Chapter VIII: Preface: The Siege at a Glance (7)

From September 19th to the 25th occurred what is known as the second assault, although it might more properly be described as a reconnaissance in force. As an assault it failed. Then on the last day in October the war-demon awoke again to his full ferocity. Where the twenty-five thousand had been lost in August, a division could now be poured right up to the parapets of the Russian forts without losing a man. Coast-defense guns had been brought from Japan to battle against the Russia coast-defense guns, which had been turned landward. The Japanese had hauled their guns by hand, eight hundred men to a gun, through mud, up the mountains, in the dark, under fire, and had placed them in silence on solid concrete foundations. But after they had crossed the valley the Japanese still had a frightful obstacle to face. There was but one way to get to the forts--up the slopes. Every inch of these was commanded by guns trained carefully through three months of actual use against a real foe and through four previous years against an imaginary one. The Russians lay confident and calm above their terrible fortress. They did not have to bluster with bombardments. They knew their strength. They merely waited until the Japanese advance reached a certain spot on the slopes. It was not a question of aiming the guns, as it is where troops are constantly fighting over fresh ground. All that was necessary was to pull the triggers. There was about the proceeding little of the sport of war. The order to advance was as certainly fatal as the hangman’s signal in an execution-chamber, and when the Japanese did advance the few who survived the murderous fire found behind those superb entrenchments men just as brave, just as cunning, just as strong as they themselves. If it is ever asked which is the braver, Japanese or Russian, no answer can be given. No one nation distinguished itself at Port Arthur. The glory belongs to both.

It was in the third grand assault, when the final operations commenced, that General Ichinobe, the commanding officer who had ordered the sacrifice of Takagagi and his immortal Ninth Regiment and who had summarily sent the sulking regiment to the rear, became the Japanese Marshal Ney. Two battalions under his command succeeded in entering the P redoubt, an outwork of the great Cock’s Comb fortification. Ichinobe left his battalions after midnight, secure in the conviction that his work had been successful. Toward three o’clock in the morning he was roused by an orderly, who reported that the men had been driven from the P redoubt. Ichinobe was then half a mile as the crow flies, nearly one and a half miles as the trenches lay across the valley, from the slope of the redoubt. Leaping from his couch, he called about him his staff-officers, issued hurried orders to the reserves, and, at the head of his immediate followers, ran through the zigzag trenches. Reaching the foremost line, now under the fire of Russian machine-guns, he found his men not demolished, but surprised, outnumbered, and being driven sullenly back. Drawing his saber, Ichinobe thrust the ranks aside, passed through, and charged up the slope, leading his heroes for the second time into the contested fort. With his own hand he killed three Russians. When dawn came his brigade occupied the P redoubt. His immediate commander, General Oshima, had an account of the exploit telegraphed to the Emperor at Tokyo. That afternoon an Imperial order reached the army, christening the fort “Ichinobe.”

In the assault of August 19th to 26th, the few men who reached the parapets had received in their faces storms of what the Chinese call “stinkpots”; that is, balls of fresh dung. This assault wholly failed. The dead were left to rot, and the wounded were shot as they lay, the stench of the corpses being used as a weapon of offense against the Japanese, who were trying to maintain the advantage they had gained at the foot of the slope. The demonstration of September 19th, which also failed, was met with hand-grenades of guncotton. In the third assault on October 29th, halfway up the Cock’s Comb, the advance stumbled over a mine, and the entire lower shoulder of the mountain was blown into the air, taking with it some twenty-five men, heads awry, legs and arms twisted, trunks shattered. Nevertheless, new volunteers advanced through the crater thus formed, up the glacis of the redoubt, until they reached a new and dangerous obstruction. This was a moat so cunningly concealed under the very edge of the parapets that an observer below could gain no hint of its existence even with the most powerful field-glasses. The ditch was so deep that once in, a man could not get out even by climbing over another man’s shoulders. To fall in was certain death, for in every turn of the concealed moat was a masonry projection called by the cunning men who devise such traps, a caponiere. These caponieres were built of stone and covered with earth. They were tiny forts, concealing and protecting four or five Russian riflemen and a machine-gun. Consequently, under perfect protection and with their foe in limited area, trapped like woodchucks in a hole, unable to escape, the Russians merely had to deal out whistling steel at their leisure. The Japanese did not falter. The first men who leaped into that moat knew that they were leaping to certain death, but they knew, too, that the men in the caponieres could be overwhelmed by the force of the numbers to come after. The two caponieres were captured at once.

Under the parapets of this fort, dominated by all the artillery of the two armies, occurred some of the grimmest fighting that history records. It was at midnight of the second day of final occupation. The black mountains lay behind, the black forts in front, the blacker plain below. A Japanese lieutenant, Oda, asked for a volunteer _Keissheitai_, or certain-death party. Thirty _Keissheitai_ men came forward. Oda put himself at their head and ventured along the bed of the moat toward the rearmost caponiere, with the idea of capturing it. The fort is very long--about one and a half times the length of an ocean liner--so he found room and time for adventure. There was no moon, and the moat was too close to the Russians for them to depress their searchlights sufficiently to illuminate it. In the blackness, halfway down the moat, Oda and his men met a Russian lieutenant prowling with a squad of men behind him, bent on the recapture of the two caponieres which the Japanese had seized. They had it out, not with bullets, but bayonet to bayonet, fist to fist, and even teeth and nails. Oda and the Russian, in locked embrace, reeled back and forth, falling, rising, scratching, first one on top and then the other, each losing sight and control of his men, all of whom were engaged in individual combats just as savage.

