“No. The truth about war cannot be told. It is too horrible. The

public will not listen. A white bandage about the forehead with

a strawberry mark on the center is the picture they want of the

wounded. They won’t let you tell the truth and show bowels ripped

out, brains spilled, eyes gouged away, faces blanched with horror.

The only painter fellow who ever told the truth about war was

Verestchagin, poor chap, drowned over there in the harbor. He in

paint and Zola in words told the truth and they were howled down

and ostracized all their lives, simply because the theorists, like

this surgeon, fed up with themselves, nursed in the belief that

science is all powerful, will always assure the public that modern

war is humane.

“Scientific warfare! Let me tell you the facts about science.

Archibald Forbes predicted twenty years ago that the time would

come when armies would no longer be able to take their wounded

from the field of battle. That day has come. We are living in it.

Wounded have existed--how, God alone knows--on that field out

there, without help, for twelve days, while shell and bullets

rained above them, and if a comrade had dared to come to their

assistance his would have been a useless suicide. The searchlight,

the enginery of scientific trenches, machine guns, rifles point

blank at 200 yards with a range of 2,000--these things have helped

to make warfare more terrible now than ever before in history.

“Red Cross societies and scientific text-books--they sound well and

look pretty, but as for ‘humane warfare’--was there ever put into

words a mightier sarcasm!”

This was translated. The officers--Lieutenant-General Oshima and

three of his staff--listened, gravely. No one said anything.

Finally, we walked home silently as the sun went down.

Chapter Fourteen

SCIENTIFIC FANATICS

Noon found me well up toward the firing line, assured by the

staff that it would be the day of days. To get there I passed a

mile and more of batteries--the Osacca guns vomiting balls of

fire, puff-balls of smoke and fat, heavy balls of steel; the

howitzers--coyotes of artillery--spitting from peaks, snapping,

louder than the monsters growl below; the naval six-inch turret

firers, rakishly sunk in valleys, their greyhound noses dappled

with mud, baying out reverberations at which even the sulking sun

might have shuddered; the field four-point-sevens, bag-redoubted,

conventional as pictures, flinging forth the business barks of

house dogs; then, finally, the hand one-pounders, hauled well up

the parallels, their bodies angled half-wise and as forlorn amid

such colossal music as a penny whistle before a symphony orchestra.

To be in it, to pass through it, to feel this whiz and boom people

the air above with demon gossip, to sniff from ravines the gusts

seeped with cordite and with phosphorus, while in the far-stretched

vistas bluecoat files wind through the fierce, vain taunts hurled

in among them--ah, this is the atmosphere--the grand, the fearful,

the unspeakably sublime atmosphere of war.

Cloudy! Yes, but what day could smile in the face of such a row

as this? The grand bombardment has been on for five days. We call

it the “grand” bombardment, to distinguish it from that other

trifling bombardment of a few hundred field guns that was on for

nearly three months. Now the big coast defense mortars from Osacca,

hurling shells the size of donkeys, are ripping the lining from the

doomed fortress. We cry for rest, but there is no rest. Night and

day the fearful din keeps up. The paper windows of the Manchurian

house where we live, two miles away, have been blown out twice by

concussions. The mountains tremble. If you get within a hundred

yards of the guns, you must wear cotton batting in your ears and

walk tiptoe to save ear-drums. This for a ten-mile front, with

infantry and regular artillery hammering the spaces out, was enough

to discourage the sun. Sun, however, is an incident. War waits for

no weather.

Halfway in among the batteries I paused for guidance. There were

certain lines between our batteries and the Russian batteries which

were called “lines of fire,” and these lines were good places to

avoid. Soon two soldiers, each with a rice bag on his back, came

along, and I picked up their trail. There was a narrow valley which

led to the Ninth Division, whose firing line was to be the center

of the attack and for which I was bound. Along the center of this

valley seemed to me the right way, but the soldiers headed straight

across it, business-like, stolid, as if they knew where to go, and

I followed. We were fair in the midst of it then. In ravines on

both sides the Osacca mortars were hid. From behind and directly

over our heads a naval battery was firing, and in front of us

there were four or five batteries of field artillery, opening the

engagement. There was never a moment without two or three shells

in the air directly over our heads. So long as they were friendly

shells--imagine a shell being friendly!--no one seemed to mind.

(That “seemed” is a good word to describe my state.) But directly

they came viciously from across the valley--look out! Presently one

did come that way. I knew it was coming. How? I felt it. So the

ground in front found my stomach and my nose sniffed the gravel.

It could not have passed very far above our heads--this shell--for

when it exploded behind the dust showered over us, and I thanked

myself for lying down, else a fragment might have rapped me so I

would have cared nothing for dust or dirt of stale encampments. Of

course, the soldiers must have lain down, too--they surely must

have known the danger. I looked up to laugh with them, but they

were trudging on stolidly, as if they were carrying a pound of meat

home from the butcher’s. When the dust came they blinked--that was

all. I was so ashamed I hardly dared show myself; yet I needed my

legs to get on out of the line of fire, and there are times one

forgets his pride. I ran; but no need to be ashamed; they had not

seen me fall, had neither quickened nor lessened pace, had turned

not so much as an eyelash to left or right. They had orders to

take that rice to the battery, and to the battery they were going.

So I paused--amazement surviving fear--and looked at them, cogs

of the machine, secret of an army’s strength, of its indomitable

bravery. As well expect the shafts of an engine to cry quits when

the trucks spring a hot box!

At length I found myself where the pewit of bullets beat a

quickstep for the inferno aloft. It was on the crest in front of

the farthest field artillery, at the rear of the parallels in which

the infantry lay, huddled masses of blue dabbed above with glints

of bayonet steel, waiting for the assault. Occasionally the sun

came out and sent a heliograph message from those bayonets to me,

and then, like myself, sought cover again. The four forts slated

for attack by the two divisions in my view lay directly in front,

about a mile and a half by parallels and approaches, but, as my

vision went, eight hundred yards for the nearest, fifteen hundred

for the farthest. From the rear that assorted pack of war-dogs

flung suspense and agony, surprise and death, over my head. Beyond,

the forts, hung like a corona of barbarous gems on the brow of the

mountain range, gushed forth pain and disgust.

The Pine Tree fort (Shodzuzan) on the extreme right was afire, had

been for two hours, and the smoke from it, blown by a northwest

wind, lifted raggedly square across the field. Through the slight

haze each explosion opposite could be seen, as it tore out, now

a chunk of a mountain and now a crater from a parapet. About

half-past twelve the star bomb chamber of the south battery, the

one nearest, was struck, and for ten minutes an explosion of day

fireworks held the line. On the north battery two guns hung across

the parapet, their backs broken, useless. On the two smaller forts

between, the P and M redoubts, men could be seen feverishly working

at a rear intrenchment. Evidently they were preparing to retire

from the front line, where they already scented danger. But they as

evidently showed determination to fight to the last ditch--which

they did. All four of these forts, spread fanwise halfway down this

mountain slope, formed the group called the Cock’s Comb (Keikan,

Japanese; Keekwan, Chinese), and above them on the skyline the

comb could be plainly seen, lacking only the dab of red, later

to be given its approaches, to give it the cock color. It was on

the Cock’s Comb that half of the great losses in August occurred.

Some ten thousand Japanese had already been mowed down there, for

every slope was prepared for enfilading by two batteries, the moats

were deep, the fortifications of masonry and the glacis sheer

and slippery. Yet the Cock’s Comb once taken, the Russians must

yield, for it was to the siege of Port Arthur what Nanshan was to

the campaign--the decisive position. Once driven from there, the

enemy’s back would be broken. The fall of the Cock’s Comb and the

Two Dragons, on December 31st, forced Stoessel’s surrender.

[Illustration:

_Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly_

PREPARING FOR DEATH

A superstition holds that the Japanese soldier who dies dirty finds

no place among the Shinto Shades; so before going into action every

soldier changes his linen, as this one is doing, preceding the

battle of October 29.]

At one o’clock the bombardment seemed to have reached a climax

of intensity. The parapets of the four forts were alive with

bursting shrapnel. A hundred a minute were exploding on each (at

fifteen gold dollars apiece). The air above them was black with the

glycerine gases of the mortar shells, and the wind blowing toward

the sea held huge quantities of dust. Timber splinters were in the

air and rocks were flying. Not a fort replied, and from the

entire eight-and-one-half-mile front of the Russian line there were

few answers. Once about every ten minutes a wheezy battery off on

the Liaotishan Peninsula sent a shell promiscuously into our vast

field, apparently to show that the defense was yet at least gasping

for breath.

In the front parallels the infantry seemed on the move. There was

a shifting of rifles, and in three of them, from end to end, a man

could be seen running. The night before I had been up there to find

all of the soldiers changing their linen and sponging themselves

off as best they could with old towels and soiled handkerchiefs.

They were purifying themselves for death. A superstition as old

as Japan says that a man who dies dirty finds no place among the

Shinto shades. Now they were waiting calmly, each with an overcoat

and spade across his back. Why the spade? Will it be necessary

to hastily intrench for the night far up the slope? Each had an

“iron” ration in his pocket, and a pint of cold tea in his flask.

Two hundred rounds of ammunition in his three leather pouches go

to help the bayoneted rifle that he slings by its strap, its butt

dragging as he goes up the hill. What a job it is, this, of living

in a pocket handkerchief, on compressed air, giving and receiving

death, for three cents a day!

At one-fifteen our fire changes. The four forts are left to their

silence and devastation, and the fat balls travel westward to the

Pine Tree and the Two Dragons. For a moment the slopes stand out,

ghastly with smoke, pitted like strawberries, each pit a shell hole

deep enough to give a man shelter.

