CHAPTER XVIII

THE NEW SIEGE WARFARE 316

EPILOGUE

THE DOWNFALL 339

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

OPPOSITE

PAGE

Going into Action. From a Painting by Massanovich.

Out from the maize, on a dog trot, springs a

battalion, across the terraces, over the stubble,

these Scientific Fanatics press on, up the Griddle of

Death Frontispiece

Richard Barry and Frederick Villiers. They were mess-mates

during the siege. Mr. Villiers, the veteran

war artist of seventeen campaigns, was dean of the

War Correspondents at Port Arthur. The photograph

shows them before their Dalny home 34

Starting for Port Arthur. Reserve regiment leaving

Dalny for the firing line, eighteen miles away 46

General Baron Nogi, Commander of the Third Imperial

Japanese Army, studying the Defenses of Port

Arthur in his Manchurian Garden in the Willow

Tree Village 62

General Baron Kodama, Chief of the Japanese Staff,

standing on his door step 84

Bo-o-om! Discharge of the Japanese 11-inch mortar

during the Grand Bombardment of October 29th.

This gun stood a mile and a half from Port Arthur

and is shown firing into the Two Dragon Redoubt.

The vibration made a clear photograph impossible 112

The Hyposcope. Lieutenant Oda looking from 203-Meter

Hill through the hyposcope at the Russian

fleet in the new harbor at Port Arthur 120

Orphans. Driven from home by shells which killed

their father and mother, these brothers tramped

from camp to camp selling eggs 148

Human Barnacles. Clinging to the bases of the

forts, like barnacles to a ship, these sturdy Japanese

existed in wretched quarters throughout the summer,

autumn and half the winter 160

Ammunition for the Front 180

How They Got in. Eighteen miles of these terminal

trenches were dug through the plain before the

Russian forts 202

The Last Word. The officer is giving last instructions

to his men before the Grand Assault of September

21st. This photograph was taken in the front

Parallel, 300 yards from the Cock’s Comb Fort 222

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 241

A map of Port Arthur. Showing the defenses and

the direction of the Japanese attack 281

Home. The shack, 800 yards from the firing line,

occupied for three months by the fighting General

Oshima, Commander of the Ninth Division 290

Plunder. Showing Adjutant Hori, Secretary to General

Oshima, standing near plunder taken from the

captured Turban Fort 290

In action. Loading a 4.7 gun of the ordinary field

artillery during the assault of September 20th 312

The Osacca Babe. Loading the 11-inch coast defense

mortar during the general bombardment of October

29th, two miles from Port Arthur 332

Cloud girt among her mountains,

Nippon, in wrath as of old,

Unleashes her young warrior;

Lo, the world’s champion behold!

He comes abysmal as chaos,

A boy with the smile of a girl,

Tumbles his man with a handshake,

And spits him up with a twirl.

Nourished on rice and a dewdrop,

He fans him to sleep with a star,

Believing the fathers of Nippon

Created things as they are.

So up and across the short ocean

He sails to the land of can’t,

To keep up the name of his fathers

And smash down the things that shan’t.

Ah! What a freshet of glory

When into the noisy fray

Against a shaggy old giant

Comes this youth asmile and gay!

PREFACE

THE SIEGE AT A GLANCE

The sea attack on Port Arthur began on February 9th, 1904, at noon.

The land isolation occurred on May 26th, when the Second Army,

under General Oku, took Nanshan Hill. Four grand series of Russian

defenses from Nanshan down the peninsula were then taken by the

Japanese. The capture of Taikushan on August 9th, of Shokushan

two days later, and of Takasakiyama the following day, drove the

Russians into their permanent works. The real siege of Port Arthur

began, thus, on August 12th, and continued for four months and

nineteen days.

The failure of the first grand assault, continuing seven days

from August 19th, forced Nogi and his army to go slowly about the

terrific job of digging a way into the fortress. In the following

four months there occurred six more grand assaults, the periods

between them being occupied in mining, sapping, and engineering.

What was known as the second assault was made from September 19th

to 25th; the third from October 29th to November 1st; the fourth

from November 28th to 30th; the fifth from December 4th to 9th; the

sixth from December 18th to 20th; the final assault from December

28th to 31st. The morning of January 1st, 1905, General Stoessel,

the Russian commander, asked for terms of capitulation, and the

following day these terms were submitted and ratified.

The grand strategy of the Japanese operations was simple. It

comprehended one brief design: to demonstrate on the west, where

203-Meter Hill is, while the infantry and the heavy ordnance

smashed the Russian right center, where are located the principal

Russian forts, Keekwan (Cock’s Comb), Ehrlung (Two Dragons), and

Panlung (Eternal Dragon). Four and a half months of sapping,

mining, bombarding, and hand-to-hand fighting, than which history

holds no record of more desperate contest, won the forts of the

Cock’s Comb and the Two Dragons for the Japanese. The fall of the

Two Dragons on December 31st brought Stoessel to his knees.

INTRODUCTORY

THE INVESTMENT, SIEGE, AND CAPTURE OF PORT ARTHUR

In all the long history of military exploits, there is not one

that can compare, in point of difficulties surmounted, with the

reduction of Port Arthur. That this fortress should have been taken

by assault entitles the Japanese operations to rank with the finest

work done by any army in any age; that it should have been taken in

five months from the day on which the investment was completed (the

day on which the Russians were driven into their permanent works)

is an exploit which has never been approached. For Port Arthur’s

defenses had been laid out on the most modern plan. Nature,

moreover, has cast the topographical features of the place on lines

that are admirably suited to defense. The harbor is surrounded by

two approximately concentric ranges of hills, the crests of which

are broken by a series of successive conical elevations. The

engineers took the suggestion thus offered, and ran two concentric

lines of fortification around the city, building massive masonry

forts on the highest summits, and connecting them by continuous

defensive works. The inner line of the forts lay at an average

distance of one mile from the city, and constituted the main line

of permanent defense; the outer line, at an average distance of

a mile and a half from Port Arthur. Beyond these again were the

semi-permanent defenses. The positions of the various forts were

chosen in such a relation to each other that they were mutually

supporting--that is to say, if any one were captured by the enemy,

it could not be held because it was dominated by the fire from the

neighboring forts; and, indeed, it often happened that the Japanese

seized positions from which they were driven in this way.

In the majority of cases the slope of the hills was very steep, and

what was even worse for the Japanese, smooth and free from cover;

so that if an attempt were made to rush the works, a charge would

have to be made over a broad glacis, swept by the shrapnel, machine

gun, and rifle fire of the defenders. Once across the danger zone,

the attack was confronted by the massive masonry parapets of the

fort, over which the survivors, cut down to a mere handful, would

be powerless to force an entrance.

The defense of Port Arthur, however, did not stop at the outer

line of fortifications, but extended no less than eighteen miles

to the northward, to a point where the peninsula on which Port

Arthur is situated narrows to a width of three miles. Here a range

of conical hills, not unlike some of those at Port Arthur, reaches

from sea to sea; and these had been ringed with intrenchments for

troops and masked (or hidden) emplacements for artillery. Between

Nanshan and Port Arthur the Russians had built four more lines

of intrenchments, reaching from sea to sea, all very strong and

admirably suited for defense. Now it must be borne in mind that all

this wonderful net-work of fortifications, strong by nature of the

ground, strong by virtue of the great skill and care with which it

had been built, was distinguished from all other previous defensive

works by the fact that in this fortress, for the first time, were

utilized all those terrible agencies of war which the rapid

advance of science in the past quarter of a century has rendered

available. Among these we may mention rapid-fire guns, machine

guns, smokeless powder, artillery of high velocity and great

range, high explosive shells, the magazine rifle, the telescopic

sight giving marvelous accuracy of fire, the range-finder giving

instantaneously the exact distance of the enemy, the searchlight,

the telegraph and the telephone, starlight bombs, barbed-wire

entanglements, and a dozen other inventions, all of which were

deemed sufficient, when applied to such stupendous fortifications

as those of Port Arthur, to render them absolutely impregnable.

The Russians believed them to be so--certainly the indomitable

Stoessel did. And well he might; for there was no record in history

of any race of fighters, at least in modern times, that could face

such death-dealing weapons, and not melt away so swiftly before

their fury as to be swept away in defeat.

But a new type of fighter has arisen, as the sequel was to tell.

On February 8, 1904, the first blow fell upon Port Arthur in that

famous night attack by the torpedo boats. On February 9th occurred

the engagement between the remnant of the Russian fleet and the

Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo which ended in the Russian

retreat into the harbor and the closing of Port Arthur by sea.

On May 26th the Japanese Second Army, which had been landed at

Petsewo Bay, attacked the first line of defense at Nanshan,

eighteen miles north of Port Arthur, and gave an inkling of the

mettle of the Japanese troops by capturing the position in a

frontal attack. The Japanese pushed on to Port Arthur and there

followed, in quick succession, a series of bloody struggles at the

successive lines of defense in which the Japanese would not be

denied. The fiercest fight took place at the capture of a double

height, Kenshan and Weuteughshan, which Stoessel re-attacked

vainly for three days, losing three times as many men as were lost

originally in the attempt to hold the position.

On May 29th Dalny was occupied, and became the base of the

besieging army. A railway runs from Dalny for three miles to a

junction with the main line from the north to Port Arthur.

On August 9th to 11th the outlying semi-permanent works Taikushan

and Shokushan, lying about three and one-half miles from Port

Arthur, were taken, and the Russians driven in to their permanent

positions.

The army detailed for the capture of Port Arthur was 60,000 strong;

Stoessel at the date of the battle of Nanshan probably had 35,000

men.

Encouraged by their uninterrupted success in capturing Russian

intrenchments by dashing frontal attack, the Japanese, particularly

after their brilliant success of August 9th to 11th, believed that

they could storm the main defenses in like manner. They hurled

themselves against the Russian right center in a furious attack

upon the line of forts stretching from the railway around the

easterly side of the town to the sea. For seven days they battled

furiously. But the wave of conquest that had flowed over four lines

of defense, broke utterly against the fifth; and after a continuous

struggle, carried on day and night, beneath sunlight, moon, and

searchlight, they retired completely baffled, with an awful

casualty list of 25,000 men.

On September 1st the Japanese, finding that they could not take

Port Arthur by assault, settled down to reduce it by an engineering

siege. This latter was carried on by means of “sapping and mining,”

supported by heavy bombardment, its object being to shake the

defense by terrific artillery fire, blow up the parapets and

other defenses by subterranean mines, and capture the fortress by

fierce assaults delivered from concealed trenches close to the

fortifications. Sapping and mining may be described as a method

of attack by tunneling. The Japanese found that they could not

get into the forts by a rush above ground, so they determined to

burrow in below ground. The main attack was directed against the

line of forts to the east of the city, or the Russian right center.

The first operation was to cut a deep trench, not less than six

feet in depth and a dozen or more feet in width, roughly parallel

with the line of forts, and at a distance of about 1,000 yards

therefrom. From this trench three lines of zigzag trenches were

dug in the direction of the principal forts of Ehrlung, Keekwan,

and Panlung. These trenches were about six feet deep (deep enough

to hide the sappers from view) and eight feet wide (wide enough

to allow the troops to march to the assault four abreast). The

zigzag consisted of an alternate approach and parallel, the former

extending diagonally toward the fortification, the latter parallel

with it. The angle of the diagonal approaches was always carefully

mapped out by the engineers, and was so laid with reference to

the enemy’s forts that it could neither be seen nor reached by

shell fire. The digging was done chiefly at night, and the soil

was carried back through the excavated trenches in gabions and on

stretchers, and dumped out of sight of the enemy. As the parallels

were advanced across the valley or level spaces, they were roofed

at intervals, with planks covered with soil and grass, so that as

the Russians looked out toward the ravine in which the army was

supposed to be encamped, there was nothing to indicate that the

enemy was cutting a series of covered roadways, right up to the

base of the forts themselves. Of course in many cases the trenches

were located, and desperate night sorties were made in the endeavor

to break up the work. But it went remorselessly forward. When the

foot of the fortified slopes was reached, a second great parallel,

extending around the whole face of the fortified eastern front,

was cut--this latter for the purpose of assembling the troops for

the final dash upon the forts. From this parallel the Japanese cut

tunnels straight through the hills until they found themselves

immediately below the massive parapets of such forts as they wished

to reach. Here cross tunnels were cut, parallel with the walls and

immediately below them, in which tons of dynamite were placed and

the wires laid ready for the great explosion--much of this being

done, it must be remembered, entirely unknown to the Russians,

secure in their great fortifications overhead. The work of the

sappers and miners was now complete.