The two leaders, grappling for an opportunity that each sought, bumping against the walls of the narrow moat, reached, without knowing it, an embrasure which led to the rear of the fort and into the gorge. Tripping over this, not knowing where they were going, the two plunged headlong down the slope. Above frowned two Russian batteries. Beyond rose the great red-capped sky line of the Cock’s Comb. A hundred yards, scratched by the stones, smashed by the shale, they slipped and writhed, until they struck a tiny plateau halfway down the mountain. Here the two, clinched, stopped as might a dislodged stone toppling from its socket. In the struggle Oda had been able to get his right arm free, which he reached over across his enemy’s back, grasping the hilt of his straight, samurai sword. Pulling it halfway out of the scabbard, which was tightly lashed to his waist, he sawed and pulled until the slender, tapering steel had gashed through the Russian’s clothing, full to his backbone.

Late the following night, after the sun had gone, Oda crawled into his own trenches at the base of the mountain. His men had been repulsed by a second party of Russians who had made a sortie to relieve the first. But, still the Japanese held the two caponieres in front and the Russians the two in the rear. Oda got no medals nor applause. Two days later a breast-wound which sent him to a hospital in Japan saved his life, for had he stayed he would have certainly gotten himself killed.

The Japanese during the first two nights hastily dug out approaches and had a partially covered way from the base of the mountain to the moat. This gave them their vital hold on the north battery of the Cock’s Comb. So resolute were the Russians in holding every inch of ground that it was a full month and a half after that before the Japanese could take the complete fortification. And when the complete fortification was taken it availed but little, for it was but one of three great batteries which formed the series known as East Keekwan, which was itself but a portion of the eastern line of permanent defenses.

To see how the rest of the great Northeast Keekwan (Cock’s Comb) Battery was taken is to see how Port Arthur was taken, for all the forts were reduced in the same way. 203-Meter Hill, the Two Dragons, the Eternal Dragon, Quail Hill, Wangtai, and the Pine Tree fell as did the Cock’s Comb. The only difference lay in incident.

It must be remembered that the fight was never over with the taking of the outer parapet. Inside the forts, beyond the parapets, well protected by moats and caponieres, was a sheltering earthwork called the contrascarp, crossing which, storming parties met a close and unerring fire from men concealed beyond, in ways formed of timber balks and sandbags, and called traverses. Below these traverses were galleries where the garrison lived; and below the galleries were the bombproofs protecting the ammunition. Under the traverses, covering the galleries and bombproofs, was heavy masonry from two to three feet thick.

To undertake the capture of the whole chain of fortifications by such sacrifices as those which gained a single one of the Keekwan forts might have entailed the extermination of the whole besieging army and of all the reinforcements which could have been sent to its support. But with one fortress in the chain in Japanese hands there was another way--sapping.

Through November the Japanese engineers were busy digging underground from the advantageous hold they had on the north battery. They started straight down through the solid rock. Only a few men could work at a time, and these could dig only while the trench protecting them, which was a few yards in advance, was held by their comrades, vigorously firing, to keep down the Russian garrison, now not more than a hundred feet away. Moreover, sometimes when the Japanese sappers were half concealed in the earth, sometimes when they were wholly underground, companies of desperate Russians would suddenly break forth on them, spurred by Stoessel’s promise of the Cross of St. George and a money prize to whoever should break up any Japanese work. Thus at night, hounded by shells, sleuthed by searchlights, and harassed by heroes from across the way, the hole was dug. Forty feet down it had to go to get below the level of the galleries and bombproofs, then another twenty feet forward to find a spot under the vitals of the fortification.

Stupendous as the task was, the tunnels were finished at last, and on December 18th a quarter of a ton of dynamite was placed in two such mines, and the galleries and bombproofs of the north battery were blown into the air, with the demolished bodies of some forty-five men of the garrison.

And even this was only the beginning of the end. Already the Japanese had accomplished a herculean task. They had sweated, endured, writhed in agony, died, and they had taken only one battery. Ahead of them still rose, tier on tier, forts and batteries, moats and walls, until the soul grew sick to think that Port Arthur must be bought with sacrifice so vast. But the Japanese did not turn back, did not weep, showed no despair. They came to work, to meals, as cheerfully as ever they had done in the rice paddies. And this, notwithstanding that winter was on them, that the keen, equinoctial gales blew in from both seas, that the thermometer fell to zero and below. They were surrounded by charnel houses of their own making, and protected only by miserable, hasty dugouts shielded from cold and wind by a few broken boughs, light shelter-tents, and hastily packed earth. Death was preferred to a wound, for the wounded had small hope of succor; yet life was cherished and fostered.