Before anyone knows it the assault is on. The four get it at once.

From the bottom of each, out of the approach sapped there in the

night, a handful of men is fed, as corn might drop, grain by grain,

ground from a hopper. They get a few rods up when another handful

is fed, then another, until the whole face of the hill is swarming

with tiny figures, their blue turned in the distance to black, the

space between each at no place less than two yards, at none more

than two rods. Not in battalion phalanx, as the picture books show,

shells dismembering, arms thrown aloft, faces wild with battle’s

glory, terror, agony, but steadily, sanely seeking every cover,

deploying with skirmish formation, they go on and up, into the jaws

of death, into the mouth of hell. Not a life is thrown away, not a

precious head wasted.

Not fifty yards up the Russian lookout scouts them, and then we

see we are not facing a beaten foe, but a waiting one. Until that

moment no sound came from the enemy. No shells chucked away at

hidden batteries, no rifle ammunition plumped into the sandbags of

parallels, no shrapnel sent hit-or-miss over the fields searching

for an unseen foe--not any of that stupid, wild game for them.

They have let the preparation go on, all the fuss and fury, the

bombardment, the sapping, and now we see what they are up to. It is

all hit with them, no miss, they have no ammunition to waste. Their

backs are to the wall. Their defense is determined, great. Deadly

purpose is in that silence.

The sun is out for a moment, the smoke has lifted. Through my

glass I see it all as perfectly as though on a chessboard; the

sprawling blue ants creeping up, rifle-butts dragging, the line

officers ahead, the field behind. Far in advance of the squad on

the P fort a young lieutenant is running, carried out of himself

in passion, foolish in zeal, waving his sword. Almost fifty yards

behind him, his nearest file-sergeant lumbers stolidly on, as

stolidly as my two companions of the morning lumbered with their

bags of rice. At that moment they meet what they changed their

linen for the night before. From all the Russian batteries, from

silent nooks, from huge, open emplacements, from mountain recesses,

from the entire line of parapets, it comes--the Russian reply. So

here is the why of that previous ghostly silence. Every shot must

tell. Bursts directly above send vitreous blue shoots of smoke

as of strata sidewise, then curl voluminously upward, the edges

unfolding to the breeze; the deadly shrapnel downward shooting bits

of lead and steel. Enfilading from all crests, over the shoulders

of the slopes, come shells, plowing the ground, hurling stones and

fragments. From above rattle the Nordenfeldts and Maxims, spraying

bullets into the advancing ants as kerosene is sometimes sprayed

from a hose nozzle on the tribe of real pests.

It was to be expected. Not a man lives. The fire ceases. They

all lie prone--some hid in the shell holes, some lost in the

gullies, some face down bare on the open sand. Most of them lie

lengthwise, their heads upward, shot apparently as they stumbled

forward. On the second slope in one place the legs and trunk of

a man are sprawled, armless, headless. An entire shell must have

met him halfway. Occasionally the figures are huddled, piteously

deprived of action, sending upward the silent, unanswerable appeal

that death makes. But most of them have that curious upward slant,

bodies rigid, as of determined men hugging the ground. Were they

bulleted straight? Anyway, it is a glorious death--this of the

infantry soldier storming Port Arthur, lifted on the crest of the

world’s fiercest passion, puffed into vapor as the crest of a

storm-tossed wave! Painless, too. A touch and all is over. But can

they all be dead, all of those figures slanted curiously upward?

There must have been remarkable sharpshooters above to pick every

man off, for shells are notoriously extravagant of bravado and

bluff.

Ten minutes pass--fifteen--twenty--and only the giant shells

wheezing through the sky to distant, unseen marks remind one that

here is indeed a battlefield.

Then suddenly those figures with the curious upward slant come to

life. Another handful of war corn is fed from the human hopper

below. The young officer waves his sword. The line-sergeant

stolidly climbs. The deploying lines curl their microbe grip more

firmly into the slope. There was a hitch in the machine. Now it

moves, slow, inexorable.

The piteously huddled figures remain. The comrades go on, with

never a look down, never a look behind, half-stooped, rifle-butts

dragging, laboring with the terrific climb. Ten paces from the

fresh start, and that hail of bursting steel meets them again. They

struggle on, perhaps a hundred feet, perhaps a hundred and fifty,

then commence dropping one by one, by the dozen, fifteen at a time,

two by two. They rest again. Again the time drags. Again the fresh

start, with more piteously huddled figures. So it goes, the hopper

below supplying every loss.

At length the young officer pauses. Just for a moment he lingers

and then digs his boots into the crater that one of those friendly

shells tore out for him an hour before. Without waiting for his

men, fifty yards beyond the nearest, he leaps to the parapet, reels

for an instant on the skyline, then plunges out of sight. I never

see him again. What must have been his fate inside there, alone,

before his men came up? Was he shot down as he entered? Did he keep

the Russians at bay till his supports came up? Dear, foolish boy,

did you think that, single-handed, with that bit of toy steel, you

could take Port Arthur?

It seems ages and ages before the line-sergeant and his deploying

figures leap to the skyline, reel for an instant, and disappear.

The grist from the hopper below hastens and the rifle-butts spring

from ground to shoulders. It was the first man who was needed. Now

that the charm is broken, they no longer skulk, but run eagerly to

the crater and tumble in. The hopper has fed well-eared corn into

the mill, and it has come out ground meal. The grits lie scattered

all along the slope. Some move. The most lie still, their battle

with cold nights in exposed trenches finished, sentry duty done.

And in many a thatched cot among the rice paddies across the sea

the old hataman will tell to his gray wife how their boy helped

take Port Arthur, and both will make a little journey to the sacred

mountain to assure the fathers they are thankful to have bred brave

stock.

At a quarter-past one the young lieutenant started on his mad

errand, supported by the same mechanism. At a quarter-past two

the flag of the Rising Sun floated from both north corners of the

P fort. At a quarter-past three the stretcher-bearers are on the

slope searching among the huddled figures. They move swiftly along,

turning a figure over, giving it a quick look and dropping it with

business precision; to another, dropping it; to another, pausing,

out with the lint, perhaps the hypodermic needle, perhaps a sip

from the tea flask, the arms of one bearer hastily passing under

the arms of the figure of the other under the knees, dropping it

on the stretcher, passing in and out among the shell holes, down

the hill, while back on the slope the carrion figures lie with the

slant of the setting sun struggling through the clouds to flash

over the bayonets beside them!

Meanwhile, over the rest of the vast field, of which the P fort

was but a fragment, the assault had been continuing. The Russian

fire had not abated. As soon as they saw the P fort was gone they

turned their shells into the redoubt itself, and cut up our forces

where they were seeking cover in the very places their own shells

had previously destroyed. But the slopes of the other three forts

were kept just as hot as in the beginning. The moment the thin line

advanced, that moment the hail commenced, and it ceased only when

the line ceased; nor did it entirely cease then, for shrapnel was

dropped above the forms, those huddled and those lying curiously

straight.

Suddenly, on the farther slope, where near a battalion of men had

crawled almost two-thirds of the way up the glacis, a panic seemed

to have seized them. The whole crowd ran down and to the right.

They disappeared over the scruff of the hill, toward their own

trenches, brushed off as a handful of flies might be blown away

from a heel of bread. The cowards! to run like that when their

comrades are valiantly struggling up the nearer heights!

But no. It is not a panic. Halfway to their trenches they all drop

into the ground. Shell holes and gullies swallow them up. As they

disappear the scruff of the hill from which they ran is blown into

the air, the flame shooting from the center of the rocks and dirt,

and the white smoke rising above. A mine has gone off there.

The pioneer ahead found the contact signal--clever fellow--ran back

to the advance officer, who led his men in their retreat. So it was

not a panic, but a well-ordered movement. Soon the advance goes on,

up the nearer angle of the slope, the men deploying carefully as

before, the hell shooting down from above, the hopper feeding from

below. So I learn to criticise nothing on a field of battle. Who

but the commanding officer can ever disclose motives? Not a word of

authentic news leaks from this place. Once the citadel is down, say

the generals, let criticism rage. Port Arthur will have been taken.

Meanwhile, let us have silence, concentration, determination!

Then, under the middle parapet, I find a squad of men hanging,

having survived the ordeal below. With no leader so headstrong as

the young officer, they halt for supports to go in and capture the

fort, for they are but twenty, or at most thirty. No supports come.

The shrapnel plays over them, the bullets rain through.

Into the crater torn on the parapet of the fort opposite by one of

our Osacca shells, and which with an enfilading fire can command

the squad, there marches a company of Russian soldiers, four

abreast. The hole accommodates four at a time, and they stand as if

on parade, an officer to the left rear, his sword drawn, giving the

word of command. Still farther in behind is another officer, pistol

in hand, holding the men to their work. They order arms, prepare,

aim, fire, wheel to the left, defile, the next squad takes their

places, and again comes this drill in manual of arms. A splendid

sight; men in the crux of action as if on parade; an object lesson

for discipline to the whole Russian army. The Japanese need no

such object lesson. Each man is an individual, though he is part

of the machine; he has a brain to think, eyes to see, legs and

arms to act. Just below the firing squad, within twenty yards, a

company of our boys has crawled up and is lying face down waiting

for the word to make the final charge. Hid by the angle of the

parapet, neither squad nor company sees the other, and the Russians

above fire directly over the heads of the Japanese below into the

assaulting party on the opposite slope, distant some four or five

hundred yards. When the last four have emptied their rifles, the

crater becomes again black with emptiness. Evening is falling. The

assaulting party creeps on up.