It must not be supposed that while this slow work was being carried

on, the garrison at Port Arthur, or the city itself, or even the

fleet in the harbor, was being left in peace, or had any respite

from the harassments of the siege. For as soon as the investment

was complete, the Japanese erected hidden batteries in various

carefully-selected positions, until they had no less than 300

guns trained against the city. All the furious assaults that

failed so disastrously were preceded by bombardments, the like of

which had never been witnessed in the history of the world. These

batteries consisted of regular siege guns of from 5 inches to 6

inches caliber, a large number of naval guns of 4.7-inch and 6-inch

caliber, and the regular field ordnance of the three divisions and

two independent brigades composing the Third Imperial Army.

By far the most formidable pieces used in the bombardment, however,

were the powerful 11-inch mortars, which were mounted in batteries

of from two to four in various positions behind the ranges of hills

which effectually screened the Japanese from Russian observation.

The pieces are the Japanese latest type of coast-defense mortars,

such as are used along the Straits of Shimoneseki and about the Bay

of Yezo. They were brought by sea to Dalny, carried by railroad

for a distance of fifteen miles to the end of the track, and from

thence were hauled by hand over special tracks laid direct to the

emplacements. In some cases, indeed, the guns were dragged on

rollers through the sand, as many as 800 men being required to

haul a single mortar; for the mortar barrels, without the carriage,

weigh eight tons apiece. This task was accomplished under fire, in

rainy weather, and in the night, to the accompaniment of bursting

shrapnel and other discouragements which would have daunted a less

dauntless race. Even when the selected site of the batteries was

reached, every one of the eighteen mortars had to be placed upon

a concrete foundation eight feet in depth and eighteen feet in

diameter. In each case an excavation had to be dug, the concrete

prepared and rammed into place, the heavy foundation plates,

traversing racks, and the massive gun carriage, weighing much

more than the gun itself, erected and adjusted, and the whole of

the heavy and costly piece put together with the greatest nicety.

All through the long months in which the sappers and miners were

cutting their trenches, the engineers were putting in place these

huge mortars, which were not originally intended, be it remembered,

for such field operations as these; but were designed for permanent

sea-coast fortifications around the harbors of Japan.

The mortar itself has a bore of 28 centimeters, or 11 inches.

The shells are designed to burst on contact. They are loaded

with a high explosive designed by the Japanese Dr. Shimose, and

corresponding in its terrific bursting effects to the English

lyddite, the French melinite, and our own maximite. Each shell

weighs 500 pounds. Its cost is $175, and the cost of each

discharge, including that of the impelling power, is about $400.

During the heavy bombardments, each gun was fired once every eight

minutes, and as the grand bombardment lasted in every case about

four hours, the cost for these mortar batteries alone must have

been over $200,000, and for the whole of the batteries, including

naval guns, machine guns, etc., the cost of each bombardment was

approximately half a million dollars. The 11-inch mortar has a

maximum range, with a moderate degree of elevation, of seven or

eight miles; but as none of these batteries were more than three

miles distant from the point of attack, they were fired at angles

of as great as sixty degrees, the huge shells hurtling high into

the heavens, passing over two ranges of hills, and falling like

thunderbolts out of the blue sky, vertically upon the devoted city.

But if the batteries were located behind hills that entirely shut

out the object of attack from view, how, it will be asked, could

the guns be aimed with such accuracy, to sink, as they did, a whole

fleet of warships, one by one? It was in this way: For the attack

of stationary objects such as forts, docks, buildings, ships at

anchor, etc., the artillery officers were provided with a map of

the whole area of bombardment, which was laid out in squares, each

square having its own number. The Japanese having, at the close

of the Chinese war, been in possession of Port Arthur themselves,

and having possessed during the past few years an excellent bureau

of intelligence, knew the exact location of every building or

object of importance in and around the city. Consequently, when

the artillery officers were directed to attack a building in a

certain square, or a particular fort, they knew exactly what angle

of elevation to give their gun, and how far to traverse it, so as

to cause the shell to fall with mathematical accuracy upon the

particular object to be hit.

The attack upon the warships, however, was another proposition,

for they could be, and were, shifted, from time to time. To make

sure of hitting them, it was necessary to have some direct line

of vision. The Japanese knew that such a line of vision could be

obtained from the top of a hill to the west of the city known

as 203-Meter Hill--the Russians knew it, too. Hence that awful

struggle for possession of this hill, which cost so many thousands

of lives. The Japanese won the position. When they had taken it,

they placed observers provided with the hyposcope--a telescope that

enables the observer to observe the surrounding country with out

exposing himself above the surrounding parapet--upon the summit,

in suitable positions, and held the hill with sufficient force to

prevent its being retaken. The batteries were then trained at the

individual warships, and the effects of the shells was telephoned

from 203-Meter Hill to the various batteries, and the errors

corrected, according as they were long, short, or wide, until the

huge shells commenced to drop with unerring accuracy down through

the decks and out through the bottom of the doomed warships. The

ships tried to escape observation by hiding on the outside of the

harbor behind the Tiger’s Tail hills, and in a cove behind Golden

Hill; but there was no escape, and ultimately every ship of the

squadron was sunk.

That was the beginning of the end. The 11-inch batteries when

directed at the forts tore gaping holes in the parapets, and

according to the testimony of General Stoessel, they were simply

irresistible. One by one, after furious bombardments, the

walls of the great forts were blown up by the explosion of the

subterranean mines that had been laid by the sappers and miners,

and the Japanese massed in readiness for the attack in the inner

parallels swept in through the wide gaps thus formed, and seized

the fortifications, from which, a few months before, they had been

swept back in terrible and crushing defeat.

PORT ARTHUR

Chapter One

THE CITY OF SILENCE

Dalny, August 3d: Guns have blown their thunder to us distantly

all the afternoon. The sounds boom a low thud with monotonous

distinctness. Lounging on the taffrail of a small cargo steamer in

Dalny Bay they strike those of us who are innocent of war, who have

never felt the thrill, the halt and the plunge of battle as tame;

almost without interest. In a California cottage, a summer’s night,

a mile from the seashore I have listened before now to the surf

climb up and lay down upon the beach with the same heavy lust.

This sound has in it, too, something of nature’s immanence and

majesty; an elemental force of decay and a primal grandeur of

progress. Yet it is ominously deadly. The sky above is a perfect

azure, the sea below a perfect turquoise, the town beyond a haze

of tranquil ocher. We are lying among warships, but they are

silent. Beyond us a troopship is unloading a thousand conscripts

for the trenches, but they are silent. The city of Dalny is

beautiful--and silent. Silence everywhere. Then comes that

boom--silence--boom--boom--boom! The captain steps up and speaks a

few words. We begin to realize that we are listening to siege guns

pounding the life out of a doomed city. The captain waves an arm

toward a point of land to be seen faintly through a glass. Only

half a day’s walk that way and beyond--to the southeast--lies Port

Arthur.

We are ten. Yesterday there landed here eight military

observers--four British, one Spaniard, one German, one Chilean and

one American. These eighteen have been assigned by the Japanese

Government to the army now operating against Port Arthur. The

eighteen are the only Occidentals who will see the siege.

[Illustration: WAR CORRESPONDENTS

Richard Barry and Frederic Villiers. Mr. Villiers (in

knickerbockers) the veteran of seventeen campaigns, was Dean of the

War Correspondents before Port Arthur.]

Four days ago we left Moji in a transport steamer, the _Oyomaru_.

The ship’s name tells of the trip--“The prosperous ocean

ship.” We might have come across a millpond so placid was our

journey. Yesterday afternoon we sighted a line of sand piles and

verdure-covered rocks rising out of the ocean. We were about to

steam past when a flash of sunlight, like a gay salute from a boy’s

pocket mirror, struck our bow. It was the heliograph. The _Oyomaru_

put to port and slid in under the lee of the islands. As we came up

an old gray battleship veered on her anchor to give us room and as

we turned her bows we floated in among the fleet, dragging at its

chains, steam up, waiting to dash at the word to Port Arthur, four

miles away.

We were at the Elliot Islands, inhabited by fisher folk and seized

by the Japanese for a naval base. Around us lay the silence of

death, though twenty men-of-war were within gun shot. Only the

spiral upshoot of smoke from fifty stacks and the heave and push

of tide-driven fighting craft gave evidence of the tensity we were

in. From the highest hill a thin shaft, like a straw in the wind,

cut against the sunset. There lay the wireless-telegraph station

to which are flashed signals from the torpedo craft and cruisers

guarding the mouth of Port Arthur.

At dawn we left the fleet, silent, with that lazy curl of smoke

uplifting its ragged fringe. On for five hours we came at ten knots

until we rounded a cape and turned into Talienwan Bay. In the

farther curve, as a pebble in a sling, lay Dalny.

“It looks like Greece; the Piraeus with Marathon in the distance,”

said Frederic Villiers. I thought of another place; San Diego Bay

with Point Loma curving a crescent out of the Pacific.

The Russians came here to stay; that is plain. We can see miles of

brick buildings, some five stories high. The great brick chimney

of an electric light plant towers above the city. The public

buildings, hospitals, schools and railroad station are as fine as

those of Los Angeles. Costly villas with spacious grounds, coolie

covered, stretch back under the hillsides. A zoological garden of

several dozen acres can be seen off at the left. There are miles

of new wharves cemented and built with stone. Two piers strike out

four hundred yards into the harbor, locked down by solid masonry.

A breakwater half a mile long stretches at our stern.

Ten years ago could the Romanoff seated in the Winter Palace at

Petersburg, placing a finger on the map of western Asia, as he

said: “Let there be a Russian city here;”--could he possibly have

foreseen to-day?--the Russians gone, half of the magnificent

city burned, the safe and beautiful harbor filled with Japanese

transports and men-of-war, the railway held for a Japanese line of

advance and Russian prestige on the Manchurian littoral smashed

like a rotten egg!

This afternoon we have found how desperate the silence is. For mere

movement after three days on shipboard and five months solitary

confinement in Tokyo we asked to launch the ship’s boat and row

about the harbor. The captain assented. Eight of us got in and

started off among the transports. Next to us was a hospital ship

painted white with a green stripe running across her middle like

an abdominal bandage round an invalid. “Looks as enticing as a

cocktail before dinner,” said one of the boys. It did have a cool

glance that must be grateful to a wounded man just in from the

battlefield. We but turned her bows when we ran into a warship--a

gunboat of the third class. She was in black, with red stripes

about her portholes and stanchions. The gun carriages were outlined

in red--stuff put on to keep off rust. Just beyond the gunboat lay

a torpedo destroyer--the most devilish craft that floats--long,

thin, low, with four thick funnels above engines like a bull’s

lungs.

As we passed the gunboat a bugle piped “to quarters” and several

officers turned their glasses on us. But on we went, gay with

the freedom of the lark, and stretching our ship-bound muscles

against the buffeting of the choppy sea. Yonder lay the torpedo

boats and brother destroyers and beyond an armored cruiser of the

second class. The cruiser piped “to quarters” and more glasses were

leveled on us.

About this time the coxswain turned her nose to the _Oyomaru_, but

before we got there the ship’s sampan glided alongside, the mate in

her alive, jabbering Nipponese and gesticulating toward the ship.

We hurried back.

As we climbed on board Villiers yelled: “You’ve spoiled it now.

You’ll never see Port Arthur.”

Then we found we had created a sensation--this strange boat manned

by eight foreigners, appearing in broad afternoon in the harbor

of the nearest naval base to the scene of the fleet’s activities.

Two warships had prepared to fire on us at word of command and

signaling from the fleet to the shore had only found that it was

“supposed” we were “neutral allies,” but that officially we could

not be recognized. The captain was reprimanded and we were told to

keep close to the ship until released. Tokyo had said nothing of us

to Dalny. To-morrow we will be released. But we will not again go

about the harbor. We will go on shore. We will have ears and eyes,

but no legs or tongues.

Chapter Two

THE INVISIBLE ARMY

Ho-o-zan, (the Phœnix Mountain) three miles from and looking into

Port Arthur, Sept. 14th: Here we are with the Third Imperial Army

waiting for Russia’s downfall in the Far East. With her fleet gone,

Russia’s sea power has vanished. With Kuropatkin smashed it will be

another year before she can have a great army in the field. So now

there remains only impregnable Port Arthur to say that Russia but

eight months ago held all Manchuria.