Meanwhile the Russians were busy. They devised a new scheme of defense. Kerosene was taken through a subterranean gallery of the Two Dragons into a moat and there poured on piles of straw. Then they waited.

At the fifth grand assault, when the north battery of the East Cock’s Comb was taken, the Two Dragons were simultaneously attacked. A company of Japanese headed for the moat. The kerosene and straw were set on fire and the men who leaped into the moat, expecting to find caponieres as they had found them in the Cock’s Comb, were caught by flame. Many perished miserably. Some valiantly fought the flames, but few survived. These few--that is, the few who do the work in warfare--the few who accomplish that for which the thousands die--made possible the Japanese advance. Through, over, and beyond these few, the Japanese finally entered Port Arthur.

Science is well, up to a certain point. Then it becomes useless and cruel. The genius of the engineer helps the soldier across the valley and to the parapet, but there leaves him in an agony of suspense, over electric mines, under dynamite batteries, crisscrossed by machine guns. If the nerves of this marvelous soldier survive the ordeal, and if his body escapes the flying chunks of steel, he is reserved for the extremity of modern torture--hand-to-hand fighting in scientific warfare. At a moderate distance he tosses balls of guncotton; he closes with stones and stinkpots; he parleys with the bayonet, and finishes with teeth and fists.

Loading a 4.7 gun of the ordinary field artillery during the assault of September 20.]

By chance, one morning in September, as the dawn came in, there was revealed in a captured bombproof one little instance of the hideousness of the conflict. The arm of a Japanese boy in khaki hung limply across the back of a huge blond fellow in baggy trousers. From the hand of the boy had fallen a pistol, which had caught in the blouse of the big one; it had not fallen too soon, for just below the muzzle the blouse was matted thick with the life stream that had welled out in response to the death call. The big teeth were clinched deep and tight into the little jugular. On the boy’s slant-eyed face, good-natured, yet stamped with the strange pathos of a people close to the soil, was written a mute appeal for mercy. To that appeal there was no answer. The boy’s dead face stared into the unresponsive block timber of the bombproof.

In the bloody angle of the Eternal Dragon, the most fiercely contested zone at Port Arthur, you might have seen these boys any day of those three frightful midsummer months, when the slim wedge was being driven inch by inch into the Russian right center. Everything was covered with the white powder of dried mud. All was wrecked. The path lay through a series of shell holes, connected rudely with pick and spade. Up to that point the ground had been neatly cut, but here it became rough and crude. No inch of dirt had been unnecessarily touched, because the enemy lay within forty yards on three sides. The _débris_ of battle was all about--torn Russian caps, conical and heavy, mingled with the light brown of Japanese uniforms, cartridge pouches half filled, shattered rifles, demolished sabres, a gun carriage smashed till the wheel spokes splintered the breech, rocks pounded by bullets as by a hammer, and, over the wall, seen as you stole by the chinks, khaki bags, loose over rotting bones.

All through the night when this bloody angle was first taken and after it had been protected with trenches from recapture, Oshima, the general commanding the division, sat in his tent without sleep. He was shaken by sobs, for he had been compelled to order that the entrenchments be made of the bodies of the dead and wounded. Only rock was there and to hold the place a quick shelter was essential. The half-dead men whose bodies were used by comrades to stop the steel hail smiled in approval at the work; they knew it was done for the best, but Oshima could not sleep; he wept bitterly all night.

Along that bloody angle and through all the eight-mile front for many months lay on duty the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who won the victory. He crouched under the parapet, rifle to cheek, its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. The tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down the barrel in deadly aim, made him look like a great cat pausing for a spring. One leg was drawn up and his cap was pulled viciously over his eyes. The sun beat upon him as he lay, venomous with pent-up passion, cut in silhouette against the trench, a shade darker than the shale. A minute before he had offered tea and cigarettes; now he dealt out hot lead. He might be a university student, or a merchant, or a professional man. Wherever he came from he was the pride of his neighborhood. Physically he was superb--perfect eyes and teeth, digestion hardy and fit as clockwork; this must have been so or he would not have been allowed to enlist. Moreover, he was a veteran of four months’ severe campaigning, seven pitched battles, and two months’ hard siege. Here he stood, far out on the firing line, clashed between two civilizations, hurled into the pallor of conflict, tossed by the greed of nations. Yes. Down there in the ditches lived the real besieger of Port Arthur. Not science, nor generalship, nor race bravery reduced Port Arthur; it was done by men who could live and die with the simple heroism of cavemen and vikings.

Chapter Eighteen

THE NEW SIEGE WARFARE

One morning in August General Nogi stood before his battalion commanders at Port Arthur with a pick in his hand. Its nose and heel had been worn away until the shank of rusted iron resembled an earth-dappled cucumber. Fondling it, the General said: “Take a lesson from this Russian pick. Your men must dig. They are too eager to ask, ‘Why intrench to-night when we are going forward in the morning?’”

Nogi here went to the heart of his problem. It had cost him 25,000 men to learn that the military engineer must precede siege assaults, as his brother, the civil engineer, precedes rapid transit in New York. The lesson, taught by Julius Cæsar to the legions in Gaul nineteen hundred years ago, Nogi and his heroes re-learned before Port Arthur in 1904. The advance in that cycle of time has been not in digging, but in ways of digging. The Japanese had to cross a valley a mile wide and six miles long, dominated at all points by every degree of hostile fire. This did not appall them. They accepted the problem, grappled with it, and mastered it.