Under the parapet of the north battery, where the forsaken squad

was left, I now see the why of the inaction. The twenty or thirty,

in half an hour, have thrown up a shallow trench. So this is the

meaning of the spade that each man carries at such cost, up those

terrific heights. They are fixing themselves for the night. Under

cover of darkness the supports will come up, and before dawn

the way from valley to parapet will be entirely protected with

trenches, so that a whole regiment can be poured up for the final

assault without losing a man. As the price of it on the slope there

lie thousands of huddled figures.

Chapter Fifteen

JAPAN’S GRAND OLD MAN--AN INTERLUDE

The Itos are the Smiths of Japan. There is one President of the

Privy Council, one the chief naval authority and head of the naval

board. There are two generals named Ito and statistics alone know

how many private soldiers are thus made still more common. The

Asahi to-day told of an Ito hanged for a triple murder. In the

adjoining column account was made of another Ito decorated by the

Portuguese government. The reason, not stated, was that the king

of that decrepit monarchy, wishing to assimilate some stray rays

of good fortune from this rising sun, chose three men in Japan on

whom to bestow his ribbons of mark. These were the Emperor, the

Emperor’s son and an old man by the universal name of Ito.

A strange circumstance permitted me to ride for an hour one morning

in a railway coach with this other Ito--the only Ito. Ambitious

of that smartness which can save where any simpleton can spend I

procured a second-class ticket from Yokohama to Tokyo, a run that

covers some twenty-eight miles in twice as many minutes. The ticket

cost fifty-three sen, and as the rate of exchange for American

gold here now is 213 you will see that the ride cost less than a

quarter. I could have gone first class for seventy-four sen, or ten

more American cents--hardly worth the saving. Still, it is more

interesting second class. Only foreigners, and Japanese who ape

foreigners, ride first class.

Japanese railway coaches are of three classes. It is not necessary

to experience the third to know it. A look is enough. Red, like the

emperor’s, they are the antithesis of imperial. Only in an imperial

land, dyed in the ancient belief that certain men are by birth

superior to other men, could these third-class coaches exist. They

are for the common people. Small as the dummy cars of an intramural

railway they are boxed off in sections similar to continental

compartments. These are loaded with as many of the riffraff as the

station guards can crowd in. Hard seats and plain company with

transportation at the mere cost of hauling is the rule there. The

fare is thirty sen (fifteen cents). The government, which owns the

railway, conducts its business on the theory employed by Japanese

merchants--sell to the poor at cost and let the rich pay the

profits.

The difference between the first and second class is twofold. One

is the color--white for the first class, blue for the second. The

accommodation is just the same--leather and plush upholstering of

seats plenty large enough, with washstand, toilet and drinking

water handy and clean midway of the car. The chief difference is

sociologic, tinged with political, economic and moral degrees.

First class is for the nobility, second for the bourgeoisie. Though

the first-class carriage is lawfully open to anyone possessing

seventy-four sen, no second-class Jap ever dares aspire to it.

So secure are the officials in the _morale_ of the people that

tickets are never examined. You show your pasteboard at the gate

as you enter the platform at the beginning of the journey, again

as you leave the platform at the end, but not on the train. A

third-class fare could easily ride in a first-class coach. No one

but a foreigner would ever think of this. I tried it one day and

succeeded, getting seventy-four sen worth of nobility for thirty

sen. It is an axiom that all foreigners are noble; hence all

foreigners should travel first class. Some day Japan will really be

civilized.

This morning the first-class coach was filled with London tiles

and Paris frocks, all silked and diamonded. It was the day of the

imperial garden party and all foreigners of note in Yokohama were

on their way to the palace in Tokyo. There was a crush of German,

French and English. I detected one pair Castilian in suavity of

accent. All were agog with gossipy gayety. The men, sleek on

Oriental dining as fresh pork packers, plumped seats unusually

commodious quite full of broadclothed avoirdupois. The women were

agush with scents, mowed from the four quarters. Feminine with

suggested lingerie, they left the men to the papers, for the London

mail was just in, and toasted some stale diplomatic scandal whose

drift I vainly strove to get. Between silk tiles and be-birded

bonnets there was not a vacant seat left in the first-class coach.

I found a seat in the rear of the second-class coach, which was

but half filled. The occupants were Japanese, evidently business

and professional men of note, perhaps fifteen all told. Except

for the complexions, the upward slant of the eyes and the uniform

small stature they might have passed for the occupants of the nine

o’clock car downtown any American morning. The dress was the same,

the average of intelligence the same. Before I began my paper I

studied each face. The Japanese countenance is inscrutable. From

coolie to Mikado exists the same placid, patient, nearly always

alert expression of canny indifference. Before such uniformity,

such hidden power, purpose and weird beginning toothed in the husk

of time the most expert western physiognomist is baffled. The

geography alone of these humanists of hardy strife can be sketched.

Of their history, legends, poesy, knowledge and aspiration little

may be said at the outward glance.

In the far corner sat a man whose personality attracted with an

unmistakable potency. Sensitive to what psychologists call the

aura, I instinctively felt that he was a person of distinction,

a distinction genuine in that it must be inherent, for nothing

obvious indicated his difference from the other Japanese. He wore

a frock coat which had seen use and a beaver hat, apparently of

English make, as it had a Piccadilly smugness found nowhere else.

None of his countrymen in the car wore cuffs like his, which were

links. The others were old-fashioned in plain roundness. His tie

was ample and of heavy silk, four-in-hand with a certain regality

of flourish. His shoes were wide, short, homely, well-furnished.

Only two items of his apparel were unlike those of anyone else. One

was the pendant from his watchchain, a superb head of polished onyx

on which I could make out the square and compass of the Masonic

regalia. The other was a button the size of an American copper cent

which he wore in his left lapel. It looked like the button of the

Legion of Honor. Later I learned that it was the insignia of the

first-class order of the Rising Sun. Only twenty-two men in the

world have the right to wear that. I also noticed that his left leg

was slightly bent. He appeared to be bow-legged.

The unknown held a newspaper in front of his face. When the train

had been two minutes out of Yokohama he put the paper down and

looked out upon the landscape. Then I recognized the Marquis Ito,

who was born a poor boy of ordinary family in an imperial land, and

who is now known before the world as the father of the New Japan.

Some historian has written that the Nineteenth Century produced

four constructive statesmen of the first rank; two--Bismarck and

Cavour--in the west, and two--Li Hung Chang and Ito--in the east.

Another puts him down as the greatest of the four because he is the

most humble.

Of Ito’s place in history it is not the purpose here to speak. This

is but the record of a chance hour when I saw him this morning

take a second-class carriage to Tokyo that he might escape the

crowd of foreigners whom he doubtless felt would annoy him with

attention, when he wishes to be undisturbed. He has one sure mark

of the prophets, that of being unhonored in his own country. The

people say that he is proud, which is their interpretation of his

aloofness, and that he does things unbecoming a gentleman. By this

they mean his fondness for geisha, which he makes no attempt to

conceal, despising public opinion and thus calling upon his head

that which he despises. He is the antithesis of Disraeli, of whom

Gladstone could say that he was the only public man in England,

unmarried, who could live his maturity without being mixed up with

a petticoat. Ito makes no secret of his feminine promiscuity.

The Marquis can well afford to ignore public opinion. With what

monarch of what age would he trade places? He has no position, no

titles and no responsibilities. Yet he is the most powerful person

in Japan. He is simply referred to as the chief of the “genro,” or

elder statesmen. What a benign reference! He is general utility

man for the government, and with that self-effacement which marks

the Japanese of whatever station he accepts his duties with as

unswerving a fidelity as the meanest gunner at his post.

When the Emperor wanted a delicate mission to Korea executed he

sent Ito with absolute diplomatic power. Ito went, conducted the

business with entire success and returned home quietly. He has

political enemies, of course, but these in the great hour of need

stand aside and recognize his voice for what it is, the guiding

genius of the nation. Emperor, ministers and generals come to him

for final advice. He is not bothered with the routine of an office

or the social duties of a position. He lives as obscurely as I saw

him this morning in the second-class coach, yet on such significant

occasions as that presentation by the Portuguese King he is the one

man selected.

Ito is now sixty-two years old. In this magnificent prime of a

great life he is at one of the ideal positions of all time--the

real dictator of the glorious future of a coming people. What a

contrast to petty jealousies and inefficient systems of western

races, who have so ill disposed of men of similar stamp! At the

same age Bismarck was hurling his thunders of wounded pride from

Friedrichsruhe at the young William. Cavour, momentarily anxious,

was tottering in an insecure seat; Grant, honored by the nations,

had to submit to the humiliation of a defeat at the hands of his

own party; Gladstone, hoary in public service, wavered between the

fires of an outraged public and an obtuse monarch; Cleveland and

Harrison, whose service may be said to compare with that of the

Japanese, at the very moment when their experience, their age and

their disinterestedness would be of most service to the state, are

relegated, like broken horses, to quiet pastures. Ito alone holds

his rightful power--unchecked, supreme at the helm of state where

alone the joy of the soul of such a man can find a vent.

His appearance! Of the cryptogram of that typical Oriental

countenance only stray ideographs can be learned. Like them all it

is inscrutable. The skin, old and yellow with the impenetrable age

and the hoary toughness of parchment, lay in sleek, well-grained

folds across a dome of brow. The eyes gazed out with reserve,

incisive, mild from a flat setting. The iris--as what Japanese is

not?--was brown-black, the white yellow with the musty haleness of

yellow marble. The look was simple and quiet. Yes. It was profound.