Ten of us are privileged to follow the fortunes of the army of

investment. We alone of eighty-four war correspondents who entered

the field are here to record the details of a siege that promises

to go down in history with Plevna and Sebastopol. At the present

time I may tell you only of how the army lives and works, and what

sensations engulf one in the midst of this elemental contest at

the apex of a world, where two civilizations are in life and death

throes.

Impregnable is the word for the line of forts confronting us.

Military authorities innumerable have predicted it would never

be taken from a white soldiery, although Japan ten years ago did

take it, in a single day of fierce assault, from the weakly armed

and poorly trained Chinese. But through seven years Russia has

been preparing for what she faces to-day--a great army of veteran

troops from a warlike nation, equipped for scientific fighting and

officered by men trained in the best schools in the world. She has

repaired and rebuilt the old Chinese Wall till it lies across the

back of the city, from sea to sea, a buttress of protection and

menace, plentifully loopholed for rifles and hung at intervals,

like huge fobs on a gigantic chain, with forts. Every natural

elevation is commanded by a battery, and every weak depression

built up for similar defense. Six miles from sea to sea, convex

into the valley, and cutting off the apex of the Liaotung peninsula

as a conical cake might be cut by a spoon, lies this bristling

line. Looking at it, and what confronts it from above, this

appears as grand a battlefield as the mind can conceive.

The mere names of some of the forts bring gleams of the situation.

To our right, in the center, lie Anzushan and Etzeshan, the Chair

and Table Mountains. Some giant might hang his legs over Anzushan

and sup from Etzeshan, but were he built in proportion he would

be nearly two thousand feet high, for they rise from the valley

precipitously half that distance. It was here, the key to the

center, that the Japanese pierced the line ten years ago, but

they have tried no such move this time; a different foe confronts

them now. Far beyond the Chair and Table Mountains, the key to

the outer, we see Golden Mount, the key to the inner defenses, at

once a sea and land fort. It shines glorious and confident in the

sunlight, the model of a conventionally built fortification, rising

square and solid from the hills, buttressed with sod and sand bags

and parapeted on a bevel.

After all the outer seventeen forts have fallen and after that

terrible Chinese Wall has been pierced, there still remains Golden

Mount, the Tiger’s Tail and Liaotishan. Just below Golden Mount,

to be seen only from a certain angle in the valley in front of

us, lie the shattered remnant of the Russian fleet--three gray

old battleships, four tarnished cruisers and a half dozen torpedo

boats, smashed and done by Togo’s fleet, whose smoke curls

irregularly over the sky line as it tugs warily there on perpetual

watch, a watch uninterrupted for seven months, in which the

monotony has been varied by three great naval battles.

To the right of Golden Mount and still below it lies the new town

of Port Arthur built by the Russians. Hid behind a hill is the old

town of frame houses. There is not a living thing to be seen on the

streets, lying in plain view through a strong glass, as though in

miniature on the palm of your hand. It is unharmed and spotless,

seemingly in fresh paint. Four sticks piercing the sky line tell

of the wireless telegraph station. To the right a huge crane can

be seen sticking up to indicate the dock yards and a patch of

blue, landlocked water, the west harbor. Nearest us the arsenal

and railroad shops are plain. Then comes the railroad mockingly

deserted in the sunlight. Then a high embankment shuts the view,

but we know that under the embankment nestles a series of barracks.

Far out on the plain, between the two armies, and between us on

the mountain and the Russian forts, two miles off, a lone factory

chimney up-slants to the blue; though bursting shells have been

thick about there it is unharmed, and, so far as we can see, Port

Arthur is unharmed. So far the Japanese have not shelled it at all.

But we are told the navy has wrecked the Russian quarter. The army

scorns to destroy the city which now lies at the mercy of its siege

guns, just as it scorns to starve out the beleaguered garrison. It

is a civilized game the Japanese are playing, one of strategy and

force.

Far down in the plain called the Mariner’s, or the Shuishiying

Valley, a little to the left and back of the lone chimney, is a

great fort known as the Two Dragons, a most difficult place to take

because of its long approaches. It is the advance guard of the

Russian line; only eight hundred yards from the Japanese trenches.

Far out to the right, resting on the northern arm of Pigeon Bay,

is a bald-headed peak some eight hundred feet high. This is

Liaotishan, the extreme left of the Russian position. Behind the

town are great peaks, the highest hereabouts, and on them, in the

early morning, four brass cannons can be seen glittering. They are

thought to be dummy cannon, for they have not yet spoken.

To the left of the town, with its Golden Mount, begin the really

great forts, scenes of carnage destined for history’s brightest

page, and about which have taken place the battles I am about

to describe. The Eternal Dragon and the three batteries of the

Cock’s Comb are the essential. Far behind this Eternal Dragon and

the wall, a few hundred yards from the sea, is a wooded driveway,

leading to a mountain called Wangtai, or “the watch tower.” Up

this, of an afternoon, a carriage can sometimes be seen drawn by

white horses. Prisoners tell us it is General Stoessel’s carriage

and that he thus goes to his headquarters. Why is he not fired

upon? Because he is out of close rifle range and the Japanese never

waste a shell on a single man or on even a group.

Occasionally we can see men moving a heavy gun about, or walking in

squads through the town. The Japanese wait to concentrate their

fire; they never harass the enemy. On the contrary, the Russians,

now when they should hoard every shell, waste hundreds each day.

They will fling a six-inch screamer at a mule or an umbrella, and

no part of the Japanese rear is safe, though distances are so great

that the chances of being hit are one in a thousand.

[Illustration: OFF FOR PORT ARTHUR

A reserve regiment leaving Dalny for the firing line eighteen miles

away.]

All is quiet except that now and then a Russian shell whizzes.

The sound can no longer be called the “boom of cannon,” so savage

and rending is the detonation of these mighty modern charges. To

hear one explode even half a mile off sets every fiber of the

body in action, so angry is the report. Infantry popping can be

heard, oftenest in the night, as the outposts come together, or the

sentries chaff each other by showing dummy heads or arms. But over

beyond that ragged line we know that twenty thousand men, driven

into a corner--and what a corner it is!--are fighting like rats

in a hole, that they are of the same blood that defeated Napoleon

when on the defense a century ago, the same that half a century

ago stubbornly contested Sebastopol, the same that a quarter of

a century ago, at appalling loss of life, reduced the marvelous

Plevna. They sit thus hunted, at bay, well ammunitioned and

provisioned, determined to sell every ounce of blood dearly.

To take Port Arthur seems impossible. It takes men drunk with

victory and strong in ancient might to dare the task. It is only

looking at what the Japanese have already taken that makes one have

faith in their ability to do what they are now trying; otherwise,

looking across at that six-mile line, one would say as he might

have said of the ridges lying behind us: human energy and prowess

cannot force them; only madmen would attempt it. But the Japanese

have already forced at least five positions, seemingly as difficult

as Port Arthur. First, they took Nanshan, which was even worse than

this, for the approaches were gradual for two miles, while here

precipitous heights and deep ravines give shelter. Nanshan the

Japanese took in a single desperate day; Kenzan, where they had to

climb hand over hand, they scaled in a night; Witozan, where they

broke in over parapets built on rocks seven hundred feet above the

sea, they reduced at high noon; Anshirey, where the road climbs

up a spiral for a mile, and is raked at every yard, they enfiladed

and took in two days; and Taikushan, a saddle of malachite and

granite straddling the main road to Port Arthur, they shelled out

in thirty-six hours. Thus it is we have faith that some morning the

world will wake to hear that the Rising Sun flies over Port Arthur,

which the military experts of the Powers have declared impregnable.

Bitter as the contest is, war has not touched the bowels of the

land. Looking into the plain behind me I can see a score of busy

and peaceful villages serene in a sea of golden harvest. Maize and

buckwheat, beans and millet, cabbage and barley alternate green

and russet over the meadows. Springless bullock carts, ancient as

Jerusalem, helped by tiny donkeys and naked children, painfully

garner the grain. Women sing in low monotones at the primitive

stone mills where blindfolded donkeys travel all day in a circle,

grinding out the seed and flour. Lines of coolies wend through

the footpaths, spring-kneed with huge weights on limber poles.

Shells at the rate of four or five an hour drop into this great

area, separated from the field of battle by a range of mountains,

plowing up a hill, shattering a house, tearing a road, killing a

donkey, wounding a coolie, but of no great damage. No one minds.

The harvest goes on. The glorious, golden September continues. The

women sing, the naked children play, the tiny donkeys labor.

It is the plain in front, under the Cock’s Comb and the Golden

Mount, guarded by the Two Dragons that has desolate quiet. There

the maize is untouched and the heavy heads of the millet fall from

sheer weight, while the cabbages are crushed by infantry passing in

the night. Fires have blackened the villages, the Manchurians have

fled, and in ragged lines from sea to sea the two armies hold their

hostile trenches, from which, through the twenty-four hours, goes

up the intermittent ping and pop of rifle bullets.

What of the army? You cannot see it; much less can you hear it. An

army of a hundred thousand men is here, around us, among us, but

we do not know it, we can hardly guess it. Little would one think,

were it not for the firing, that so much as a company were idling

along that plain. A machine gun rattles, a low, deep boom comes

from the sea; the forts reply, a flash streaks the air, we see a

puff of smoke, then a cloud of earth is thrown up; finally, after

a long while, as we are about to turn away, the angry shriek of a

shell comes over and we hear it burst a thousand yards below in

the valley. Only our ears tell us that war is on. The Japanese are

as invisible as the Russians. It will take days and weeks to spy

out the labyrinthine ways of this great army as it toils among the

hills, into the valley and up the ravines, mounting its guns, and

digging its way up to the parapets, where its units will cling,

like barnacles to a ship, until the monstrous hulk founders.

But getting down into the rear plain, traveling the road, taking

a different one each day, passing among the villages and through

the hills, one begins to realize that the country is honeycombed

by grim activity. Back and forth, from the front to Cho-ray-che, a

railroad station halfway from Port Arthur to Dalny, travel lines of

transport. Each line has from one to five dozen light wagons drawn

by single small shaggy horses, each guided by a small dust-visaged

soldier.

“There is the strength of our army,” said an officer to me one

day as a company of them passed, grimed, heated, menial. They are

the flower of Japanese youth, clerks, professional men, students,

exiled on rice and pickled plums, getting none of the glory of war.

They are the unnamed and unknown but all-powerful commissary.

As the transport passes in, loaded with bags of rice, there comes

out another line, this time of coolies, paired, and well burdened

with human freight. They are bearing the wounded, in bamboo

stretchers that do not jolt the piteously shattered frames, to

the railroad station, whence they go by train to Dalny, thence by

hospital ship to Japan. Every day comes this dribble of wounded,

some days only a score, but after a battle the ways are thick with

them--hundreds, thousands.

Occasionally, but very seldom, a battalion or a regiment of

infantry will be seen moving in, with compact lines, knapsacks on

back, bearing rifles with the barrel holes brass covered. The

other night over by the western sea I suddenly came upon a troop

of cavalry racing along the sands in the sunset. They rode their

horses well, considering that the Japanese is not a horseman. Each

had an extra mount. They frolicked like plainsmen till the coves

rang. I had not seen so much gayety before in all the Japanese

army. But what can cavalry do at a siege?

For the sublime we need not go to the firing line where men risk

their lives and lose them. At the front of our mountain lies a deep

rutted road, at the end of which, hid well among the hills, is

the hole for a concrete gun-emplacement, redoubted with sandbags,

the glacis slippery with shale. Along this road as the sun sinks

we see what looks like a gigantic snake, its tail pulling an ugly

head slowly backward, its dust-covered belly squirming laboriously.

Descending we find a cable thick as a man’s thigh stretched between

two long lines of men, each of whom has hold and is pulling

that ugly head--a siege gun--nose and breech clap-boarded, and

wallowing, without its carriage, on wooden rollers. We count the

men--300. Men alone can do the work, for they alone can move in

unison, quietly, at the word of command. There is no noise. The

commands cannot be heard five hundred yards away. The three hundred

bend their backs as one and the Pride of Osacca bunts her nose

through the dust a rod nearer emplacement. They toil there a week

to get that monster into position, pygmies moving a power that

will rend the mountains, as tradition has it that Hendrick Hudson

and his crew moved the ships’ cannon into the Catskills for the

eternal generation of Knickerbocker thunder. To look upon that gun,

helpless but disputatious in the hands of the three hundred, to

realize that a week hence its bulk, into which one of these naked

Manchurian children can easily creep, will toss five hundred weight

of shell five miles through the air into one of those Russian forts

where it will shatter the skill, labor, and life of an Empire--ah,

that is sublime! Is it not also terrible?