They honeycombed the valley, in the classic manner, with eighteen miles of trenches and tunnels. The chief element in the problem was to hide these from an enemy with lookouts above the plain. “Till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane,” the prophecy that sounded Macbeth’s doom, had already been heeded by the Russians before Kuroki’s northern operations. Here the witch, whispering in Stoessel’s ear, might have warned him of his end when “maize-stalk fields shall climb the Dragon’s front”; for it was under the protection of maize-stalks, twisting through a shell-swept plain, that the sappers crept on their slow but inevitable advance.

The Japanese attaché in South Africa had seen the Boer commandos, under fire, suddenly vanish in waving stalks of corn, projected, screen-like, across a telltale front. It was a savage trick, learned by the Boers from the Kaffirs; and though school-bred British minds sneered at a ruse apparently so childish, yet many times their game was lost through such maneuvers. The Boers used their maize in wholesale fashion, covering their front with deep layers of whole sheaves. The Japanese improved on this. Students of nature, disciples of nature, they gave no gross imitations. In late autumn, over a field battle-tossed for three months, trampled by two armies, and sickled by the husbandman Death, they advanced, resurrecting the corn-fields as they went, till the Russian eye beyond could not guess the point where maize standing by chance left off and maize erected by besiegers began. Each angle of advance was concealed by these brown, withered sheaves.

But maize was only the screen, and could not hide the thousands of tons of earth which had to be taken from the plain. To throw the earth beside the trenches, thus bringing into Russian sight a furrow like that of a gigantic plow, would have revealed the Japanese position as clearly as a blue pencil could have diagrammed it on white paper.

To hide the earth of this digging was the appalling task. It was done gloriously. The advance sappers threw their first trickle of mole-like progress backward between their legs from the furious indent of their tiny spades. Helpers behind immediately deepened and widened the rivulet of shelter thus begun. The infantrymen, closing in at daybreak throughout the hot sun, perfected it, but the reserves accomplished the new thing. As fast as the earth was displaced they carried it with gabions and bamboo stretchers back through the zigzag lines behind the mountain range which concealed their own heavy guns. Here, parallel with the Russian defense, mile after mile of fresh-smelling mounds slipped up through the cautious, industrious months following that frightful August. Passing across the valley through these tunnels, deep enough to shelter regiments, three months after the Aceldama of midsummer, one could, in safety, be frowned on by hostile batteries, distant three hundred yards, or look into the plain gridironed with cunning trenches, and, like the foe above, see no evidence of life. The maize-stalks hid the trench turnings, and though the plain was alive with its thousands of armed men, even the practiced eye that had just been among them could not tell where they lay. Where had the output of that enormous digging gone? As well ask the chipmunk where he puts the dirt from his hole. It was a new experience for the Russians to fight a foe who could wiggle through the earth as easily as he could cross it, and, underneath, escape the death that he met on top.

Both sides had sailors on land. The Japanese emplaced the navy six-inch guns in the bottom of a valley. The army field guns were perched along the peaks in front, from which they could bark down like noisy house-dogs. But the savage bite came from the big guns, a quarter of a mile behind, the location of which was mistaken by the Russians as identical with that of the blustering field-pieces on the ridge. The sailors did not trust alone to the improbability of their hiding-place. They cut out earth the size of a ship’s hull, mended the broken crust with timber balks, and thrust the noses of the six-inchers out of two square openings that might have been turret-holes. Thus, entirely protected, though within easy range of the enemy, they escaped serious injury. This was the most effective Japanese battery; it has become famous for tenacity.

For the first time coast-defense guns battled with each other. The Russians turned most of theirs landward. The Japanese learned that field artillery was useless against either the fleet or the permanent forts. Such knowledge prompted the assignment of a naval brigade to the initial bombardment, which, with the first grand assault, failed. Then they immediately turned to home for heavier ordnance. Mortars for coast-defense along the Straits of Shimonoseki and on the Bay of Yezo were all but completed in the military shops at Osacca. Twenty-six of them were immediately sent by transport to Dalny, and thence by rail over the tip of the mended Trans-Siberian to the last station outside the zone of the Russian fire.

The shipment of these great guns, the mortar-barrel of one weighing eight tons, up to that point where cranes, steamships, and locomotives of the finest type were available, was a gigantic undertaking. Arrived at the shattered station in the night--for day work was impossible--the task was only begun. From there the guns were hauled by hand, for horses or Manchu oxen could not be used where silence and concerted intelligence were essential. Eight hundred men were detailed to each gun, which was mounted on skids such as lumbermen use in the North Woods. Four abreast, with hemp thongs across their shoulders, and all attached to a long cable as thick as a man’s leg, the men labored on through the mud, after dark, with the Russian shells flinging out searching challenge over their heads, occasionally a quart of shrapnel bullets spurting promiscuously into their ranks. Of the positions to which the guns were thus taken the nearest were a thousand yards and the farthest three and a half miles away. Once they were there, no emplacement of shale or earth, such as sufficed for field artillery and for naval guns, would do. So under each gun was laid eight feet of concrete, firm and deep; and when it had hardened the gun was emplaced. All this was done under fire, in the night, the men being spat upon frequently by the glare of the searchlight, pelted sometimes by wind and rain, and, toward the end of autumn, seared by the winds howling in from two seas. It was prodigious toil, obscure heroism unbelievable. But it was successful, for it was this coast-defense artillery that sank the Russian fleet. None other could have done it. The monster labor of placing these guns on the bleak Manchurian hills, from which they have contested with the finest defenses in the world, is one of the thrilling engineering feats of modern times.