Yet it was alert.

I realized that I was looking on that which was older than the

saber-toothed tiger or the mausoleums of time, as old as the

riddle of the Sphinx. I was gazing upon the oldest thing in the

world--the spirit of progress.

When the train reached the last station, Shinegawa, eight minutes

from Shimbashi, which is to Tokyo what the Grand Central station

is to New York, there were but two vacant seats left in the car,

one beside the Marquis, one next myself. Two Japanese entered.

The first was well dressed, foreign style, and, without looking,

plumped into the seat near the Marquis. I was, apparently, the only

one in the car who had recognized the great man.

The second newcomer was one of those queer specimens of the hiatus

from old to new which may be seen in the streets of the large

cities. He wore the wooden Japanese geta and a half-caste kimono,

but on his head was a dinky derby hat so low in the crown that

the ticket he had stuck in the band was as tall as the hat. He

halted in the door, abashed. Plainly he had taken the wrong coach.

He should have gone third class. He was in a land where caste is

everything and he felt out of his element. His limp attitude told

his embarrassment and even his inscrutable face showed his pain.

But the train had started and he could not get out.

Marquis Ito touched the man on the arm and pointed out the seat

at the farther end of the car. The poor fellow was only more

embarrassed. He looked like a street tramp who might have stepped

into a Fifth Avenue prayer meeting. At one shrewd glance the

Marquis Ito saw the situation. He rose from his seat, offered it to

the stranger with a simple gesture and himself walked the length of

the car to the vacant place.

* * * * *

Know a nation’s great men and you know the nation, says the spirit

of biography. Marquis Ito is to Japan what Count Tolstoi is to

Russia, with this difference: Ito is in power, Tolstoi all but

exiled. You may say that one is a statesman, the other a writer,

and that hence they are not comparable. Yet, each stands before the

world as the most significant intellectual figure among his people.

There are other differences between the two. Ito is silent, Tolstoi

has a clarion voice; Ito is omnipotent, Tolstoi powerless; Ito

has no ostensible followers, Tolstoi counts his by the tens of

thousands. Again you will say this is the difference not between

men, but between statesman and prophet. Granted. But a curious

fact lessens the force of that truth. Ito and Tolstoi are working

for the same ends. Both seek the enfranchisement of men. The true

difference between them is this: Ito sinks his personality in the

cause he champions, satisfying Tolstoi’s own definition of the

great man as being one too great to tell of his own goodness, while

Tolstoi stalks his stalwart way to the limelight and focuses upon

himself the attention of an age.

Hundreds have written of Marquis Ito, and the only reason for

writing of him again is that he may thus be seen in some new

light. He is not the only interesting man in Japan, nor the only

great one, but he is certainly a dominating figure which fills

the horizon with a mighty presence. He is not popular. The papers

make only formal announcements of his movements. He passes to and

from his country residence and the Imperial Palace without escort

or demonstrations. He has no official position, Katsura being the

prime minister, except the titular one of President of the Privy

Council, which carries with it neither stated duties nor salary. He

may be easily approached and is seen by all who have the desire. He

is as free from pose as it is possible for man to be. He doesn’t

chop trees like Gladstone or pet great danes like Bismarck or walk

in melancholy solitude like Disraeli. As a picturesque personality

he is disappointing. He is more like Ben Harrison leaving the

White House to practice law in Indianapolis; or, imagine Abraham

Lincoln surviving the war and settled quietly in a side street in

Washington and you will have Marquis Ito as he is to-day. Only add

to that the absolute confidence of an all-powerful emperor and the

support of all politicians, even those of life-long enmity.

Yet, in spite of seclusion, in spite of a simplicity possible only

to men of the very first rank, Ito charms and holds attention. One

finds traces of him, hears accounts of him, feels his pervading

influence everywhere. When I told of riding in the second-class

coach with him from Yokohama to Tokyo the day of the imperial

garden party, I did not tell of the talk I had with him after he

had given up his seat to the abashed countryman and had taken

one next to mine. After a minute and when I saw that he was not

occupied I had the temerity to say:

“Your Excellency, I am an American, and as I see you are unoccupied

would be glad if you might say a few words that I could repeat to

my countrymen.” The never-to-be-forgotten way in which he turned

to me replying, “Certainly,” was at once benign and shrewd. There

was something of the fatherly old priest about him. Yet through

his naïve simplicity there shone a canny alertness such as critics

say the French landscapist, Corot, preserved in all his idealist

vagaries.

The way in which the old statesman interviewed me was masterly, yet

as gracious and lovable as any of the compelling things produced by

any of the artists of these forty million. I had before then been

sent on newspaper embassies to famous interviewers of the west. Of

these J. Pierpont Morgan is of the roughest squeeze, ripping the

marrow from a scribe with one smash of his lion paw. Elihu Root

glances through one like a rapier, gashing incisive questions into

the very pith of the attempt. But you leave such knights of power

and purpose dismayed and disheartened. You have been baffled and

beaten, the door slammed in your face; you have been caught up by

a strong wind and flung blindly to the ground. You need not cry.

It is only the wing of destiny clipping a wee mortal as it hurls

skyward in its flight.

Not so with Ito. He is all gauzy silk over his shimmering steel. I

left him satisfied, enthusiastic about his priceless simplicity,

jubilant over his grave dexterity, worshipful at his fatherly

equality. Surely, he was a great man worthy of the name.

What had he told me? Nothing.

What had I told him? Everything.

Do not laugh, thinking mine the joy of one self-pleased at his own

prattle. No. It was sheer delight in the knowing of one who towers

above the greatest without conscious effort, and who reaches to the

lowest without condescension. When I shook hands with him I felt

that I had known him all my life. When I saw him into his carriage

ten minutes later I felt that I should call him brother through all

the lives that Buddha promises.

How did he do it? By flattery? How vain! By subtlety? How futile!

There were a few details of person to note--a slim flex of the

wrist as it dangled majestically across his lap, the weatherly gray

old look of battles fought and conquered and of tempests braved

and won; then always that inscrutable squint of the brown-black

eyes with their yellow whites. For the rest you must seek it in

that alchemy which the world, in spite of poets and prophets

innumerable, seems still to overlook.

* * * * *

In the last quarter century the Marquis Ito has made the same

change in his attitude toward the Japanese house of peers that

Gladstone made in his lifetime on the slavery question. In the

beginning he believed--or at least contended--that it should hold

but one allegiance--toward the Emperor. Now he believes that it

should owe a duty to the people, as well. Count Ogura, leader of

the opposing political party, has had the honor of bringing him

around. Ogura from the first has been a stanch democrat. Ito has

been neither imperialist nor democrat; he has been both. Like every

successful constructive statesman he has been an opportunist,

taking things as they existed and improving them as he could. And

he has had as phenomenal a success as any man that ever lived. His

attitude on the peers question alone will illustrate the manner of

his policy. In the beginning he feared to make too great a breach

from the old ways, not sure that either people or peers would stand

it. Slowly he released the old beliefs, educating his countrymen,

by other innovations, to the new. Now when he finds that neither

peers nor populace will stampede at so complete a revolution he

forsakes that consistency which is the weakness of little minds.

* * * * *

Again to-day I came across Marquis Ito--his mark. In this Japanese

room made of a roof on pegs, with walls of paper shutters, and

its floor ten blanketed mats, there are three decorations. They

belong to a hotel of the second class. First is a spray of lordly

wistaria, leaning slender and dainty from a majolica vase. Next

is a bronze statue of a Chinese prophet, sword-habited and

tiara-coiffured. The third faces me, leaning above the sliding

paper doors. It is a motto in Chinese characters, two yards long

and a yard wide. At the left end is a signature and below the

signature two seals, one an ochrish yellow, the other vermilion.

For days that motto has stared at me its baffling puzzle. Were it

the conventional lettering of any language but that of the East

I would not be so much concerned. But in the dreamy half light

of evening or in filmy moonbeams these ideographs dance; they

cry aloud; they gesticulate; they demand utterance. Each stroke

is masterly; each separate character a picture--more a poem! I

am haunted by their blazing signals. Are they of appeal, or of

warning, or of blessing? I try to study them out and fancy I

can make a tortoise of the first. The last is a straight dash,

the exclaimer of a prodigious font of type, clasped by two

crossbeams. Perhaps this ideograph shows a man embraced by welcome

arms--appropriate for a bedroom. At last my curiosity bubbles over

and I drag Kato in to translate.

“It is very difficult to explain the meaning,” he says. “It is

simple to a Japanese, but impossible to a foreigner. The first

character is a tortoise, which to us is the symbol of wisdom

and eternity. The next means to pray. The last shows pilgrims

climbing the sacred mountain, Fujiyama. That straight dash with the

cross-beams is the crater with clouds floating about it.”

“The motto thus means, ‘Pray that you may be as a tortoise on the

sacred mountain.’”

“Yes. It means to wish eternal wisdom and happiness to the dweller

in this room.”

“And the signature?”

Kato looks again. “Hiburimo Ito,” he spells. “The Marquis Ito.”

“The Marquis Ito,” I cry.

“There is only one,” says he.

“The motto was given by him to the master of this house. See! the

yellow and red seals are his. He did the work himself. This is the

mark of his brush.”

“Is he a friend of the master?”

“No. But the master has a friend who came from the same province,

Tosa, in the south. It is called the Statesman Province, for Ogura

and Komura also came from there, while Satsuma in the west, from

which Yamagata, Oyama and Hirose came, is called the Warrior’s

Province. This friend went to school with the Marquis Ito when they

were both poor and now that the Marquis is rich and powerful his

friend asked him for some motto of good fortune. And he was given

this. It is a custom.”