The same scientific skill with which the gun is handled is seen

throughout the army. Even after a battle, in the disorder of

regiments, the search for the wounded, the burial of the dead,

there is no confusion. All moves quietly and quickly. No officer

swears, for the simple reason that the Japanese language hasn’t

the words. Only the interpreters, who know English, swear. They,

however, can be excused; they handle the correspondents, to whom

they can’t speak, as the soldiers do to the Russians, with lead.

You read of “the confusion and bustle of an army” and “the terrors

of war.” There is no confusion, no terror here. No shrieks, no

shouts, no hurrying. Once, as a regiment, after losing half its

men, scaled the top parapet of one of those lower forts across the

way, it gave out three rapid “Banzais.” Just that triple cry in the

early dawn, from troops drunk with victory and mad with fatigue,

is about the only evidence I have that the army possesses nerves.

It rings in my ears yet and will always ring there--a wild shriek

of samurai exultation floating out of the mist of the valley above

the voice of rifle and cannon. “The officers lost control for a

few minutes, but not for long,” explained a certain general to me

later, apologetically. He didn’t countenance such enthusiasm. War

is business here--the most superb game of chess ever played upon

the chequered board of the world.

One thing that relieves the situation of much of the evident hurry

that once made war picturesque is the absence of the orderly. The

mounted officer, riding for life, dispatch in breast-pocket or

saddle bag, from the general to his brigadiers and his colonels,

is food for reminiscence. The telephone rang his knell. This

is the first time in history that the field telephone has come

successfully into extensive active use. General Nogi can sit in

his headquarters, four miles from Port Arthur, and speak with

every battery and every regiment lying within sight of the doomed

forts. Little bands of uniformed men, carrying bamboo poles and

light wire frames on transport carts, and armed with saws and

shovels, have intersected the peninsula with lines of instantaneous

communication. It is the twentieth century. Yet, as I walked over

the hills near the headquarters of the commander of artillery

yesterday, I saw, hanging from one of the bamboo poles and all

along a wire leading from it to the artillery commander’s tent,

strips of white cotton cloth called “goheis.” You can see the same

before all the Shinto shrines in Japan. They are offerings of

supplication to the spirits of the fathers. Some simple linesman,

garbed in khaki and wearing an electric belt, not content with

telephonic training, would thus guard his general. “Oh, ye who

have watched over Japan, in peril and in safety, from the age of

Jimmu, even to the present day,” he cries, “now, in a foreign land,

faithfully guard this, our talisman and signal!”

I have said there are no sounds in the Japanese army. But there

are--a few. At night, from far back on the rear plain, comes

the monosyllabic sound of singing, several companies in unison,

interspersed with light laughter--nothing hilarious, nothing loud,

only an overflow of happy spirit into the night--never in the

daytime, always at night. The song is a long one by Fukishima, a

Major-General now in the north with Marshal Oyama, with a refrain:

“Nippon Caarte, Nippon Caarte; Rosen Marke-te.” (Russia defeated

is, Japan victorious.) The laughter comes from the game they play,

something like our fox and geese, an innocent sport with nothing

rough about it. Of late the Osacca band has been here, playing

for the generals at luncheon and for the convalescents in the

field hospitals, but very quiet music--The Geisha, some Misereres,

waltzes from Wang, and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s tunes. They avoid

the military, the dramatic, and the inspiriting. The music is

taken to soothe, just as their surgeons use opium when necessary.

How different from the Russian, of whom each regiment has a band

busy every day with the pomp and circumstance of conflict! One

day, a week before we came here, the Russians made a sortie into

the plain, parading for several hundred yards in front of the Two

Dragons. That was before the lines were as closely drawn as they

are now and the Japanese looked with amusement on the show-off.

At the head marched two bands, brassing a brilliant march. Then

came the colors flashing in the sun. The officers were dashingly

decorated, and the troops wore colored caps. It was a rare treat

for the Japanese, for they had never seen anything such as that in

their own army. Like a boy bewildered at the gay plumage of a bird

he might not otherwise catch, the simple and curious Japanese let

the foe vaingloriously march back into the town. So here they sit,

playing children’s games, to the chamber music of women, as gentle

as girls--but you should see them fight!

The transport camps are sheltered by mountains so high and steep

that Russian shells cannot be fired at an angle to drop in behind

them. Through one of these nooks I came one morning, unable to

find the main road, and pushed among the horses. As I emerged at

the farther end a soldier rushed at me with a bayonet and slashed

at my legs. The bayonet was sheathed and I had a stout stick, so

no damage was done. I soon explained who I was. He sullenly let me

pass and his comrades began chaffing him. Some officers across the

ravine also laughed. I thought they were laughing at me. Almost any

human nature laughs at the foreigner. That was the first evidence

of violence and the first evidence of rudeness I had seen in the

Japanese soldier. I passed the day off in the regiment and, as

night fell, came back through the horses, where I went without

comment. Round a corner, out of sight of the camp I suddenly came

upon the same soldier apparently waiting to see me. I grasped

my stick tightly, but he was weaponless, and advanced smiling,

cigarette box in hand. He wanted to apologize and be friends. His

comrades had been laughing at him, not at me, and had taunted

him till he felt so ashamed of himself that unless I smoked with

him and returned for some tea he would never stand right with

them again. We had the tea and the whole mess joined in. That was

a private soldier--a hostler. The courtesy of the officers is

embarrassing, it is so continuous and exacting. Everywhere, from

general to private, it is real and delightful, especially toward

an American. I have heard many say that it is only a crust, that

underneath the Japanese is a devil and a dastard. But a very nice

crust. Let us enjoy it; as to the pie underneath, let the Russians

testify.

For the essence of courtesy and thoughtfulness there is General

Nogi. James Ricalton and I went to call on him two days ago. He

spent half an hour with us at his headquarters in the village of

Luchufong, which is Chinese for Willow Tree Apartment. It is one of

the prettiest villages in the great plain, on the edge of a brook,

fringing the zone of fire. Everything shows seclusion and quiet,

though there is located the brain that directs these gigantic

operations, the girth of which Nogi alone comprehends. “Do you

understand the situation?” I asked weeks ago of Frederic Villiers,

the veteran English war artist, survivor of seventeen campaigns,

present ten years ago at the other fall of Port Arthur, and dean of

the war correspondents.

“No,” said he, “I was at Plevna with the Russians, but that

was jackstraws to this game of go. I know nothing of go. Ask

the military attachés.” In turn I asked the different military

attachés--the German, French, English, Chilean, Spanish, Swedish,

and finally the young lieutenant here for the United States. They

all understood all about Port Arthur, but the trouble was, no two

knew it the same. So I went back to Villiers. “Nogi is the only man

that knows,” said he; “Nogi alone can tell you how the batteries

are placed, how the divisions and regiments are to be deployed

and played, what forts are the keys, what Russian batteries the

weakest, the reserve force, the commissary and hospital supplies.”

So, naturally, coming to meet such a man we must have some awe,

some curiosity and some respect for the master strategist,

commander of the army which drove the Russians down the peninsula

and which holds it now in a death trap. We expected to meet a man

of iron, for Nogi is the General whose eldest son, a lieutenant in

the Second Army, was killed at Nanshan; who has under his command

a second son, a lieutenant, and who wrote home after the first

disaster: “Hold the funeral rites until Hoten and I return, when

you can bury three at once.”

The General received us in his garden. He was at a small table,

under a willow, working with a magnifying glass over a map. He wore

an undress blue uniform with the three stars and three stripes of

a full general on the sleeve--no other decoration, though once

before I had seen him wearing the first class order of the Rising

Sun. His parchment-crinkled face, brown like chocolate with a

summer’s torrid suns, beamed kindly on us. His smile and manner

were fatherly. It was impossible to think that any complicated

problem troubled his mind. A resemblance in facial contour to

General Sherman arrested us. Lying near, in his hammock, was a

French novel. He reads both French and English, but does not trust

himself to speak in either. Miki Yamaguchi, Professor of languages

in the Nobles School, Tokyo, for seven years resident in America,

and graduate of the Wabash college, was the interpreter.

“Look after your bodies,” the General said after greeting us. “I

was out to the firing line the other day and came back with a touch

of dysentery, so take warning. I do not want any of you to be sick.

At the first sign of danger consult our surgeons. We have good

surgeons.”

“We are of little account, General,” said Ricalton, “but it is a

very serious thing for a man on whom the world’s eyes are centered

to have dysentery.”

The General smiled. “I am quite well now,” he said; “but how old

are you?” he asked, looking at Ricalton’s gray hairs. They compared

ages. Ricalton proved to be three years the older.

[Illustration: _From Stereograph, Copyright 1904, by Underwood &

Underwood, New York_

GENERAL BARON NOGI

The photograph shows the Commander of the Third Imperial Japanese

Army studying the defenses of Port Arthur in his garden in the

Willow Tree Village, Manchuria]

“The command of the army, then, belongs to me,” said Ricalton. “I’m

your senior.”

“Ah,” said the General, “but then I should have to do your work

and I fear I could not do it as well as you do.”

That night a huge hamper came to Ricalton’s tent in charge of the

headquarters orderly. It contained three huge bunches of Malaga

grapes, half a dozen Bartlett pears, a peck of fine snow apples,

and bore a card reading: “The General sends his compliments to his

senior in command.”

“He is a great man,” said Ricalton, “who can so notice, in the

midst of colossal labors, a passing old photographer.”

But, as Nogi goes, so go the other generals, and so goes the

army. Villiers and I went yesterday to call on a certain

Lieutenant-General who commands the most important third of the

forces. His division has borne the brunt of the fighting, and

he doesn’t live as Nogi does, on the edge of the zone of fire,

but close under the guns within a mile of the Russian forts, so

close that in his lookout two of his staff officers were recently

killed. His home is a dugout in the side of a mountain. It is large

enough for him to lie down in and turn over. He had a heavy white

blanket, a rubber pillow to be inflated with lung power, a fan,

an officer’s trunk that carries sixty pounds, and a small lantern

of oiled silk--this was his furniture, his complete outfit. On a

peg hung his sword, and outside, on the ground, lay his boots. Some

member of his staff had fixed up an iron bedstead and a water bowl,

but they were lying off at the side of the dugout, untouched. He

came to meet us in a thin pair of rubber slippers, his uniform a

bit worn, the string on his breast, where the order of the Rising

Sun is usually worn, barren, his eyes kindly, his manner fatherly

and his hospitality generous; he spread a lunch bountiful as Nogi’s.

“I know the Russians,” said Villiers that night. “I was with them

all through the Russo-Turkish War. I remember Skoboleff, their

great cavalry leader, a magnificent type of man, a soldier to the

ground, but fiery, emotional, vivacious, vain, fond of orders,

jewels, wine and women, looking on war as a lark, dashing and

brilliant, the scourge of Europe! He was not this type of man--a

scientific chap, sober, full of business to the chin, no lugs to

him, and as unemotional as a fish. Kuropatkin was Skoboleff’s

Chief of Staff and you see what these fellows have done with him.

The day of cynical dash and reckless valor has gone by in war, my

boy. We are living in an age of modesty and gentleness, of science

and concentration; Japan is the master.”

We lay under the searchlights, which were turning the night valley

into a noontide halo, as Villiers spoke. Every light came from

the Russian side, which lay wary and restless beyond us. From the

Japanese side came no light, no sound. All was secrecy and silence.

Yet we knew those hills were alive with toiling brown figures,

that a ten-mile line of rifle pits was guarded at every rod by a

sleepless soldier watching for the Rising Sun and that the tents

of those Generals blinked unceasingly with the steady glow of the

oiled silk lanterns, quivering cabalistically with ideographs.

As I looked upon swaying and heavy searchlights, I could think only

of the Indian cobra and his mortal enemy, the mongoose. Silently,

rolled in a ball, alert for a fatal spring, the little mongoose

watches, and the hooded cobra swings ponderously, more nervous

with each move. All other enemies he can crush; none other he

fears; his body is murderous, his fangs deadly, his stealthy glide

noiseless and sure. How well he knows his power! Despot of the

jungle, why should he fear? And yet, since the world dawned his

tribe has done well to avoid the mongoose.