For the first time in history armies battled under searchlights. There had before been fights at sea, and at Kimberley a few skirmishes under searchlights; but in front of Port Arthur they have lighted up decisive engagements, extensive maneuvers, and vast losses. Science has intensified war. It has limited numerical loss, but it has increased individual suffering; and, as in modern city life, it strains brain and nerves to the breaking-point.

In August, for seven days and seven nights without cessation, a great battle was fought--the first grand assault, which failed and failed and failed until Nogi learned his lesson. Maneuvers as intricate and almost as extensive as those in the north at Liaoyang were conducted alternately under sun, moon, and searchlight. The crux of this action rested on one of Stoessel’s searchlight tricks, played on the night of the seventh blow of Nogi’s hammer, desperately driving a wedge into the fortress. All the afternoon the Japanese artillery had been fiercely bombarding the ridges of the Cock’s Comb, the Eternal Dragon, and the Two Dragons. One by one the Russian batteries ceased firing. It seemed that they were silenced. Night fell, with prospects fair for assault. A rising storm increased the Japanese hope, for in wind and rain the searchlights would be nullified. Then, as night and rain came down together, the searchlights struggling with both, the Japanese shrapnel opened up against the lights. They had tried before, unsuccessfully, to reach the dynamos hidden in the hills. This time the attempt apparently succeeded. The man behind the light waited until a Japanese shell burst in the line of vision between him and his foes, and then turned off the switch, giving the Japanese the impression that the light had been shattered. In this manner, one after another, three of the searchlights playing over the center of the field were “shattered.” With lights and guns apparently out of the contest, and favored by the storm and the night, Japanese expectation rose higher.

After midnight the most desperate of the eleven assaults conducted through the seven days was made against the Cock’s Comb and the Eternal Dragon. Halfway up the slope of the Cock’s Comb the three “shattered” lights, converging at one point, threw the advance out in silhouette against the red earth and the white shale. At the same moment the “shattered” batteries opened up, every gun alive. Simultaneously a regiment of Siberian sharpshooters sortied from the Two Dragons, caught the flanks in their onslaught, and all but annihilated the two regiments in front. Reinforced, bringing to the task that dour pluck that has given the Anglo-Saxon his hold on his big corner of earth, a quality the possession of which by the Japanese was once questioned, the reserves hammered the Siberians into their trenches; and though the assault against the Cock’s Comb failed, shortly after dawn the Eternal Dragon fell. This was the tip of the wedge, driven at fearful cost into the Russian right center, and was the objective needed by the engineers to outline across the valley the vast mining operations of those three months.

Between the hostile lines, held all summer and autumn with desperate determination, lay a zone on which the dead were not buried or the wounded succored. To send Red Cross men into this field was to lose two fighting units for every one saved, and no general would be guilty of such folly. The intensity of scientific conditions, the forces of which are the searchlight and the star bomb, the military engineer and the hyposcope, thus brought the fulfillment of Archibald Forbes’s prophecy, made twenty years ago. The time has come, as he said it would, when the wounded cannot be rescued from a battlefield.

Kimberley saw the dawn of the fireworks branch of warfare. It was left for Port Arthur to bring into permanent use this _feu de joie_ of holiday nights, a delight in peace, in war a spy. Rockets, such as we use on the Fourth of July, bursting above the plain, threw phosphorus over the advancing sappers and lighted up acres as though by candelabra of stars. The Russians used three batteries of such star bombs, and their dazzle added spectacle to horror. Some Japanese officers contended that they caused no annoyance, but my observation of the results was that they gave annoyance, but were not a decisive factor. By lying low, advancing troops could always escape being seen when the light came their way.

It was to be expected that a people like the Japanese, inventive, versatile, and industrious, would develop extraordinary resources when confronted with such a problem as Port Arthur, the reducing of which has caused them great agony and cost vast treasure. Archimedes would have rejoiced to know Colonel Imazawa. Major Yamaoka of General Nogi’s staff once said: “The world makes too much fuss over the unreasoning bravery of the private soldier. It pays too little attention to the obscure effort of the engineer, who risks as much, but with full realization of what it means.” Yamaoka was speaking of Imazawa. The two are friends.

Imazawa’s most effective device was the wooden grenade gun, an invention to save assaulters from death by their own explosives. He found that a soldier carrying hand-grenades of guncotton up a slope under fire, if properly hit, became a more frightful menace to his comrades than an opposing mine. So he made a wooden barrel three feet long, erected it at an angle of forty-five degrees on a wooden upright, and by a catch-spring tossed the balls of guncotton from it several hundred yards into the Russian parapet.