* * * * *

The Marquis Ito says but little. Of whatever subjects he speaks he

illumines, and he never hesitates to break into a conversation if

it interests him. Some time ago he rivaled that unknown New Yorker

who achieved fame for a single toast of nine words:

“The new woman, once our superior, now our equal.”

It was at a reception and the Marquis interrupted a discussion of

the difference between American and Japanese women to say to an

American: “When I marry I take on a head servant; when you marry

you become one.”

It was only last week at a banquet that Mrs. Wood, wife of the

United States Military Attaché at the legation here, was asking

Baron Komura, Minister of Foreign Affairs, if it was true that the

Japanese government had made an appropriation to buy back the

heirlooms which needy Japanese of good family had sold abroad.

“No,” said Komura, “we are too poor. What is gone is gone. It

may be that some private parties are buying them up, but not the

government. I have heard that even some of the temple relics, their

most prized bronzes and lacquers, have gone. The people forsake the

old gods, the priest gets poor, the curio man comes with gold and

away go the musty monuments of centuries.”

At this moment, with an almost sinister frown the Marquis Ito

interrupted. “What’s that?” he called. The conversation was

repeated. The inscrutable eyes closed, then he opened them with a

squint and said to Mrs. Wood:

“America can have all the relics Japan has--her bronzes, gilts,

ivories, lacquers, silks, her temples, everything but the land and

the people--for gold. We want American gold.”

“Couldn’t America buy Japan?” asked Mrs. Wood, playfully.

The old man mused a while. Finally he said:

“I have no doubt that America has the enterprise to build a ship

large enough to float our island to the Golden Gate and anchor it

there, but if you do that I bid America beware that we do not annex

her!”

Chapter Sixteen

THE COST OF TAKING PORT ARTHUR

Port Arthur stood formidable and haughty on the night of February

8th, when Togo first saluted it with his turret six-inchers. That

salute of the shell was lengthy and costly. For ten months it kept

up from nearly seven hundred guns, approximately two hundred and

forty in the navy and three hundred and fifty in the army. Each gun

fired its weight in metal twenty times over. About two thousand

tons of bursting shell went into that proud and mighty citadel,

cordoned with its cunningly hung and ingeniously intrenched forts.

Each firing cost an average of twenty-four gold dollars. Thus

the moneyed treasure hurled against the fortress exceeded thirty

millions. And men--but of the human later.

What bait lured and what force repelled that money and blood? To

comprehend we must review briefly Port Arthur, its fortification,

and its siege. Nature there was the greatest ally the Russians

ever had. Topographically, Port Arthur was fitted with a defense

that taught tricks to the most skillful engineers. Two ranges of

hills, almost concentric, surrounded the harbor. The crests of

these were broken by a series of successive conical elevations.

Here was a suggestion that the mightiest engineer--an Archimedes

or a Michelangelo--would have seized. The Italians who helped the

Russians in laying out their defenses, taking these concentric

ranges for the primary grand scheme, ran completely about the

city two concentric lines of fortifications. Massive masonry

forts were built on the shoulders of the high summits, and were

connected by continuous defensive works. Hugging the city close,

distant from one thousand yards to a mile and a half, lay the

inner line of permanent defense, whose backbone was an old Chinese

wall, broadened, deepened, and loopholed. Beyond, and filling the

interstices between these forts, were semi-permanent works. The

forts were so related to each other that they gave mutual support.

Each one was dominated by fire from neighboring heights, and it

often happened that the Japanese seized positions, which, though

untenable for the Russians, they were unable to hold themselves.

The slopes of the hills were steep. Also, they were smooth and free

from cover. To rush the works charges had to be made over a broad

glacis, swept by the shrapnel, machine gun, and rifle fire of the

defenders. Should the assault survive the scientific deathtraps

of this danger zone, the valiant few were confronted by massive

masonry parapets, through which they could not force an entrance.

This wonderful network of fortifications, strong by nature, strong

by virtue of the skill and care with which it had been built, was

distinguished from all previous defensive works by the fact that

here for the first time were used all those terrible agencies of

war which science in the last century has rendered available. There

were steel shields to protect skirmishers, 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 diabolic inventions, the sum of which, allied to this

stupendous fortification of nature by man, enabled the military

authorities of the world to pronounce upon Port Arthur that

superlative word, impregnable.

Reducing the scale of this fortress, we might see in miniature

its intricate construction if we looked upon the hair-clippers

of a barber. The forts were the teeth, the murderous scientific

apparatus the death blades of this monstrous clipper. For five

months they shaved clean everything that approached them.

At the beginning of the operations, in the War Office at Tokyo, the

plan of campaign against Port Arthur was laid out as all Japanese

campaigns are laid out--by the General Staff. With a passion for

detail and a mania for precision, the fortress was plotted and the

operations against it mathematically separated into stages. Now

that Port Arthur calls on history for an answer, the exact nature

of this plan, and how rigidly it was adhered to, may be for the

first time disclosed.

There were to be four stages in the reduction of the fortress.

The work was divided into stages, because the Japanese are so

practical that they must plainly see on paper what they project.

They live by system. They have reduced accomplishment to a problem

of economics. They believe that the most successful man is he who

makes the closest analysis. It was fore-ordained that they would be

successful, for they analyzed Port Arthur.

[Illustration]

The first of the four stages laid out comprehended the capture

of the Chinese wall, which is the main line of permanent Russian

land defense on the east, and its protection of twelve forts;

three permanent, four semi-permanent, and three redoubts. The

second stage comprehended the taking of Etzeshan and Anzushan (the

Table and Chair forts), which are considered the keys to the west

defenses, with the lunettes, batteries, and redoubts which formed

their out and in works. The third stage comprehended the capture of

the town of Port Arthur, and the great sea forts located on the

Tiger’s Tail and Golden Hill. The fourth and final stage, in which

it was expected that the desperation of defense would mount to the

height of a fierce guerrilla warfare, comprehended the taking of

the tip of the peninsula, called Liaotishan.

The first stage was the most vital military move, for once

accomplished it meant the crumbling of the Russian line, though the

defense might linger after that for months.

The second stage was politically the great essential, for not until

it was well accomplished could the world be told that Port Arthur

had fallen. Through this Chair fort the town was taken ten years

ago, but now it rises so formidably that the Japanese have not even

dared to attack it. It looks like the crater of an extinct volcano,

bulwarked with loose sand at a seventy-five degree angle, so that

on assault men sink to their knees and lie inert under merciless

fire. “203” was but a semi-permanent outwork of this Chair fort,

which dominated it.

Such was the project. Execution needed only Stoessel and his

defenders to make the plan of the Tokyo War Office precise. They

failed on the defense of the last three stages, so that when the

Japanese accomplished the first stage, Port Arthur fell. Nogi’s

original intention was to pierce the Russian right center through

the line of forts from Keekwanshan and Ehrlungshan, while he

demonstrated on the left, where lie “203” and Etzeshan. He pursued

this plan to the end and was consistent through a bitter, costly

half-year. He planned to enter Port Arthur, through Keekwanshan

and Ehrlungshan, on August 21st. He entered Port Arthur through

Keekwanshan and Ehrlungshan, January 2d--four months and a half

late--but he got there, as he originally planned.

It was predicted that if the Russian line could be broken at any

one point, the fortress would fall. No one but the mathematical

heads in the War Office took stock in the idea of the four grand

stages. But Nogi and his generals held to the plan by foreseeing

beyond the actual defense, by checkmating it at every point that

might possibly have bearing upon these various stages, and as a

chess player surveys every possibility of defeat, counting on

consummate ability in the opponent. Then they finally got what

they were after, even before they expected it.

Had Nogi met what his foresight led him to expect--a consistently

determined defense--his capture of Ehrlungshan and Keekwanshan in

the last days of December would have left him only with one-quarter

of his work finished. But as a general giving full credit to his

adversary, he could not count on the Russian failure in the two

vital respects which spelled the final surrender. These two vital

things were ammunition and _morale_. If the Russians had had plenty

of ammunition and had been pervaded, rank and file, with Stoessel

spirit, they would have fought on while they held Anzushan and

Etzeshan, and all of that great chain of forts from Golden Hill

through to Liaotishan.

The siege of Port Arthur presents many phases--military, political,

ethnical, scientific, spectacular, and dramatic--in short, all the

great vital phases of human life. About the siege of Sebastopol the

libraries hold thirty volumes--about Plevna twenty. Port Arthur

surpasses both. Politically, vaster interests were at stake. In

a military sense the operations were more extensive; so we cannot

hope to cover the ground delved into by hundreds of writers about

former sieges.

We can but pick the grand salient features that seared themselves

into the memory of the few who lived through it. Of these the chief

is the proof that human tenacity and valor are as great to-day as

at any time in the world’s history. The great guns at Port Arthur

were marvelous. They impressed one with that power seen in a jungle

of elephants, yet they were sensitive and delicate as a little

girl. The battling under searchlights was as grand a spectacle

as the imagination can devise. The ingenuity and precision of

the movements outlined by generals bred in all the duplicity and

culture of the schools, and reared through every vicissitude of

camp and march, were astounding. The ingenious, quiet deviltry of

the engineer puzzled the brain. But all would have been useless

without the private soldier. The boy in khaki--he did the trick.

And after all the story of Port Arthur has been thrashed out, its

questions settled, that soldier of Nippon, with a calm, plain

face, stamped with the soil, rises supreme, saluting his equally

glorified yokel brother from the Trans-Baikal.