Steadily swings the cobra; viciously he lunges. Now look! In the

folds of the cobra’s neck those incisive teeth, those death-dealing

claws! With the fury of whirlwinds lashes the cobra. With eternal

calm cling the teeth and claws. Hour after hour goes the unequal

struggle. The huge coils relax, the great head falls. Then the

beady eyes twinkle. The mongoose slips off in the darkness; prone

lies the cobra. Who sheds tears?

Chapter Three

TWO PICTURES OF WAR--A GLANCE BACK

Tokyo, June 1st:--Who pays for the war? Here are a few telling

one another that they are the bankers. It is at a Sunday concert

in the fifth city of the world, a wilderness of sheds flimsy over

two million human beings. In the midst rise vast acres of country

solitude and rest. A tangle of cryptomeria and fir shade puzzled

paths winding through furse of elderberry and hawthorn. Haze and

vista spread away past hills and forests, past hothouses and

lawns of firm packed earth. A lake dimples a vale, as a smile the

cheek of a lovely woman, and its pebbly bed reflects the laughter

of the sun. About it fluttering flags, new and gay, festoon the

sentiment of all nations, one--Russia--excepted. Thousands, tens of

thousands, dot the paths, are merry with the lake, instill from the

greenery a quiet joy. Hundreds of voices, atune with instruments,

filter the fragrant air with music. Beyond the fence is squalor so

dense three sen a month pays for a dwelling; here is leisure so

luxurious the senses float in dreams. In a corner a moldy Diabutsu,

the calm of Nirvana on his face, nods on a leaf of lotus; “out of

the slime itself spotless the lotus grows.”

Tokyo is beautiful--brunette and beautiful. This first day of June

she has risen past the cherry blossom, past the wistaria, through

the freshness of spring to the full radiance of summer. Pink, like

the fleece of clouds in the sky, and heliotrope, like the first

flush of sunrise, are past. Now green, rich and deep from a soil of

winnowed sustenance, mantles her in Oriental splendor--a splendor

simple and elegant with the wealth of the east, shadowy and sunny

with the blow of Japan. It folds her about with the assuring clasp

of a lover, and she responds with the shy, voluptuous acceptance of

a maid o’erwon.

This is a summer of content, a dream of gayety, of insouciance.

A million babies gurgle with the baby glory of it. A million

mothers coo and coddle at the eternal freshness of it. But here,

to-day, in this wilderness of terraced garden, in this bouquet of

smiling East, have assembled the daintiest mothers in the land--the

peeresses. The son of one is a major-general. Others have captains,

colonels, aides-de-camp to tug their heartstrings with fear, to

inflate their pulses with pride. Have we not penetrated to the very

viscera of war’s nature when we find the mothers of its heroes thus

assembled?

One of these mothers, a Princess, passes. Should she buy that

delicate lace and lingerie, so charming with all that’s feminine,

from boxes labeled and graded, she would choose misses’ sizes,

so tiny is she. A toy of a woman, demure and pretty; yet put

up by the finest of Parisian makers. The dotted mulle of her

veil sweeps slightly away, scallop-like, from a face thin with

aristocratic aquilinity. Behind that face, with wax complexion and

eyes of bead-like purity, scintillates a mind bred on intellectual

fashions. She speaks with the cultured English of Vassar. She knows

Omar Khayyam as well as any. The major-general is her son. Beside

her walks another son, his gold-rimmed spectacles completing a

fine picture of esthetic pride. His silk tie is the envy of every

Japanese not bred abroad, for his clothes are from Piccadilly.

The garden is full of these and such as these. They are giving a

concert for the relief fund.

The music! It is the choicest that the sensuous imagination of

man has built out of rules and dreams. “William Tell” thunders

its diapason from the hid footholds of the earth. The audacious

march of Leroul spits out its song of triumph. “America” murmurs a

swelling hymn. A Weber overture sparkles, ascends, leaping crags,

whirling diaphanous gayety through cloud and shadow.

Then a Japanese aria, weird with the rapt genius of the land,

molten with Malay poise, floats a mystery of ancient longing

through the broad day’s haze. It weaves through fir and

cryptomeria, assaults the hearts of thousands, and, triumphant,

storms the heavens; is lost in the faint sky, a sky blue with the

dreaminess Whistler would have etched in immortal phantasy.

The Relief Fund gets fifty sen apiece from these peeresses with

Piccadilly sons, brothered by major-generals. And all other manner

of folk, down to the little sister, carrying on her back a future

soldier of the emperor, daughter of a rice cleaner in a three-sen

dwelling beyond the gate, thus while the pleasant hours away.

On the heights of Tokyo they are paying for the war.

* * * * *

Here are the heights of Nanshan on the 27th of May. It is 5.20

o’clock in the morning and seas of sunlight are hid in a fog across

Korea Bay. The fog lifts, and as the day bursts in along the

whole line the banner of the Rising Sun is planted on the Russian

ramparts of Kinchow. Since midnight the artillery of the third

division has been hammering from the right, off toward Talienwan.

At intervals the infantry of the first and fourth divisions charge

from the front whence they have been advancing for two days. It

is the second army of 60,000 Japanese and the investment of Port

Arthur has begun. The railway has long been cut. Now Kinchow is

taken and the Russians are helter-skelter Dalnyward.

Here, then, is the theater, scene of such sublime assault and

conquest as the eye of history has not looked upon since Grant

stood on Orchard Knob and watched his thin blue line scale

Missionary Ridge; the hill of Nanshan, key to the advance on

Port Arthur. Turned in its lock Nanshan confronts the Japanese,

impregnable, ghastly grim in the fresh sunlight. We may well

pause to inspect the position. It rises, formidable, the height

of a church steeple, from a narrow plain. The edges of this

plain dip sheer down a hundred feet of slippery rock to the two

bays--Talienwan and Kinchow. From bay to bay is scarce three miles.

From Nanshan we may see, through a glass, the bay of Kinchow.

Riding on it are four of the enemy’s gunboats. Their shells are

flying over our heads. They have not yet found the range. To the

left in Talienwan, a Russian gunboat, guarding four transports, is

enfilading the third Japanese Division and supporting a regiment

of its own men flanking the base of the hill. The hill has been

cleared of underbrush and terraced, divided into four intervals

and on these intervals trenches built. One hundred and ten cannon

are there manned. At the bottom are barbed-wire fences, Spanish

trocha, not like the fences of a cow pasture, but dovetailed and

doubled so that if a man breaks through one he stumbles into the

oblique, bloody arms of another.

This the Japanese are to assault before noon. There is no timber,

only a few bushes and rock the size of a bull’s head, hard things

to wade through, but no defense. They must cross the open plain,

500 yards, in full range of those one hundred and ten cannon,

smash the barbed wire, climb the terraced plateaus where they will

be picked off like rabbits in a shooting gallery, assault the

trenches and finally take the heights. To take one trench seems

heroic achievement, four an impossibility. Impossible but for

one thing--orders. The navy was ordered at the outset of the war

“to exterminate” the Russian fleet, this Second Army went out to

“take Port Arthur.” And they obey orders--these Japanese. So why

contemplate that to attempt that Hill of Nanshan is folly, to take

it madness?

The Russians wait. All is silence--the awed hush preceding carnage,

terror, death. Waiting they sing, not light tunes heard so bright

and gay on the heights of Tokyo to-day; chansons of France,

Italy’s peerless compositions, America’s solemn new-born hymn or

Japan’s flute note weird and penetrating. From deep bass throats

and barytones majestic rolls organ music of fierce, wild grandeur,

as through some vast forest aisle the harmonies of winds and

woods and waves unite in mighty pæans, celebrating to the august

fastnesses glories yet fresh to man. Schools, traditions, customs

civilized have not touched the fiber of that central gauntness,

shining up through the spirit of the singers, like dreamland on a

tragedian’s afterglow. Siberia with all its wildness, with all its

immensity, where aback the mammoth wallowed; the Caucasus tossing

aloft primeval ecstasy the long slant of the steppes, and Russia,

bold, defiant, revengeful; all rolled in one, are in that note.

The clothes of the men are heavy, ungainly, ill-made, nothing

serviceable but the boots, which are well adapted for running away.

The faces--sodden with ignorance and vice--reflect only stolid

endurance; no initiative, no individuality. Only through the song

shines the soul.

The singing ceases. There is a dreadful hush. It is eleven

o’clock. Off toward Kinchow, which is hid by a fringe of low

fir trees, something is moving. Soon hunchbacked dabs can be

seen bobbing across the furze, leaping over the stones, pausing,

searching, then onward dashing. The firing begins. Two machine

guns--only ten of the one hundred and ten are quick-firers--lead

off. You can easily tell them. The sound is little, like the

popping of a dozen beer bottles in quick succession. Then silence.

The strip of cartridges is torn aside, another inserted, again a

dozen pops. So it goes until the ten are brought into action and

there is no intermission. Flicks of dust are kicked up by the

shells, most falling short, a few passing on through the trees. One

of the bobbing dabs falls, the rest press on. Now the gunners are

getting the range; the shells pick off more hunchbacks.

But there is no stop. This is not reconnoisance; it is battle.

The skirmishers deployed and well up, now the main line advances.

Out from the trees on a dog-trot springs a battalion. It is going

to try that griddle of death. The men dash valiantly on, agile

fellows, intense as fanatics. Now the hundred field cannon come

into play. Most are Chinese of ancient date, some are modern,

rim-firing. Smoke fills the plain. It is difficult to see. The

torrent of lead is on. Snatched through the noise of firing you

can hear great cries; they grow spasmodic, then cease. The firing

slows. Soon only the automatic pops are heard. The smoke drifts

off. The foremost man is there on the wire, gutted. He hangs, a

frightful mass, limp on the barbs. Here and there a poor fellow is

crawling, as you have seen some worm trodden on vainly seek its

hole. Not a man of the battalion has survived. A thousand brave,

faithful soldiers are gone. So this is civilized warfare!

Yes. They now see it was folly to attempt the hill of Nanshan. So

they open up with artillery, a whole regiment of it, infinitely

superior to the sixty antiquated cannon, the forty Canet pieces

and the ten quick-firers. For an hour they rain that leaden taunt

back at dubious Nanshan, who austerely barks out a thin reply,

coughs a wheezy growl and ceases. Meanwhile the thousands in leash,

battle inflamed, recall that the dead battalion are Osacca men,

and, being merchants from the Japanese Chicago, had been hailed as

cowards by sons of samurai. A company of Osaccans went down, stuck,

like pigs, in the _Kinshu Maru_. But after Nanshan the pork packers

of Osacca will hold their heads decently high with the boldest.

Toward three o’clock the second advance is ordered. Half the third

division and a part of the first, nearly 15,000 men, close in. They

get across the plain, dropping a few hundreds, and smash the wire.

Drunkenly dizzy, flaring with the lust of battle, the vanguard

tears clothes, limbs, and tosses on the treacherous barbs.

They have no scissors, no choppers, no axes. Worse, they have

no time. They keep on at the fence, gashing shins, stripped of

impediments, down to the instincts and passions, all discipline

gone, every vestige of civilization lost. Now they are through,

half-naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the

very muzzles of the first entrenchment they surge, waver and break

like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast. It seems

no tide or wind can melt that precipitous front. But only seems.

A rest, a terrible breathing spell, the slow, wounded gasp of an

animal in pain, and again the intrepid Japanese lash their haggard

forms against that low trench. Glory! They win! The Rising Sun

glares in the afternoon as it greeted the sun of that morning above

Kinchow.

Yet only a quarter of the battle is won. Another rest. Another

assault. Again and again they go up. Nine times they hammer away,

muskets to jowl, heads down like bulls in the ring, with one

thought; nay! not a thought, an instinct--to win or die.

The officers are picked off by sharpshooters, as flies are

flicked from a molasses jug. Two colonels are killed, the list

of done captains swells. Then, through the haze, commanding the

first division, looms a prince of the blood, the general whose

peeress-mother is but this afternoon smiling serene on Tokyo

heights. He below Kinchow, smoke-stained, grimed with death, hears

the artillery report that ammunition is about gone, but one round

left and Nanshan still Russian. Defeat stares Prince-General in

the face. Retreat, disgrace seems right ahead. And orders were to

“take Port Arthur.” Smiling, he tells the gunners to wait. “Charge

again,” he says.

So up they go, for the tenth and last time. At the top more

civilized warfare. Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage.