After the taking of Hatchimakiyama (the Turban Fort), Imazawa found his men for the first time on a height above the Russian trenches. Then he invented the dynamite wheel. This is a steel cylinder containing five hundredweight of dynamite, with a projecting shield for soldiers who roll it forward under fire until it reaches the declivity down which it is hurled. The opposing trench precipitates the explosion.

Imazawa also improved the saphead shield, used by besiegers since the Middle Ages. Formerly it was a heavy log of wood, protected by armor-plate, behind which pioneer soldiers advanced their trenches when close to the enemy and under outpost fire. A solid log was too heavy for the Japanese purposes, so Imazawa contrived a framework of kiri-wood, both light and tough, over which he built a steel shield such as Maxim put on his machine-gun. The shield stuck out in advance of the framework like a cow-catcher on a locomotive. It was rolled out of the saphead one or two feet toward the enemy. Behind it two sappers, on their bellies, dug out from under their legs the beginning of a wide, safe trench in which, two days later, a regiment could find shelter. Nervous work this, with bullets raining overhead like hail on a tin roof; but Imazawa made it practicable.

Before he finally hit on his grenade gun, Imazawa employed a bamboo grenade lift, his first device to let assaulters hurl their explosives into redoubts without danger to themselves. These were twenty-foot lengths of heavy bamboo, to the ends of which balls of guncotton were tied. Two soldiers carried one of these lifts up a slope, projected the grenade over a trench or a parapet, and let the furious Russians smash it and themselves into destruction.

The last thing Imazawa did was a mistake--not his, but still a mistake. In preparing for the third grand assault on October 29th, after the sapheads had been worked to within a hundred yards of the parapet on the Two Dragons redoubt, it was found that a dry moat separated the Japanese from their prey. The width and depth of this moat were difficult to determine. In the most fiercely contested zone, and on a plateau so situated that it could not be accurately seen from any of the heights possessed by the Japanese, its exact nature remained a mystery. Scouting was difficult, for it was commanded not only by the batteries of the Two Dragons, but also by the batteries of the greatest forts at Port Arthur--the Chair, the Table, the Cock’s Comb, and Golden Hill. To reach it a scout would have to cross several hundred yards of red earth, bare to every sight, and commanded by sharpshooters. Of those who went in for information about that mysterious dry moat, for a week none came back. Finally one scout, more cautious than the rest, returned and reported to Imazawa, “Ten meters.” Thirty-nine feet is big width for a moat, and no one could wonder that, sneaking along there in the dark, with momentary fear of searchlights and sharpshooters, the scout, finding a hole wider than his imagination, thought the distance great if it was ten meters. So Imazawa made his bamboo ladders fourteen meters long. On the day of the assault, everything having progressed favorably up to that point, the bombardment and the flank work against forts on each side being successful, the advance went in with Imazawa’s fourteen-meter ladders. Under fierce fire nearly half of the men dropped from the ranks, and only enough were left to handle three ladders, the glacis of the redoubt being littered with four others whose bearers had been slain. The hardy scaling party at last placed their ladders securely on one edge of the moat and dropped them across, expecting the next moment to dash across them to victory, leaving the reserves crouched in the trenches, waiting for the word to follow. Judge of their dismay when the ladders fell from the perpendicular to horizontal, from the horizontal to the perpendicular again! They failed to touch the other side, failed to touch bottom, and disappeared. The moat was fourteen meters wide. The dismayed assaulters hastened back to Imazawa. That night a party advanced and dropped a thousand bags, at one point, into this terrible moat. These sand bags disappeared, and not a ripple of their indent could be seen. This sunken road of Ohaine baffled the army and was the chief reason that Port Arthur did not fall on the Emperor’s birthday. Had they passed it, the Two Dragons redoubt would have fallen and the town could have been entered.

Those who charge the Japanese with suicidal folly should remember that when confronted with this crack in the earth they did not emulate emotional Frenchmen at Waterloo. They sat down and gave Imazawa a chance to study. They did not die in a climax of frenzy. Their sacrifice is for a grand and patriotic idea. Sensational despatches about losses spread the belief that they die like flies. The truth is, they never waste a life.

_Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly_

THE OSACCA BABE

Loading the 11-inch Coast Defense Mortar during the general bombardment of October 29. Two miles from Port Arthur.]

The use of many successful inventions showed the Japanese equal to all the progress of the age. The hyposcope enabled them to observe what went on in the town, and from 203-Meter Hill revealed the fleet. This is a telescope cut in half, the front elevated two feet above the rear by a further length of scope, and the line of vision between made straight past the angles by two mirrors. It gives a lookout within a few hundreds yards of the enemy’s line a chance to explore calmly at his leisure.