Shells make a lot of noise and led the hotel correspondents many

miles away to see blood on the face of the moon, but at Port Arthur

their damage was out of all proportion to their cost. Only one out

of four hundred of the Russian shells was effective in the Japanese

camp. It is not likely that more than twice that ratio--namely, one

out of two hundred--would cover the proper statistics of Japanese

effectiveness. Of course, the Japanese had the great advantage of a

plain target.

Bullets did the harm. There were about forty million discharged

during the five months of the siege, and forty million bits of

steel flying with cutting velocity are bound to hit some hearts in

Japan and other hearts in Russia. The weight of the total number

of men killed at Port Arthur on both sides, if compared with the

weight of the steel sent from the large and small guns of both

armies, will show that the death of every soldier cost his weight

in metal.

But the deaths were not frightful. It was life that was frightful.

In the contested redoubt of the Eternal Dragon, where the Japanese

drove the tip of their wedge into the Russian right center in

mid-August, and which they held against numberless sorties for

three months, the Japanese soldiers lived in conditions that would

be impossible to men of any other race. The enemy was within forty

yards of them on three sides. Their way back to their base of

supplies was across half a mile of valley, every yard of which

was swept by the enemy’s fire. Few prisoners were taken on either

side. Through the four chief months of the siege only seventy-one

Russians were captured, and the number of Japanese found alive in

Port Arthur at the time of its surrender was less than one hundred.

There are a few instances on record of mutual devotion between the

enemies, which is vastly heightened by the other frightful record

of mutual unswerving hatred. One day a Russian sergeant appeared

in front of a Japanese trench, bearing over his shoulder a wounded

Japanese lieutenant, whom he had picked up with a shattered leg

under the parapet of one of his own forts. This sergeant had been

on the point of thrusting his bayonet through the brain of the

Japanese lieutenant, when the other man moved, moaned, opened his

eyes, and from his pocket took a bit of biscuit, offering it to the

other. The Russian dropped his bayonet, bound the shattered leg,

hoisted the Japanese to his shoulders, and walked by moonlight that

night to the opposing trenches.

Chapter Seventeen

A CONTEMPORARY EPIC

That Port Arthur would fall on the 21st of August was believed by

every man in the Japanese army; the island nation was sure of it;

the world thought it certain. And the Japanese did try. They lacked

neither the bravery, nor the numbers, nor the skill. They failed

because Nature stood in their way. Nature built the mountains,

and without the mountains the Russians could not have defended

Port Arthur as they did. The forts were so arranged that each was

commanded by two or three others, and some by ten or twelve. One

taken, the others immediately concentrated fire there and made

it untenable. One thing only could be done--take all the forts

simultaneously. Since there were seventeen permanent, forty-two

semi-permanent, and eighteen improvised fortifications, two miles

of fortified Chinese wall, and a triple line of trenches eight and

a half miles long, defended by a stubborn foe, this was impossible.

“Impossible?” That is an English word. The Japanese do not

understand it. “You are expected to do the impossible things,” read

the first imperial order their troops received. They have done

impossible things. So have the Russians done impossible things.

The ordeal has raised the story of the siege of Port Arthur into

an epic. Without the perspective of Troy, it has some of Troy’s

grandeur. The glory, to us, is that we have touched shoulders with

an age that has produced men as willing as any ever have been to

fight nobly and die heroically.

[Illustration: HOME

The Shack occupied for three months (800 yards from the firing

line) by General Oshima, Commander of the Ninth Division.]

[Illustration: PLUNDER

Adjutant Hori, Secretary to General Oshima shown standing amid a

quantity of plunder from one of the captured Forts.]

Skill and bravery had their value, of course, but to take Port

Arthur a man was needed--a man like Grant, who could fight it out

on one line all summer and all winter. This man was Nogi; with a

face parchment-crinkled, brown like chocolate, with beard gray,

shaded back to brown where it met the skin, so that he seemed a

monotone in sepia, with eyes small and wide apart, perfect teeth,

tiny, regular nose, and a beautiful dome of a head flaring out from

the temples in tender and eloquent curves. He stands five feet ten,

unusually tall for a Japanese, showing the loose power of a master

in his joints and in that mighty jowl shaded by the gray-brown

beard. He has had to weather fierce storms of public indignation

in Japan for two reasons--because he did not take Port Arthur as

scheduled; and because he sacrificed so many lives. Turn over

the pages of our history and read the story of Grant’s campaign

from the Wilderness, through Cold Harbor and Spottsylvania, to

Petersburg and Richmond, and you will read the story of Nogi’s

campaign against Port Arthur. In northern Virginia the mighty

battle-ax cut down the keen Damascene sword. On the Liaotung Thor’s

hammer smashed the straying fasces of an overripe empire. The North

cried out that the man who felt himself an agent of Destiny in

conquering northern Virginia was a butcher; just so Japan cried

“butcher” against the iron man who reduced Port Arthur.

In 1894 Nogi saw the Chinese besieged and Port Arthur taken by a

feint. He saw the big Japanese demonstration then made against

the front while the bulk of the army slipped along the coast to

the west and south, enveloping the enemy’s left wing and driving

the silly Chinese into a net where they were caught fast under

the great forts, which speedily fell. Again, apparently, the

same strategy was about to be repeated. But instead of making

the real attack in the rear of the Russian left flank, Nogi made

only a demonstration there, where “203” is on the west, and drove

his straight, hard blow into the eastern line of permanent land

defense. To pierce the Russian right center, enfilade its left

flank, and stand Port Arthur on end--this was the plan. Gloriously

it was attempted, gloriously it failed. Regiment after regiment

went in, regiment after regiment went down. Corpses lay eight deep

in the creek which ran red to the sea.

This grand assault--the first--began August 19th. For seven days

and nights without cessation the battle raged, in the vain endeavor

to pierce that right center. It is said that the Japanese are all

heroes--that none are cowards. Some are also sensible. There was

the Eighth Regiment, which, when ordered in to the assault where

the regiment before it had been swept down, sent back through its

commanding officer the word that the way was impossible. This word

was so new to the Brigade-General that he ordered the regiment

to the rear for fatigue duty, the worst punishment that can come

to Japanese soldiers in an army where there are no guard-houses.

Another regiment, the immortal Ninth, was ordered to cross the

field to the foot of the slope on which lay, dead and dying, many

of the men of the regiment which had gone before. The Colonel,

Takagagi, surveying the task set for his regiment, sent back a

report that it was not feasible. The Brigade-General Ichinobe

replied hotly that one regiment was enough to take one battery.

Takagagi stepped out of the ravine, in which he had been seeking

shelter, at the head of his command. Before, he had been marching,

as colonels usually do, in the rear, while his line officers led

the advance. Now, he leaped forward up the slope, out in front of

his men. A dozen paces from the ravine he fell with four bullets

through his breast. The Lieutenant-Colonel took up the lead and

was shot a few yards farther on. The majors were wiped out. Every

captain but one went down. The last Captain, Nashimoto, in charge

of D Company, found himself, at length, under the Chinese Wall

with seventeen men. Looking down upon the shell-swept plain,

protected for the moment from the sharpshooters above, with that

handful of heroes, a mile and a half in advance of the main body of

the Japanese army, he grew giddy with the success of his attempt.

Of a sudden he concluded that he could take Port Arthur with his

seventeen men. He started in to do it. There was only the wall

ahead--the wall and a few machine-guns--beyond, the city itself--a

five minutes’ run would have brought him to the citadel. He scaled

the wall and fell across it--his back bullet-broken. Eight of his

men got over, scaling the height beyond, called Wangtai or the

Watch Tower, a place to which the Russian generals formerly rode

on horseback to survey the battlefield. On this slope, for three

months, in full sight of both armies, the eight lay rotting. The

Russians referred to them as “The Japanese Garrison.”

This was the high tide of the advance made in August. Nogi paid a

frightful price to learn his terrible lesson--that he could not so

quickly wipe out a foe thus allied with Nature. The lesson cost him

twenty-five thousand men. After the first ghastly assault he sat

down with his army and went sensibly and slowly at the enormous

task. Instead of storming Port Arthur with his army, he and Kodama

saw that he must dig into it. Realizing that Nogi was sure to pass

into the fortress through the earth where he had failed to enter

above ground, Kodama might well have chuckled as he said that he

held the besieged city in the hollow of his hand.

Yet both Kodama and Nogi thoroughly realized what they had to

face. The permanent forts of the Russians were built on the

advantageous shoulders that projected two-thirds of the way down

the slopes. The mountains, fortunately for the Russians, were so

situated that, though irregular in detail, yet their line formed

a complete semicircle enveloping the city. Making use of these

natural advantages, they were able to build a grand fortress with

seventeen locks, for every one of which they held the key. The

Japanese might spring one of the locks, but the fortress could

be instantly closed with any or all of the other sixteen. Each

depression between the main shoulders of the mountains was used for

the emplacement of a battery. Batteries and forts were connected

with barbed-wire entrenchments, and the glaces were made sheer and

slippery. Some were formed of concrete, some were built crater-like

of a sliding sand, so that a man advancing found himself slipping

to the knees and quagmired. Around the great forts moats of

unknown depth and width were built. In these moats caponieres were

placed to enfilade daring assaulters. Some of the barbed wire was

electrically charged, so that men attempting to cut it with nippers

were electrocuted. Down the forward slopes of the mountains mines

were sunk in the earth; some were exploded by contact with an

electric button on the surface, others by direct contact from some

tripping man as he passed over the spot. Around two of the forts

torpedoes taken from the ships were buried, and their finlike stems

were turned into contact flanges projecting from the earth. All

these defenses were connected with a network of covered ways; in

two places deep tunnels ran from fort to fort, and from all of the

principal forts back to the Chinese Wall was a deep tunnel. Behind

the wall lay machine guns, the most deadly weapons in modern

warfare, sprinkling bullets as a hose sprinkles water.