Japanese bayonets clash with Russian sabers. Bayonets struck from

hands they grasp knives carried suicidally in belts. Thus, hand

to hand, they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of

centuries sloughed, as a snake his cast-off skin, they spit and

chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man.

The Prince-General waits, ready to fire his last round, and

retreat, hopeless. It has been a desperate fight--yes, reckless,

unparalleled. If lost he loses nobly. “Are you through, General?”

his aide asks. “I have just begun my part of the fighting,” he

answers. His name is Fushimi--remember it. As he speaks a weak cry

goes up--weak because even victory cannot rouse spirits so terribly

taxed.

It was a bloody sun going down in Korea Bay that night, but it saw

its rising counterpart flaunting above Nanshan, while the Russians

were making use of the best part of their apparel, sprinting

towards the Tiger’s Tail.

The cost! The fleeing ones left five hundred corpses in the four

trenches. The others paid seven times that price--killed and

wounded--to turn across the page of the world’s warfare that word

Nanshan, in company with two others, perhaps above them--Balaklava

and Missionary Ridge.

Now who pays for this war?

Chapter Four

THE JAPANESE KITCHENER

Headquarters, Third Imperial Army, Before Port Arthur, Oct. 12th:

“Goddama’s here!”

“Who?”

“General Goddam--what’s his name?”

“Kodama?”

“That’s it. Who is he? They couldn’t do more for the

Emperor--special train, guard mounted, and all that. He came while

I was in the staff tent--a mite of a fellow in a huge coat.”

Thus Villiers two weeks ago announced the advent to the army of the

Chief of the General Staff. Who is he? The soldiers know, for they

have a verse in their interminable war song:

“On with Nippon, down with Russia

Is the badge of our belief;

The Son of Heaven sends us saké,

And Kodama sends us beef!”

But who is he? A poor, unlettered samurai of the famous Censhu

clan who to-day, at fifty-two years of age, rules Japan and guides

her armies. Many will dispute this. They will tell you that the

illustrious Mutsuhito, member of the oldest dynasty in the world,

rules Japan. They believe that the Marshal Marquis Oyama and the

Marshal Marquis Yamagata, veteran spirits, great warriors, shrewd

in counsel, valorous in conflict, guide their armies. They forget,

perhaps they do not know, that Gentaro Kodama, whose rank is that

of Lieutenant-General, his title Baron, his position Assistant

Chief of the General Staff, thinks while the others sleep and works

while the others eat; that the “illustrious ones” may “guide” and

“rule.” People seldom know the boss behind the President, the power

behind the throne, or the advisor at the general’s ear.

Most public men in Japan will tell you that Kodama is an unsafe

person of second-rate capacity. That is what the Directorate said

of Napoleon, it is what Halleck and his staff said of Grant, it is

what the Crown Prince said of Von Moltke. They will tell you that

his charge of the commissary and transport in the China war was

an accident. That is what the Directorate said of Napoleon after

Egypt, what Halleck said of Grant after Donelson and Henry, what

the Crown Prince said of Von Moltke before the Franco-Prussian war.

The public men sent Kodama to Formosa to get rid of him, as

Napoleon was sent to Italy, as Grant was sent to Pittsburg Landing,

as Von Moltke was shipped from Metz. Kodama went and raised Formosa

from savagery to commerce and prosperity. He could have been Prime

Minister. “No,” he said. “I would rather pull strings than be one

of the strings to be pulled. Russia is peeking up over the border.

Let us prepare. Give me a desk in the War Office.”

The public men shook hands, grateful that the unsafe upstart was

out of the way. Only soldiers and seers foresee war. Kodama is not

a seer. The public men reveled in peace and wondered occasionally

that Kodama should bury himself in that dry hole of a war office.

They were grateful because the unsafe upstart kept out of the way.

Then the war came and what a scrimmage there was as the public men

scrambled for place! One had his finger on things; this only one

knew just where, when and how to strike. He alone knew where every

merchant steamer in Japan was and how quick each could be turned

into a transport. He alone knew the points in the Korean coast

where an army could be landed and how quick it could be gotten

there. Above all he had audacity--the audacity of genius. His name

was Gentaro Kodama, sometime military governor of Formosa, sometime

chief of the etape bureau.

[Illustration: _From Stereograph, Copyright by H. C. White Co., N.

Y._

GENERAL BARON KODAMA

The photograph shows the Chief of the Japanese Staff on his

doorstep.]

How shameful for the upstart to command! He had never left his

native land. He spoke only Japanese. He had a most vulgar way

of pitching into things, of living on the tick of the watch, of

showing people in and out minus ceremony, of laughing as a boy

might at the things he liked and of frowning ingenuously at what

displeased him. More horrors! He scorned a frock coat for ordinary

wear and stuck to a kimono. Only upstarts defy the fashions.

Sometimes, however, the upstart happens to be a great man--a

Socrates barefoot, a Grant without his shoulder straps. Now

there were plenty of men who had been abroad, who could speak

French and English perfectly, who could crease their trousers and

who could add the proper dignity to a function. Besides, Kodama was

only a lieutenant-general, of whom the realm had a dozen others,

to say nothing of four full generals, two field marshals and an

emperor. Why should he run the war?

But Yamagata and Oyama knew and the Emperor knew. They were too

keen not to see and they were too patriotic to let Japan suffer.

They could not give Kodama the place, but they crowned him with

power. So to-day he has the only coach on the Japanese end of the

Trans-Siberian railway and is the first to pass over the rebuilt

road from Liaoyang to within sight of Port Arthur.

Yamagata stays in Tokyo, one foot in the grave, holding himself to

work with will and prayer, snowed with seventy years, in counsel

with the Emperor; Oyama, loved by the people, always a figurehead,

goes to command the northern armies, and Nogi is given the glory

of reducing the “Gibraltar of the East,” but Kodama, with his

hands on everything, the brains of all, unifies the whole. I saw

him leave Tokyo, cheered by the coolies of the streets, who, like

the Emperor and his marshals, know. Already the campaign was in

his hands. He went straight to Liaoyang and saw the first great

blow struck at Kuropatkin. Then he came here, stayed two days,

saw his plans being effected to his satisfaction and got back to

Liaoyang before the battle of the Shaho. It was on his way back,

during the day’s rest in Dalny, that I saw him for the second time,

when he granted me an interview, in which he made his first public

utterance.

Certain names flash across an age as meteors across a sky. Cæsar

and Napoleon are such names to the student of history, Bernhardt

and Irving to the lover of the stage, Shakespeare to the man of

books. Their mere pronouncement has a mysterious power, some occult

influence to startle and make dumb. Like a searchlight’s flare they

throw one into a hopeless sense of insignificance and awe. So it

was with me, a student of the war, when Villiers uttered that word,

“Goddama,” two weeks ago. I recalled the months in Tokyo when we

stormed the war office in vain, how London, Washington and Berlin

brought their influences to bear, how the cabinet was assembled,

how the ministers pleaded that correspondents, creators of that

vast, indefinable power called “public opinion” have some rights.

Kodama said they had no rights; they might have privileges, but

no rights. One day a grave-faced official announced: “I am very

sorry, gentlemen, but you will have to wait the pleasure of General

Kodama. We have done all we could for you. The question now is,

shall the ministers or Kodama run the war? I much fear Kodama is

the man of the hour.”

Thus the name rose over me as a symbol of power and hauteur. Three

days ago I started to Dalny from the front to lay in stores. There

was a four- or five-mile walk to Cho-ray-che, the field base where

acres are covered with rice and ammunition cases and where a

shattered Russian station is being used by the Japanese commissary.

On the siding lay the train of flat cars we were to take. In the

center was the first coach seen on the Liaotung since the battle of

Nanshan, May 26th. It was an ordinary Japanese third-class coach,

with paneled doors for each compartment, and hard seats. Out of

the corner chimney rose a whirl of smoke and it was easy to see

what an improvement even those hard seats would be over the tops of

ammunition cases where there was a three-hour ride to be made in

the face of a sleet Manchurian wind.

“Back to civilization,” I cried.

“Not for us,” said Gotoh, my interpreter. “That is General Kodama’s

coach. It was transported especially for him and he has just

brought it down from Liaoyang.”

Then I saw him, with his salient, pointed chin, and his goatee like

a French noble, bent over an improvised table, scanning papers.

Five or six members of his staff gazed lazily out at a company

of soldiers doing fatigue duty with the empty ammunition cases,

swarming up over the track and back again, human ants. They had

heard the captain say the eyes of Kodama were upon them and they

worked feverishly, with rhythmical precision. The General never saw

them. His staff did, but he had work to do, and he knew the men

were doing theirs.

As we lay shivering on that jolty ride into Dalny, day dying out

with bursts of grand color and night coming in to the orchestral

music of battle opening in our rear, Gotoh snuggled among the empty

cases at my feet, pulled his overcoat about his head, and hummed a

song composed by the biwa players of Kioto:

“As a slender boat alone in a great storm,” it ran, “so Japan

sails the sea of modern civilization; does she not then need great

leaders for her forty million souls!”

The mudflats of the bay were chocolate brown in late sunset as we

turned south and slid into the city, shivering, crouched low on the

pouches kept huge for bullets anon. Two kerosene lamps in the coach

and the sparks from the engine streaked the night as we tooted into

the revamped station of spruce and corrugated tin which stands

where the hole in the ground was out of which the Russians blew

their beautiful Byzantine architecture. We slipped to the ground,

cold, hungry, tired, and slouched under the two arc lights that

make Dalny a brilliant metropolis after our six weeks around camp

fires and tallow dips.

Hurrying along I suddenly found myself in a group of officers

bound the same way. All but one instinctively fell back and left

me ahead with a tub of a man in a fur coat and a red cap with two

braid stripes which told him to be a lieutenant-general. Swathed

to his ankles in an overcoat of thick martens he looked huge,

but the two red braids and the star of Nippon were level with my

armpit. When he shook hands he lost all the clumsiness of the fur.

As his fingers grasped mine in real earnest there passed from them

the spirit of the island empire--its tininess, its audacity, its

febrile intensity--for the grip was sinuous and sure as the clasp

of a wild thing, hearty and elegant as a comrade’s. He walked with

the stately swing of a star actor, poised his cigar with the air

of a gentleman of leisure and smiled roguishly on me as he talked.

A word brought a thin man in spectacles--his secretary--from the

group behind. Through him the General said he had not seen a

foreigner in three months, he remembered me from a chance word over

a tiffin in the Shiba detached palace last May, and would I be kind

enough to call on him to-morrow when he would have a day of rest

before his trip north toward the Shaho. We parted at the first

corner and he walked on with his stately swing, which his enemies

call the strut of a turkey cock, his staff grouped artistically

behind.

Dalny bristled with the military. The base now of all the armies,

it had become a huge supply depot through which passed the food and

ammunition for a third of a million men, and to which poured the

dribble of wounded. Every house in the Russian quarter, including

two magnificent churches and the fine hotel, were used for

hospitals, in which four thousand patients then were. A hospital

ship left every day for Japan, carrying from 200 to 1,000 wounded

and prisoners. Each day a transport came in bearing twice as many

fresh troops. A brigade had just landed and was to be sent north at

dawn to take the place of the lost in the Liaoyang battle. There

was no barrack room, and though the general wore a fur coat his men

stacked arms on the curbs and slept on the pavements. It was two

days after the arrival of the advance guard of the civic invasion

of Manchuria. Fifteen Tokyo and Osacca merchants had left home

with all their fortunes to try luck in a new land. In a Chinese

restaurant that night I met one of them, an old Tokyo friend who

spoke English. It was a great moment in his life, he said, this

parting with the old and taking on of the new. He had already been

given a house in the old Russian quarter at a nominal rental,

which he expected later to acquire from his government at a low

figure. In a few days he expected to open a store. He asked me to

call on him and gave me his card with an address in “Nogimachi.”

Thus I learned that all the town has been re-christened. The old

Russian names attached to the elegant streets which looked more

like roads among fashionable English villas were changed. Japanese

generals had been honored. The chief hospital was in Oyamamachi,

the etape office on Yamagatamachi, the reserve detail bivouacked on

Fukishimamachi and I slept on Kurokimachi.