Bombproofs for the generals were cut in the solid rock a thousand yards in advance of the artillery and overtopping the firing-line. Thus commanding officers could get the traditional bird’s-eye view of the battlefield. Instead of sitting at headquarters, miles in the rear, as the generals in the North were compelled to do, and directing the action from an office desk, as a train-despatcher regulates his system, the divisional, brigade, and regimental commanders with their own eyes could observe all that was going on. The commander-in-chief had a fine lookout in the rear center of his army, two and a half miles from the town of Port Arthur. From there his eye glanced over as grand a battlefield as the world has yet produced, for within an area of ten square miles was brought every possibility of modern warfare. Even cavalry maneuvered. While his optic vision was extraordinary, his mental horizon was vast and comprehensive. Telephones centering to a switchboard in the next bombproof connected him with every battery and every regiment under his command. He was in instant touch with the most outlying operations, and, almost with the ease and certainty of Napoleon at Austerlitz could march and countermarch, enfilade and assault.

Telephone and post office follow the flag. In the advance of the Japanese army down the peninsula, telephone linesmen bearing on their shoulders coils of thin copper wire, not much larger and of no more weight than a pack-thread, followed through the kaoliang-fields on each side of the commander. The moment he stopped, a table was produced, a receiver was snapped on the wire, and a telegrapher stood ready. More remarkable was the advance of the telephone into the contested redoubt of the Eternal Dragon, where a station was placed and operated for four months, with the Russians holding trenches only forty meters distant and on three sides. At this station, along the front of which twenty men a day were slain by sharpshooters, mail was delivered every time that a transport arrived, which was almost daily. Men on the firing-line received postal cards from their sweethearts and mothers an hour before death.

Telephone and post office followed the flag; the Red Cross preceded it. The medical corps came, not in the wake of the army, but close on the heels of the pioneers. Before even the infantrymen entered a Chinese village it was explored, the water of its wells analyzed, its houses tested for bacteria, and the lines of encampment laid down. This unusual sanitation is looked upon by surgical authorities as perhaps the chief cause of Japanese success.

But one could find another cause of Japanese success, if the analytical probe is to be used and the mystic impulse which gives men resolution for supreme sacrifice ignored. This great cause may be called originality. The record of superficial observers of her recent advance is that Japan to-day selfishly and slavishly reaps the values wrung from time and chance through many centuries by other nations. If this be true, she is original enough to survive the ordeal of imitation. Had a single person shown the qualities displayed at Port Arthur he would be charged with having the audacity of genius. This audacity did not hesitate to make use of anything, new or old, possible or impossible, conventional or unconventional, which might win success from desperate conditions.

Let me give an instance: the problem that faced Japan’s soldiers when they had dared to capture a minor position in the fortress’s line of defense. Audacity won it, originality held it. The trench-line of this bloody angle of the Eternal Dragon lay down the slope and thus beneath the opposing Russian trench-line. The maxims of assault declared it untenable unless the contiguous positions to which it was subsidiary could be immediately taken; wise generalship seemed to dictate that it be abandoned. To hold it would be hardly worth the cost. Napoleon thus laid down in general treatise and Von Moltke specifically so dictated; but not Nogi. Give him an inch and he keeps it. Besides, he needed this inch for his engineers.

In the bloody angle the ordinary sand-bag redoubt would not do. There was no opportunity to erect the permanent masonry or even the semi-permanent timber redoubt. The men must have some protection that would let their heads be sheltered a foot or more below the top of the trench, and yet give them loopholes for firing. Any conventional trench built from experience or laid down in the text-books was impracticable. A French, a German, an English, a Russian soldier would have thrown up his hands because his father and his grandfather knew no medicine for such a hurt. The American, had he been far enough away from red tape, might have improvised. The Japanese did not hesitate. Around the bloody angle he raised a trench modeled on the medieval bulwarks of his samurai fathers. It was built with ingenious quickness due to his twentieth-century training. He erected a front of rock, like the turret of a castle, and through the deep embrasures of this turret fired his machine-guns, while the ragged skyline overtopped and kept him safe. On the spot he married old with new. He was following the destiny of his race--to tie the ages together.

Epilogue

THE DOWNFALL

D’Adda--the Marquis D’Adda of Rome--had studied history well, and he declared that the end would come at “ze psychologique mo-ment--in ze wind, ze rain, when ze high spirit go low.”

D’Adda was wrong. Port Arthur did not fall--it capitulated. It was not stormed and won. It was worn out. The military critics of the world were right. Port Arthur is impregnable, and well may some other power some day learn this, when it is defended by Japanese soldiery, properly provisioned, properly officered, and properly supplied with ammunition. It was because the Japanese were ever vigilant and never lost an opportunity to push their victorious arms onward that they entered the city as soon as they did.