The very names of these forts characterized the forms of the

granite of which they were built and out of which they rose. The

Eternal Dragon, the Two Dragons, the Chair, the Table, the Lion’s

Mane, and that flippant old rooster, who is the grimmest and

sauciest of them all, the Cock’s Comb, stood out defiant in Chinese

hoariness.

To get across the plain, up the slopes, and into those forts by

digging trenches and tunnels was the problem, and the Japanese were

able to solve it. In those two months one hundred men at a time did

the job, for only that number could work at once in the tunnels.

Often shells found them out; rifle-fire harassed them every hour.

The loss was many companies, but they never lacked the one hundred

to do the work, always by night, always silently; crawling through

the night, pick and shovel in hand, came that antlike hundred, the

individuals constantly varying, as figures in a kaleidoscope where

death is at the handle, but never quitting its terrible task.

In darkness a company begins its labor in unison. Guided by clever

engineers, the picks advance through the blackness; the shovelers

smartly after. The Russian searchlight swings menacingly to play

upon the little group. A shell hurtles in. A dozen men fall,

some never to rise again. Up with the first aid, down with the

stretchers, to the rear with the victims. Advance another squad--on

goes the hundred. So for two months--and then through the finished

trenches the rest of the army walked impudently in the broad sun,

laughing at those useless bullets singing so saucily overhead.

The plain lay overripe with harvests, but not a living thing was

on its surface. The autumn sun hung indolent and golden. Blackened

villages were deserted. Among the chain of forts, bristling with

cannon, there lay one with its nearest side completely honeycombed.

All the other forts were silent and bare on their near sides.

That honeycomb was made by the gridironing of Japanese trenches.

Between it and the line of mountains, parallel to the Russians on

the north, the ground was ridged with mounds of fresh earth, as if

some gigantic mole had zigzagged across the plain. From neither

army was there the slightest evidence of life, except that between

the two lay that telltale fresh earth, as though a huge animal had

been busy in the night. Yet, behind the northern parallel range,

the distance of a rifle-shot from the Russians in Port Arthur,

ominously silent, monstrously at work in preparation, was the

Japanese army--siege-mortars cocking their twenty tons of steel on

solid masonry as a Mauser pistol cocks on a man’s fist; monster

naval guns, rakish devils, buried in the earth, with frightful

noses menacing the blue; howitzers perched on peaks; lines of

transport laden with rice and biscuit; hospitals brilliant as the

sunlight and quiet as its stillness; regiments of men receiving

instructions--how to escape beri-beri, how to keep nightdews from

the rifle-barrels, how to bind a fractured leg, how to scupper an

adversary in a hand-to-hand fight--but on the field of battle,

on the opposite sides of which the opposing hosts were held like

hounds in leash, there was nothing human--only silence, beauty,

sublimity.

From September 19th to the 25th occurred what is known as the

second assault, although it might more properly be described as a

reconnaissance in force. As an assault it failed. Then on the last

day in October the war-demon awoke again to his full ferocity.

Where the twenty-five thousand had been lost in August, a division

could now be poured right up to the parapets of the Russian forts

without losing a man. Coast-defense guns had been brought from

Japan to battle against the Russia coast-defense guns, which

had been turned landward. The Japanese had hauled their guns by

hand, eight hundred men to a gun, through mud, up the mountains,

in the dark, under fire, and had placed them in silence on solid

concrete foundations. But after they had crossed the valley the

Japanese still had a frightful obstacle to face. There was but one

way to get to the forts--up the slopes. Every inch of these was

commanded by guns trained carefully through three months of actual

use against a real foe and through four previous years against an

imaginary one. The Russians lay confident and calm above their

terrible fortress. They did not have to bluster with bombardments.

They knew their strength. They merely waited until the Japanese

advance reached a certain spot on the slopes. It was not a question

of aiming the guns, as it is where troops are constantly fighting

over fresh ground. All that was necessary was to pull the triggers.

There was about the proceeding little of the sport of war. The

order to advance was as certainly fatal as the hangman’s signal in

an execution-chamber, and when the Japanese did advance the few who

survived the murderous fire found behind those superb entrenchments

men just as brave, just as cunning, just as strong as they

themselves. If it is ever asked which is the braver, Japanese or

Russian, no answer can be given. No one nation distinguished itself

at Port Arthur. The glory belongs to both.

It was in the third grand assault, when the final operations

commenced, that General Ichinobe, the commanding officer who

had ordered the sacrifice of Takagagi and his immortal Ninth

Regiment and who had summarily sent the sulking regiment to the

rear, became the Japanese Marshal Ney. Two battalions under his

command succeeded in entering the P redoubt, an outwork of the

great Cock’s Comb fortification. Ichinobe left his battalions

after midnight, secure in the conviction that his work had been

successful. Toward three o’clock in the morning he was roused by

an orderly, who reported that the men had been driven from the P

redoubt. Ichinobe was then half a mile as the crow flies, nearly

one and a half miles as the trenches lay across the valley, from

the slope of the redoubt. Leaping from his couch, he called about

him his staff-officers, issued hurried orders to the reserves, and,

at the head of his immediate followers, ran through the zigzag

trenches. Reaching the foremost line, now under the fire of Russian

machine-guns, he found his men not demolished, but surprised,

outnumbered, and being driven sullenly back. Drawing his saber,

Ichinobe thrust the ranks aside, passed through, and charged up the

slope, leading his heroes for the second time into the contested

fort. With his own hand he killed three Russians. When dawn came

his brigade occupied the P redoubt. His immediate commander,

General Oshima, had an account of the exploit telegraphed to the

Emperor at Tokyo. That afternoon an Imperial order reached the

army, christening the fort “Ichinobe.”

In the assault of August 19th to 26th, the few men who reached the

parapets had received in their faces storms of what the Chinese

call “stinkpots”; that is, balls of fresh dung. This assault

wholly failed. The dead were left to rot, and the wounded were

shot as they lay, the stench of the corpses being used as a weapon

of offense against the Japanese, who were trying to maintain

the advantage they had gained at the foot of the slope. The

demonstration of September 19th, which also failed, was met with

hand-grenades of guncotton. In the third assault on October 29th,

halfway up the Cock’s Comb, the advance stumbled over a mine, and

the entire lower shoulder of the mountain was blown into the air,

taking with it some twenty-five men, heads awry, legs and arms

twisted, trunks shattered. Nevertheless, new volunteers advanced

through the crater thus formed, up the glacis of the redoubt, until

they reached a new and dangerous obstruction. This was a moat so

cunningly concealed under the very edge of the parapets that an

observer below could gain no hint of its existence even with

the most powerful field-glasses. The ditch was so deep that once

in, a man could not get out even by climbing over another man’s

shoulders. To fall in was certain death, for in every turn of the

concealed moat was a masonry projection called by the cunning men

who devise such traps, a caponiere. These caponieres were built

of stone and covered with earth. They were tiny forts, concealing

and protecting four or five Russian riflemen and a machine-gun.

Consequently, under perfect protection and with their foe in

limited area, trapped like woodchucks in a hole, unable to escape,

the Russians merely had to deal out whistling steel at their

leisure. The Japanese did not falter. The first men who leaped into

that moat knew that they were leaping to certain death, but they

knew, too, that the men in the caponieres could be overwhelmed by

the force of the numbers to come after. The two caponieres were

captured at once.

Under the parapets of this fort, dominated by all the artillery

of the two armies, occurred some of the grimmest fighting that

history records. It was at midnight of the second day of final

occupation. The black mountains lay behind, the black forts in

front, the blacker plain below. A Japanese lieutenant, Oda, asked

for a volunteer _Keissheitai_, or certain-death party. Thirty

_Keissheitai_ men came forward. Oda put himself at their head and

ventured along the bed of the moat toward the rearmost caponiere,

with the idea of capturing it. The fort is very long--about one and

a half times the length of an ocean liner--so he found room and

time for adventure. There was no moon, and the moat was too close

to the Russians for them to depress their searchlights sufficiently

to illuminate it. In the blackness, halfway down the moat, Oda

and his men met a Russian lieutenant prowling with a squad of men

behind him, bent on the recapture of the two caponieres which the

Japanese had seized. They had it out, not with bullets, but bayonet

to bayonet, fist to fist, and even teeth and nails. Oda and the

Russian, in locked embrace, reeled back and forth, falling, rising,

scratching, first one on top and then the other, each losing sight

and control of his men, all of whom were engaged in individual

combats just as savage.

The two leaders, grappling for an opportunity that each sought,

bumping against the walls of the narrow moat, reached, without

knowing it, an embrasure which led to the rear of the fort and into

the gorge. Tripping over this, not knowing where they were going,

the two plunged headlong down the slope. Above frowned two Russian

batteries. Beyond rose the great red-capped sky line of the Cock’s

Comb. A hundred yards, scratched by the stones, smashed by the

shale, they slipped and writhed, until they struck a tiny plateau

halfway down the mountain. Here the two, clinched, stopped as might

a dislodged stone toppling from its socket. In the struggle Oda had

been able to get his right arm free, which he reached over across

his enemy’s back, grasping the hilt of his straight, samurai sword.