In Kodamamachi Gotoh and I the next day called on General Kodama,

who was living in the Russian Mayor’s house. In a side room where

the secretary ushered us we waited for the General, then in his

bath. This gave us time to examine the house. The Mayor was the

engineer who laid out Dalny, and, naturally, he spread himself on

his own home. Three stories high, with a wide balcony, a yard full

of flowers and a big brick fence, it looks out on the convergence

of the two main streets. It is built like the early palaces on what

is now Tar Flat in San Francisco, with casements two feet thick,

buttressed by solid masonry. The walls are thick enough to harbor

great Russian stoves and bear evidence to the coming cold. The

ceilings are enormously high, the double windows stained glass, the

balustrades massive, the flooring of matched hardwood polished,

all conveniences in the latest modern style. I know of no house

in all Japan so fine. The panels were scratched in places where

the Chinese bandits had sacked, and there was little furniture.

Otherwise, all was in good condition. In scorn of the place the

Japanese guard had slipped his neat, low futon into an alcove,

but in respect he stood at “present arms,” his rifle loaded, to

prevent outlawry. The silence was deep, the dispatch of business

swift. Occasionally a messenger passed through the hall, with no

hurry and with no dignity. It would have been difficult to persuade

Sherlock Holmes that the army was about.

Presently the secretary announced that the General was ready,

and led us down a corridor to a side room on the west, which the

sunlight, falling through the stained windows, dyed purple and

gold. As we advanced I could not but think of the superb setting

Mansfield gave the throne room scene in “Richard III,” and how he

knelt by the dais as the light died out, whispering to himself,

“Richard, to thy work!”

Here there was no false splendor, only the light of purple and

gold--and a great character. I felt his presence before he advanced

to meet me with a lithe stride. He shook hands with the intensity

of the night before and again I felt that clasp as of a palm all

sinew and nerves. But there was gayety in his gesture as he threw

his hands out, palms up, like a Frenchman, and bade me welcome.

He wore a kimono and slippers--nothing more. I could see the bare

V sloping in to his chest, thin and skin-drawn, and it was plain

where the brown of sun-tan shaded into the clothes-covered white.

He stepped back around a table and, dropping the slippers, climbed

into a great chair, against whose russet leather he nestled the

kimono and became lost, curling his bare toes under, whence, from

time to time, they peeked and wiggled.

Overwhelmed by his littleness, for the swivel armchair could easily

have held three generals like him and have had room left, top and

bottom, for several colonels and a major, I thought of the huge

overcoat of the night before and remembered what Lincoln said to

Grant when the two met Alexander H. Stephens in a similar greatcoat

on the _River Queen_ in the fall of ’64: “That certainly is the

littlest ear out of the biggest shuck that ever I did see.”

Gotoh and the General plunged into the labyrinths of the impossible

Japanese language and left me to the joy of studying the toes and

mustaches of this remarkable personality. He did not touch his

mustaches, which, though long, had none of the ordinary poise and

polish. No. They partook of the nature of the man and seemed the

superficial ganglia of his sensitive alertness. Three single hairs

from each side, twisted in a loose wisp, glimmed the air furiously

like the whiskers of a cat, as the General’s salient, pointed chin

chopped out the sentences. Then I noticed a phenomenon. While the

body of the mustache and the whiskers on one side were as black as

my coat, untouched by time, the right wisp was white with hoary

snow. It was as if the Genius of his time had selected him from

among the common race of men and touched him there.

“The General wishes to apologize for receiving you this way--in

a kimono.” At last the interpreter spoke, after the two had been

chattering several minutes. Could it really be the great General

familiar with a mere man of words like Gotoh, so insinuating

the smile, so comradely the gossip? Yet, doubtless, in that few

minutes he got from Gotoh every pertinent rag of information the

interpreter had about me. “But he has been a long time without the

luxury of a good bath, and the Russian Mayor left a fine one----”

“Tell the General,” I interrupted, “that he is the first man

I have met in six months who has given me the satisfaction

of appearing as he is. This is his finest tribute to Western

civilization--informality.”

Then they went at it again--chattering. The General, thrusting his

elbows on the table, banged his chops into his palms, and, with

his eyes, pierced first me, then Gotoh, a roguish twinkle lighting

up his face for an instant to be replaced by the curl of irony on

his lips. Could this be the man of lightning decision, and of iron

will, who gave the order on February 8th to attack Port Arthur

before a declaration of war? I looked at his head, round and small

like a bullet, yet singularly long from nose bridge to dome. The

absence of excess tissue, skin stretched tight over parietal bones

and neck scrawny from spirited strain, together with a peculiar

atmosphere of concentration and mastery which invested him, said

it was as full of meat as an Edam cheese. Not a statesman, the

ministers say, but a giant of organization, a master of detail, the

brains of new Japan.

Is he not also the greatest editor in the history of journalism?

Because it is he who for six months has cornered the news market of

the world, so that, until the present time, not a single authentic

account has come from the field except those issued in the official

reports of his own generals. He has controlled the news as he

has controlled the armies--noiselessly, perhaps clandestinely,

but nevertheless absolutely. If the telegraph announces Japanese

victories, he reasoned, the public will not listen to the wail of

the special correspondent. He has substituted fact for criticism,

and, like the Duke of Wellington, announces his victories first,

his reverses afterward. Now that the campaign is outlined and all

can see what he is driving at, the time for speech has come; so he

speaks.

“You have seen Port Arthur. You may think it easy to take,” he went

on through Gotoh. I protested.

“It is not easy,” he continued. “It is quite difficult to take.”

“Of course--of course--thirty forts--ten years of

engineering--impregnable natural defenses--a stubborn army of great

fighters--clever officers to face----”

“But----” he reached halfway across the table, not waiting for

Gotoh to tell him what I said, and I had no need of an interpreter

to know the five words he uttered:

“I hold Port Arthur there!” I looked into the hollow of his hand,

twitching nervously, and saw the palm that is without bones, the

palm all nerves and sinew.

“But where will the army winter? You are not building barracks.

You have only shelter tents, flimsy as paper, which the Manchurian

winds would laugh at.”

“Do not worry. You shall winter inside. We will take it soon. I

hesitate to use the big guns for fear of hurting noncombatants.”

Then the tea came, via a soldier whose shoulder straps bearing the

figure 9 showed him to be one of the few survivors of the famous

9th regiment, which lost 94 per cent. of its men in repeated

unsuccessful assaults on the Cock’s Comb forts during the three

days battle from August 21st to 23d, and I saw that Kodama, like

Nogi, rewards the heroism of private soldiers by relieving them

from duty on the firing line and giving them honorable work as body

servants.

The General fondled his tea, delicious in a lacquered cup; Giokuro

it was, the best Japan grows, and bits of the leaf glittered in the

bottom like particles of steel. The steam curled about his face.

He lit a cigar, puffed vigorously, and smoke wreathed with steam.

Through the haze his whiskers, twisted in a loose wisp, bobbed

spasmodically as his pointed chin spat out the sentences. He pulled

himself further together, tying his legs acrobatically, and made

room in the great chair for still another general. I wondered if he

would disappear entirely, wizard-like, in a cloud of smoke. Then I

thought of that criminal condemned to capital punishment, executed

in experiment by the tea expert, who drank and drank until he

shriveled and shrunk to powdery fiber. Plainly Giokuro, Havana and

hot baths had helped hard work in drying up this tiny great man.

“We can’t tell what damage the big guns will do,” went on the

aspirate voice out of the smoke. Gotoh was turning over the

sentences now as fast as they came. “This is the first time in

history that coast defense guns have battled with each other. We

have brought ours from Japan. As the Russians cannot use theirs

against our navy they have turned them landward.”

“Why not against your navy?”

“Because--” he quickly drew from a drawer a brass tube attached

to a pot of India ink. Out of the tube he drew a brush and began

sketching nervously on a piece of blotting paper. The brass tube

was a yatate, the first one I have seen in the army. Generations

before siege artillery Japanese warriors who took arrow holders

from the enemy disgraced them by converting them into ink pots and

brush holders, for to soil a thing with business in those days was

to disgrace it. But merchants found the device a neat invention

and made arrow holders in miniature. The idea spread and soon all

the men of business in the empire carried yatates in their belts.

The army discarded them in disgust. Now Kodama comes, oblivious of

tradition, satisfying his caprice and comfort, and to his work, as

a samurai of old, introduces the yatate. When he finds the samurai

superstition concerning the gaining of eternal life by a soldier

killed in battle of value in his chess game of war he cherishes the

belief, but when the silly prejudice against business gets in his

way he cuts acquaintance with the samurai.

Quickly, under the yatate brush, there grew a sketch of Port Arthur

and the peninsula--curves for the east and west harbor, a cross

for the town, fuzz for Liaotishan, a loop for the Tiger’s Tail.

Then from east to west of the Liaotung he drew a dotted line in a

semicircle and paralleled it with another dotted line.

“Our mines,” he said, pointing to the outer; “their mines,”

pointing to the inner. “We have laid a series of electric mines

counter to theirs, which, if firing at, they explode, will ignite

their series and damage their coast defenses and harbor. Locked in

this mutual mining our navy and their coast defense must remain

inactive, as neither cares to take an initiative. So they have

turned not only their coast defense, but their navy guns landward.

We, in reply, have landed our navy guns and brought from Japan

our coast defense artillery. So you will see the spectacle of two

great naval equipments fighting on land. I wish I could bring all

the tacticians in the world to witness. There will be much to

learn for future warfare.” He puffed vigorously. The whiskers

poised themselves. His eyes, looking at the sketch, were lost in

introspection. He was reveling in the situation.

“You think it, then, a battle of strategists?”

“Only that. This is entirely a game of strategy. The chief question

is: are our naval and siege guns, reinforced by field artillery,

more powerful than their naval and coast defenses reinforcing the

forts? Lesser questions concern the individual generalship of

divisions and brigades.”

“But the boy in khaki--is he not the deciding force?” My mind ran

back to those terrible August days when I lay in the broiling sun

watching the soldiers hurled against the barbed wire, under the

machine guns, onto the parapets, only to melt away like chaff

before the wind. I thought of the night in the storm when the

general in command gave the order to retreat, but before his

aide could deliver it to the colonel in the field, the soldiers,

impatient, went in and took the opposing trenches. I thought of

all the sights in that mighty game I had just left; great guns in

the shock of battle peppered by shrapnel but holding to their

work like bulldogs on the grip, the sappers creeping with pick and

shovel through the night hounded by shells, the pioneers going up

with pincers to nip the wire met by the death sprinkle of Maxims,

the infantry in a thin brown line following, the men popped out

as expert drivers flick off flies with a whiplash, but advancing,

advancing, till a handful out of a host creeps up, and flings

itself, fanatical with the lust of battle, worn in the gory charge

so that life never can be the same again in sweetness and in peace,

into the redoubt paid for a dozen times with blood, and which even

then is but curtain raiser for drama still more heartrending,

because, beyond, rising tier on tier, series after series, are

redoubts and forts, trenches and barbed wire, moats and gorges,

rifles and cannon until the soul grows sick with the thought that

Port Arthur must be bought with sacrifice so great, agony so

monstrous.

“No,” said Kodama. “This is a question of military strategy.” He

thrust the yatate from him, stretched back into his chair and

puffed cigar wreathings into the air. They looked like the smoke of

a volley from a battery of howitzers. As he settled down to the

talk again, sometimes his eyes flashing, sometimes his mustaches,

one black, the other white with a venerable sign, twitching, his

bare toes twisting with suppressed energy, I thought I saw a huge

black spider serene in the Russian chair.

“Will you bring any more reserves?”

“No. We have an army large enough to take Port Arthur. The enemy

has about 20,000 men, we about 60,000. Three to one makes the

odds about even when you consider the defenses. More men are not

necessary. It is not a question of men now, but of ammunition and

generalship.”

“How about food? It has been reported that you let junks and even

transports run the blockade, that you won’t starve them out, but

want the glory of forcing them to surrender?”

His eyes snapped as he answered: “That is absolutely false. We have

them entirely hemmed in and maintain a perfect blockade.”

“Do you find the forts stronger than you expected?”

“They are very well built--on the Belgian model, I believe. They

are like the forts on the Belgian frontier where the lay is

similar. Toward the sea side they are iron plated, but toward us

there is only earth, with some concrete and masonry. It is the

arrangement that puzzles us. A very clever engineer must have

devised them, for we find an absolute change from the Chinese war

of ten years ago when we took Port Arthur in a day. Then, one fort,

Issusan, taken the others fell. That was the key to the position.

Now, one cannot say that any single fort is the key. All are so

arranged we must take them in detail. The capture of one means

only the capture of an individual fort, not of a series as in the

old days. Study as we may we find it difficult to minimize their

strength. They have even carried the fortifications to such an

extent that the sea escarpments jut over and they bathe there with

ease and safety.”

