting steel meets them again. They struggle on, perhaps a hundred feet, perhaps a hundred and fifty, then commence dropping one by one, by the dozen, fifteen at a time, two by two. They rest again. Again the time drags. Again the fresh start, with more piteously huddled figures. So it goes, the hopper below supplying every loss.

At length the young officer pauses. Just for a moment he lingers and then digs his boots into the crater that one of those friendly shells tore out for him an hour before. Without waiting for his men, fifty yards beyond the nearest, he leaps to the parapet, reels for an instant on the skyline, then plunges out of sight. I never see him again. What must have been his fate inside there, alone, before his men came up? Was he shot down as he entered? Did he keep the Russians at bay till his supports came up? Dear, foolish boy, did you think that, single-handed, with that bit of toy steel, you could take Port Arthur?

It seems ages and ages before the line-sergeant and his deploying figures leap to the skyline, reel for an instant, and disappear. The grist from the hopper below hastens and the rifle-butts spring from ground to shoulders. It was the first man who was needed. Now that the charm is broken, they no longer skulk, but run eagerly to the crater and tumble in. The hopper has fed well-eared corn into the mill, and it has come out ground meal. The grits lie scattered all along the slope. Some move. The most lie still, their battle with cold nights in exposed trenches finished, sentry duty done. And in many a thatched cot among the rice paddies across the sea the old hataman will tell to his gray wife how their boy helped take Port Arthur, and both will make a little journey to the sacred mountain to assure the fathers they are thankful to have bred brave stock.

At a quarter-past one the young lieutenant started on his mad errand, supported by the same mechanism. At a quarter-past two the flag of the Rising Sun floated from both north corners of the P fort. At a quarter-past three the stretcher-bearers are on the slope searching among the huddled figures. They move swiftly along, turning a figure over, giving it a quick look and dropping it with business precision; to another, dropping it; to another, pausing, out with the lint, perhaps the hypodermic needle, perhaps a sip from the tea flask, the arms of one bearer hastily passing under the arms of the figure of the other under the knees, dropping it on the stretcher, passing in and out among the shell holes, down the hill, while back on the slope the carrion figures lie with the slant of the setting sun struggling through the clouds to flash over the bayonets beside them!

Meanwhile, over the rest of the vast field, of which the P fort was but a fragment, the assault had been continuing. The Russian fire had not abated. As soon as they saw the P fort was gone they turned their shells into the redoubt itself, and cut up our forces where they were seeking cover in the very places their own shells had previously destroyed. But the slopes of the other three forts were kept just as hot as in the beginning. The moment the thin line advanced, that moment the hail commenced, and it ceased only when the line ceased; nor did it entirely cease then, for shrapnel was dropped above the forms, those huddled and those lying curiously straight.

Suddenly, on the farther slope, where near a battalion of men had crawled almost two-thirds of the way up the glacis, a panic seemed to have seized them. The whole crowd ran down and to the right. They disappeared over the scruff of the hill, toward their own trenches, brushed off as a handful of flies might be blown away from a heel of bread. The cowards! to run like that when their comrades are valiantly struggling up the nearer heights!

But no. It is not a panic. Halfway to their trenches they all drop into the ground. Shell holes and gullies swallow them up. As they disappear the scruff of the hill from which they ran is blown into the air, the flame shooting from the center of the rocks and dirt, and the white smoke rising above. A mine has gone off there.

The pioneer ahead found the contact signal--clever fellow--ran back to the advance officer, who led his men in their retreat. So it was not a panic, but a well-ordered movement. Soon the advance goes on, up the nearer angle of the slope, the men deploying carefully as before, the hell shooting down from above, the hopper feeding from below. So I learn to criticise nothing on a field of battle. Who but the commanding officer can ever disclose motives? Not a word of authentic news leaks from this place. Once the citadel is down, say the generals, let criticism rage. Port Arthur will have been taken. Meanwhile, let us have silence, concentration, determination!

Then, under the middle parapet, I find a squad of men hanging, having survived the ordeal below. With no leader so headstrong as the young officer, they halt for supports to go in and capture the fort, for they are but twenty, or at most thirty. No supports come. The shrapnel plays over them, the bullets rain through.