The end came unexpectedly with the new year. There was nothing dramatic about it--nothing spectacular, and he who wanted excitement would have required excess imagination to find in the event the dramatic climax of a great war. When Port Arthur was taken ten years before, it collapsed in a day, and the unspeakable carnage before and after furnished one of the lurid chapters of history. Chinese were massacred, the town was plundered, and the world rang with outrage. When Plevna fell, thirty years before, the Turkish prisoners marched through the snow, across the Volga, dropping thousands of starved, scurvy-ridden, frozen comrades by the ebbing mile stones. When Metz went down a vast army came to the victor, and hemisphere-resounding was the scandal. Nothing of the sort distinguished the surrender of Port Arthur on the morning of January 2d, 1905. A stalwart, grim-visaged soldier in Turkoman cap rode on a white charger out of the town to a little village on the plain, saluted his victorious adversary, and presented him the beautiful white horse. The adversary, Nogi, with exquisite courtesy, refused the gift. On being pressed by Stoessel, in the Turkoman cap, he accepted it on behalf of his army. Complimented upon his achievement he replied: “I see no reason for exaltation--the cost has been too great.” The next day this courteous soldier, Nogi, the soul of chivalry, a prince of leaders, marched in at the head of his worn but marvelous followers. The Russians marched out, some to honorable parole, and some to tender care among their enemies. There was no massacre, no spectacle, no great dramatic incident. War had become a business. It was thus that these two great men--Nogi and Stoessel--wrote “finis” at the close of the first chapter of this interesting new volume, called “Civilized Warfare.”

It is less than fifty years since Sebastopol fell, and not forty since Lee abandoned the trenches at Petersburg. Yet the weapons used at these memorable sieges are now as obsolete as the catapult and the crossbow. And yet Port Arthur was won as were Tyre, and Carthage, and Constantinople. Men will charge on machine guns as readily as on crossbows. Apparently no defensive works or engines can stop first-class soldiers. Nothing so well describes the last few days of the great siege as this letter which came to me in New York a month after Stoessel started on his way to St. Petersburg. It was written by a man whose whole knowledge of English came from his own countrymen. His position is that of Adjutant of the Ninth Division of the Third Imperial Japanese Army; his service that of private secretary to Lieutenant-General Oshima, who commands the division.

The letter is transcribed, spelling and all, as it was written:

“NEAR PORT ARTHUR,

“_Jan._ 3d, 1905.

“_Dear Sir_:

“At last Port Arthur strongly defended and well known in the
world came to the end quite late yesterday. Let me tell you
a little about it. After you left here we took front part of
Niryuzan as far as to the ditch which was 14 meters wide and
deep. We made two roads into the ditch destroying two caponires
and reaching the other side of the ditch, we dug four holes under
the Russian bom-proof--the holes were about 14 meters deep. Then
we filled them up with gun cotton to blow it up. On the 28th of
last month we blew that up using 2.700 kirogram of gun cotton,
at the same time our soldiers made an asolt, and took hold of it.
By that explosion many Russians, large stones, and sand went up
high into air. It was just like a volcano. The Russians increased
and threw out many hand granates and very hard fighting went on.
But about 5:30 of that evening the whole fort was occupied by our
men, after six hours of continual fighting. After that we opened
the road to push out beyond Niryuzan. On the 31st the first
division captured Shojuzan greatly helped by our men in Niryuzan.
Before the dawn of the 1st of this month this division took hold
of all Russian line from H. peak to Banryuzan new fort, except
Bodai. By a severe attack of the 35th regiment at 4:20 of that
afternoon, Bodai was taken by us. Though we had a good battle
on the happy new years day, yet the rest of the army did not
have any. Early next morning General Stoessel sent in an officer
and had the letter of surrend sent to General Nogi. On the 2nd
negociation took place and the battlefield began to be entirely
calm, by and by no sound of a rifle. I felt something.

“I really wished you could stay here till this time to walk in
together to Port Arthur. I got slightly wounded after you left
and lost hearing of one ear. Wishing to see you at Mukden and
with best regards,

“Yours faithfully,

“LIEUT. K. HORI,

“9th Division.”

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained. For example,
bomb-proof, bombproof; machine gun, machine-gun; firing-line,
firing line; hyposcope; tensity; deviltry; diapason.

Pg 12, ‘defense motar’ replaced by ‘defense mortar’.
Pg 17, ‘SEIGE, AND CAPTURE’ replaced by ‘SIEGE, AND CAPTURE’.
Pg 23, ‘subterreanean mines’ replaced by ‘subterranean mines’.
Pg 46 (caption), ‘leaving Dalney’ replaced by ‘leaving Dalny’.
Pg 61, ‘parchment-krinkled’ replaced by ‘parchment-crinkled’.
Pg 68, ‘the fragant air’ replaced by ‘the fragrant air’.
Pg 70, ‘His silk tile’ replaced by ‘His silk tie’.
Pg 74, ‘primeval ectasy’ replaced by ‘primeval ecstasy’.
Pg 136 ‘rice paddie’ replaced by ‘rice paddy’.
Pg 160, ‘reduce the catidel’ replaced by ‘reduce the citadel’.
Pg 203, ‘commssioned officers’ replaced by ‘commissioned officers’.
Pg 221, ‘To the Colenel’ replaced by ‘To the Colonel’.
Pg 230, ‘wild crysanthemums’ replaced by ‘wild chrysanthemums’.
Pg 240 (caption), ‘the Jananese soldier’ replaced by ‘the Japanese
soldier’.
Pg 240 (caption), ‘preceeding the battle’ replaced by ‘preceding the
battle’.
Pg 303, ‘chistening the fort’ replaced by ‘christening the fort’.
Pg 319, ‘have diagramed it’ replaced by ‘have diagrammed it’.
Pg 325, ‘guns apparenly’ replaced by ‘guns apparently’.