He looked so cosy in his kimono, redolent of the bath, that I

ventured: “You envy them, then. Aha! This is the secret of Japanese

persistence. The Russians have such a fine place to bathe.”

He gurgled and continued: “We began yesterday to shell with our new

guns--the Osacca mortars. It will be most interesting to watch

their effect on the earth forts.”

The General paused. It was time to go. We had taken the better part

of an hour from him. We rose. He slipped from the chair, tickled

his toes into his slippers, and threw his shoulders back jauntily,

giving himself the air that a little man does unconsciously when a

sense of the physical is borne in upon him.

Then I felt that creepy clasp as of a boneless hand. When I closed

the door he crept back to his perch. So I left him, noiseless

leader of forty millions, swathed in the great Russian chair, lost

in the Mayor’s Byzantine house, withered to essence like a tea leaf.

And his salary is the same as that of a congressman of the United

States.

Chapter Five

CAMP

Before Port Arthur, Headquarters Third Imperial Army, Oct. 9th: We

have left the mountain--the Phœnix--where by day we saw artillery

duels and by night flashes of lightning illumining the big guns,

while the plains stood out under the searchlights. There we could

step from our lunch table and, down the cliff, look into the

upturned ecstasy of a victorious army, or feel the dull weight of

its despair surge in and close upon us.

Now we are with the army, part of it. From the Manchurian hut,

where we live in insect powder, on tinned beef, biscuit and jam,

we go a few rods to a plateau and look into Port Arthur. The path

of the army can be traced by beer bottles--Asahi, Yebisu, Kabuta

and Saporo--but in all the army there is not a guardhouse. If the

company has a man who doesn’t smoke cigarettes he is pointed out

as a curiosity; the empty boxes--Peacock, Tokiwa, Pinhead, Old

Rip, Cherry and Star--dot the fields thick as the beer bottles;

the price of a box is two days’ pay; there is no way to have money

sent from Japan to the front, but a field savings bank to take it

back; and yet, into this field bank, from the three cents a day

pay, in spite of the beer and the cigarettes, over $10,000 has gone

since the opening of the campaign. Approach a battery and find a

lot of uncouth boys, gentle and friendly as children, curious as

savages, as lacking in assertion as a comedian off the stage; you

take them for menials, for most Americans in such a place would

carry mountains of dignity and be covered with placards, “hands

off.” These are expert gunners, handling scientific instruments,

and yet simple. Generals the same! It is an unaccountable thing,

this naturalness and modesty, like the morality of a man of genius.

A paradox? Yes; when you think of what fighters they are! But how

does a hen know when to turn her eggs, and where does a girl carry

her powder puff?

But to us, of whom there are three--Frederic Villiers, the war

artist, James Ricalton, the war photographer, and myself. The

public knows about Villiers, hero of Plevna and the Soudan,

discoverer of artistic Abyssinia, decorated by seven governments,

veteran of seventeen campaigns, dean of the war correspondents,

who has traveled the world round lecturing, sketching, writing.

The public knows less of Ricalton, one of its obscure great men.

He has gone through a long life with his nose to his work, like a

dog to a scent, heedless of fame and money. He is original, alone,

and has done things no other man has done. It was he that Thomas

A. Edison sent into all the tropical jungles twenty years ago to

search for a vegetable fiber for the electric lamp. He took most

of the photographs for John H. Stoddard’s lectures. He was the

first foreigner to walk through northern Russia, 1,500 miles from

Archangel to St. Petersburg. He has traveled through every country

on the globe, exposing 75,000 negatives, and has photographed most

of the great men of his generation. Of late years he has become

one of the most expert of war photographers. In the Philippines

he was the only man to get troops actually firing on the foe. At

the battle of Caloocan a soldier near him was winged; Ricalton

picked up the useless rifle, grabbed the cartridge belt and went

up with the skirmishers. At the siege of Tien Tsin he stood on the

walls and photographed Americans as they were dropped by Chinese

bullets. Little the public knows when it sees photographs of war

how few of them come from the front. Ricalton is one of the few

who gets the real thing. He is sixty years old, yet he tramps ten

and twenty miles a day with a thirty-pound camera under his arm,

for he sneers at the snap shot and will carry a tripod. Yet he

outlasts the young men on the march. Here he goes everywhere--into

captured forts while the corpses are still about, through the most

dangerous artillery positions, among reserves waiting for battle,

into the actual fighting if they would let him. To-day he is off to

gratify one of his few remaining ambitions, for he is sighing like

Alexander at already exhausting the world. He wants to get one of

the new siege shells, 500 weight, as it leaves the gun on its trip

to the battleships in the bay. Four of these shells were dropped

yesterday into the _Retvizan_ and _Pallada_. To-day the gunners

will try to put in another. Ricalton plans to have his camera all

set and tilted at the proper angle behind. Then as the gunner

pulls the lanyard he presses the bulb. He has stuffed his ears

with cotton so the shock will not break the drums, for a gunner

yesterday was deafened for life. He will probably be hurled to

the ground and his camera may be smashed, but he wants that shell

hurtling through the air, no bigger than a bee, while the dust of

the recoil curls up over the emplacement and all the grand tensity

of power and motion is about the place.

“Why take the risk?” say I, “when you can so easily take the gun

at rest and then paint in a little dust and that wee dot up in the

air.”

[Illustration: BO-O-OM!

Discharge of the Japanese 11-inch Mortar during the Grand

Bombardment of October 29. The gun is a mile and a half away, and

is firing into the Two Dragon Redoubt. The vibration made a clear

photograph impossible.]

“But it wouldn’t be the real thing,” said he, as he started off.

Then I saw why he is Ricalton and not some faker at his ease over

a chemical tray in the city. Just now, looking out of the window

under which I write, I can see the battery where he has gone. It

lies snug among the hills, two great guns cocked on concrete and

flanked by howitzers aloft on peaks. The Russians have the range

and are pumping shells in, two or three a minute. It looks as if

nothing could live there, but I know that probably not a man is

injured, for I was there yesterday and saw how safe the dugouts

are. Villiers looks up from his sketching and watches the firing

through his glasses. A ten-incher plunges into the hillside and the

earth boils up as if the foundations were ripped away.

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

“Don’t fear for him. He has gone through too much to be rapped by

that,” I reply. I remember how he walked there yesterday, his eye

always on a dodgehole. A ten-incher came just as this one to-day.

He threw himself flat on his stomach, hugging his machine, tenderly

as though it were a baby, in a ditch by the roadside. Ten yards off

the shell exploded. The pieces flew over and clods of earth fell on

him. Hardly had the pieces stopped before he was up and after them,

for he is as great a curio hunter as he is a photographer, and he

has a house in Maplewood, New Jersey, converted into a museum,

which the natural history experts declare is the finest private

collection in America. But enough of Ricalton.

Along a deeply rutted road in front of our village we gaze in awe

at the big guns and their accouterment spread beside a narrow-gauge

track. A pile of empty shells with points like needles and thick

as a telephone pole, so heavy two men can hardly lift one, lies

scattered down the slopes. A recoil vamp lumbers a truck. An

ungainly steel thing nestles belly deep in the sand while a company

of human ants sweats and wrestles with it. Then suddenly we come

upon the beautiful breech, delicate as clockwork, dazzling as a

jeweler’s case, gleaming in the sun, and Ricalton exclaims:

“The only thing that gives one respect for man--his achievement--is

to look at such a piece of mechanism. It has the power of a jungle

of elephants, yet is as sensitive as a little girl!”

Some days we take trips off to the various divisions and get close

in for a big battle, feel the pitch and pallor of war, see heights

assaulted, won and lost, hear the adventure of conflict from heroic

mouths and get in close upon the red anathema. Then we visit the

hospitals and know the slow agony of it--the suffering, endurance,

silent sacrifice. Two weeks ago I saw the same operation that was

performed on President McKinley--laparotomy. A soldier’s stomach

was pierced, as McKinley’s was. The surgeons took it out, sewed it

up and replaced it. To-day I was told the man would recover. He is

a strong, hardy chap, a peasant boy, who lives on rice, fish and

tea, which was not McKinley’s diet. The soldier at the same time

lost his right arm by amputation. Visiting him again yesterday I

asked how he was getting on.

“Well enough,” he replied. “The hard thing is not to think about

it. You’re all right if you only don’t think. It’s the mind that

rips one up, sir, the doctor says.”

Our village shelters most of the impedimenta that an army

headquarters must carry. Band-musicians are our neighbors. The

interpreters, next door, swap tea, cigarettes and news with us.

The Russian interpreter, who lived in Moscow three years, sketches

so well, Villiers says he will take him to Paris and make him the

fashion. Behind us are the Japanese correspondents, so clandestine

in their ways that even a Manchurian farmer must know they are

yellow journal reporters. Of a morning we see a curious pair

strolling off over the hills, one with a fowling-piece, looking for

snipe, the other with a camera watching for a chance to get a shell

as it explodes. One is Mr. Arriga, the expert on international law,

who will adjudicate all property rights as soon as Port Arthur

falls; the other is the official photographer.

Then there are the war correspondents, who have a camp three miles

off. In bargaining for junks to take the news out, two of the cable

men have become so bitter in rivalry that they go around with

Mauser pistols, each threatening to shoot the other if he tells how

the censor was evaded. There is the Norwegian nobleman with the

eyes of a viking who is writing serials for one of Harmsworth’s

London dailies. Finally, there is what Villiers calls “The Bartlett

pair”--A. Bascom Bartlett, Esq., son of the Hon. E. Bascom

Bartlett, M. P., who came out to see the fun and what Villiers

calls the Tossup, because it was a toss-up whether or not he should

come, and who is here to make fun. It was he, who recently, after

hearing a general tell of the desperate charge of a brigade,

patted the officer on the back and said: “A very noble act, sir. I

shall relate that in Tossup Hall.”

The elder Tossup is a country brewer in Yorkshire. The younger

insists that he is an officer and a gentleman and knows how to

conduct himself. But a few days ago he was caught, while visiting

an outpost with an officer, in a crossfire, and ducked into a

trench. The officer tried to reassure him by following into the

trench. There, while a battle was raging beyond, and in the

presence of all the sublime panorama that surrounds us here the

Tossup said: “I hope you will come and visit me in England. We will

go to the autumn maneuvers.”

The officer, not expert with English, pulled out his dictionary and

ran his thumb down the “ma’s.” “man--man--manur” he read. “Ah,”

he cried at last, “the autumn manuring! I see, sir, yours is an

agricultural country.”

Chapter Six

203-METER HILL

What Blaine’s unfortunate “three R’s” were to his Presidential

campaign “203-Meter Hill” was to the siege of Port Arthur. Risen to

the dignity of key to the situation, it had, in an ordnance sense,

little to do with the case. It was but one of seven advance posts

for final assault. A pimple of progress to the engineer, it was

not permanently fortified, did not belong to the primary scheme of

defense, and was dominated by three of the finest forts--Etzeshan,

Anzushan, and Liaotishan: mountains of the Chair, the Table, and

the Lion’s Mane. For three reasons heavy guns could not be mounted

there. First, the cost in energy and life would be too vast,

because rifles whose barrels alone weigh from two to eight tons

each would have to be hauled by hand up 680 feet of rock, a task

heroic even in peace. In war, wedged among three magnificently

intrenched hostile positions, this would be impossible. Second,

even if these heavy guns--only of any value against forts or

fleets--had been gotten there, they would have been pounded to

pieces within an hour of arrival by the more numerous and better

emplaced artillery of the Chair, the Table, and the Lion’s Mane.

Finally, heavy guns are never emplaced on mountain peaks in an

offensive campaign.

“203” had one value--a great one. It was the best point of

observation the Japanese had yet had. Line of vision, not line of

fire, was what they needed. From “203” they could look into all

portions of the harbor that could float a warship, but, what was

more essential, they could look around the promontory of Golden

Hill into the cove, where the hunted remnant of the Russian fleet

had been hiding, at loose anchor, since the disastrous attempt to

escape on August 10th. They had no need for better artillery posts

than the positions which they had held for four months and from

which they had been able to place shells in any spot on the Russian

side.

[Illustration:

_Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly_

THE HYPOSCOPE

Showing Lieutenant Oda looking from 203-Meter Hill through the

hyposcope at the Russian fleet in the New Harbor of Port Arthur]