Pulling it halfway out of the scabbard, which was tightly lashed to

his waist, he sawed and pulled until the slender, tapering steel

had gashed through the Russian’s clothing, full to his backbone.

Late the following night, after the sun had gone, Oda crawled into

his own trenches at the base of the mountain. His men had been

repulsed by a second party of Russians who had made a sortie to

relieve the first. But, still the Japanese held the two caponieres

in front and the Russians the two in the rear. Oda got no medals

nor applause. Two days later a breast-wound which sent him to a

hospital in Japan saved his life, for had he stayed he would have

certainly gotten himself killed.

The Japanese during the first two nights hastily dug out approaches

and had a partially covered way from the base of the mountain to

the moat. This gave them their vital hold on the north battery of

the Cock’s Comb. So resolute were the Russians in holding every

inch of ground that it was a full month and a half after that

before the Japanese could take the complete fortification. And when

the complete fortification was taken it availed but little, for it

was but one of three great batteries which formed the series known

as East Keekwan, which was itself but a portion of the eastern line

of permanent defenses.

To see how the rest of the great Northeast Keekwan (Cock’s Comb)

Battery was taken is to see how Port Arthur was taken, for all

the forts were reduced in the same way. 203-Meter Hill, the Two

Dragons, the Eternal Dragon, Quail Hill, Wangtai, and the Pine Tree

fell as did the Cock’s Comb. The only difference lay in incident.

It must be remembered that the fight was never over with the taking

of the outer parapet. Inside the forts, beyond the parapets, well

protected by moats and caponieres, was a sheltering earthwork

called the contrascarp, crossing which, storming parties met a

close and unerring fire from men concealed beyond, in ways formed

of timber balks and sandbags, and called traverses. Below these

traverses were galleries where the garrison lived; and below the

galleries were the bombproofs protecting the ammunition. Under the

traverses, covering the galleries and bombproofs, was heavy masonry

from two to three feet thick.

To undertake the capture of the whole chain of fortifications by

such sacrifices as those which gained a single one of the Keekwan

forts might have entailed the extermination of the whole besieging

army and of all the reinforcements which could have been sent to

its support. But with one fortress in the chain in Japanese hands

there was another way--sapping.

Through November the Japanese engineers were busy digging

underground from the advantageous hold they had on the north

battery. They started straight down through the solid rock. Only

a few men could work at a time, and these could dig only while

the trench protecting them, which was a few yards in advance,

was held by their comrades, vigorously firing, to keep down the

Russian garrison, now not more than a hundred feet away. Moreover,

sometimes when the Japanese sappers were half concealed in the

earth, sometimes when they were wholly underground, companies of

desperate Russians would suddenly break forth on them, spurred by

Stoessel’s promise of the Cross of St. George and a money prize to

whoever should break up any Japanese work. Thus at night, hounded

by shells, sleuthed by searchlights, and harassed by heroes from

across the way, the hole was dug. Forty feet down it had to go

to get below the level of the galleries and bombproofs, then

another twenty feet forward to find a spot under the vitals of the

fortification.

Stupendous as the task was, the tunnels were finished at last,

and on December 18th a quarter of a ton of dynamite was placed

in two such mines, and the galleries and bombproofs of the north

battery were blown into the air, with the demolished bodies of some

forty-five men of the garrison.

And even this was only the beginning of the end. Already the

Japanese had accomplished a herculean task. They had sweated,

endured, writhed in agony, died, and they had taken only one

battery. Ahead of them still rose, tier on tier, forts and

batteries, moats and walls, until the soul grew sick to think

that Port Arthur must be bought with sacrifice so vast. But the

Japanese did not turn back, did not weep, showed no despair. They

came to work, to meals, as cheerfully as ever they had done in the

rice paddies. And this, notwithstanding that winter was on them,

that the keen, equinoctial gales blew in from both seas, that the

thermometer fell to zero and below. They were surrounded by charnel

houses of their own making, and protected only by miserable, hasty

dugouts shielded from cold and wind by a few broken boughs, light

shelter-tents, and hastily packed earth. Death was preferred to

a wound, for the wounded had small hope of succor; yet life was

cherished and fostered.

Meanwhile the Russians were busy. They devised a new scheme of

defense. Kerosene was taken through a subterranean gallery of the

Two Dragons into a moat and there poured on piles of straw. Then

they waited.

At the fifth grand assault, when the north battery of the East

Cock’s Comb was taken, the Two Dragons were simultaneously

attacked. A company of Japanese headed for the moat. The kerosene

and straw were set on fire and the men who leaped into the moat,

expecting to find caponieres as they had found them in the Cock’s

Comb, were caught by flame. Many perished miserably. Some valiantly

fought the flames, but few survived. These few--that is, the few

who do the work in warfare--the few who accomplish that for which

the thousands die--made possible the Japanese advance. Through,

over, and beyond these few, the Japanese finally entered Port

Arthur.

Science is well, up to a certain point. Then it becomes useless

and cruel. The genius of the engineer helps the soldier across

the valley and to the parapet, but there leaves him in an agony

of suspense, over electric mines, under dynamite batteries,

crisscrossed by machine guns. If the nerves of this marvelous

soldier survive the ordeal, and if his body escapes the flying

chunks of steel, he is reserved for the extremity of modern

torture--hand-to-hand fighting in scientific warfare. At a moderate

distance he tosses balls of guncotton; he closes with stones and

stinkpots; he parleys with the bayonet, and finishes with teeth and

fists.

[Illustration: IN ACTION

Loading a 4.7 gun of the ordinary field artillery during the

assault of September 20.]

By chance, one morning in September, as the dawn came in, there

was revealed in a captured bombproof one little instance of the

hideousness of the conflict. The arm of a Japanese boy in khaki

hung limply across the back of a huge blond fellow in baggy

trousers. From the hand of the boy had fallen a pistol, which had

caught in the blouse of the big one; it had not fallen too soon,

for just below the muzzle the blouse was matted thick with the

life stream that had welled out in response to the death call.

The big teeth were clinched deep and tight into the little

jugular. On the boy’s slant-eyed face, good-natured, yet stamped

with the strange pathos of a people close to the soil, was written

a mute appeal for mercy. To that appeal there was no answer. The

boy’s dead face stared into the unresponsive block timber of the

bombproof.

In the bloody angle of the Eternal Dragon, the most fiercely

contested zone at Port Arthur, you might have seen these boys

any day of those three frightful midsummer months, when the slim

wedge was being driven inch by inch into the Russian right center.

Everything was covered with the white powder of dried mud. All was

wrecked. The path lay through a series of shell holes, connected

rudely with pick and spade. Up to that point the ground had been

neatly cut, but here it became rough and crude. No inch of dirt

had been unnecessarily touched, because the enemy lay within forty

yards on three sides. The _débris_ of battle was all about--torn

Russian caps, conical and heavy, mingled with the light brown of

Japanese uniforms, cartridge pouches half filled, shattered rifles,

demolished sabres, a gun carriage smashed till the wheel spokes

splintered the breech, rocks pounded by bullets as by a hammer,

and, over the wall, seen as you stole by the chinks, khaki bags,

loose over rotting bones.

All through the night when this bloody angle was first taken and

after it had been protected with trenches from recapture, Oshima,

the general commanding the division, sat in his tent without sleep.

He was shaken by sobs, for he had been compelled to order that the

entrenchments be made of the bodies of the dead and wounded. Only

rock was there and to hold the place a quick shelter was essential.

The half-dead men whose bodies were used by comrades to stop the

steel hail smiled in approval at the work; they knew it was done

for the best, but Oshima could not sleep; he wept bitterly all

night.

Along that bloody angle and through all the eight-mile front for

many months lay on duty the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who

won the victory. He crouched under the parapet, rifle to cheek,

its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. The

tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down the barrel in

deadly aim, made him look like a great cat pausing for a spring.

One leg was drawn up and his cap was pulled viciously over his

eyes. The sun beat upon him as he lay, venomous with pent-up

passion, cut in silhouette against the trench, a shade darker than

the shale. A minute before he had offered tea and cigarettes; now

he dealt out hot lead. He might be a university student, or a

merchant, or a professional man. Wherever he came from he was the

pride of his neighborhood. Physically he was superb--perfect eyes

and teeth, digestion hardy and fit as clockwork; this must have

been so or he would not have been allowed to enlist. Moreover, he

was a veteran of four months’ severe campaigning, seven pitched

battles, and two months’ hard siege. Here he stood, far out on the

firing line, clashed between two civilizations, hurled into the

pallor of conflict, tossed by the greed of nations. Yes. Down there

in the ditches lived the real besieger of Port Arthur. Not science,

nor generalship, nor race bravery reduced Port Arthur; it was done

by men who could live and die with the simple heroism of cavemen

and vikings.

Chapter Eighteen

THE NEW SIEGE WARFARE

One morning in August General Nogi stood before his battalion

commanders at Port Arthur with a pick in his hand. Its nose and

heel had been worn away until the shank of rusted iron resembled

an earth-dappled cucumber. Fondling it, the General said: “Take

a lesson from this Russian pick. Your men must dig. They are too

eager to ask, ‘Why intrench to-night when we are going forward in

the morning?’”

Nogi here went to the heart of his problem. It had cost him

25,000 men to learn that the military engineer must precede siege

assaults, as his brother, the civil engineer, precedes rapid

transit in New York. The lesson, taught by Julius Cæsar to the

legions in Gaul nineteen hundred years ago, Nogi and his heroes

re-learned before Port Arthur in 1904. The advance in that cycle

of time has been not in digging, but in ways of digging. The

Japanese had to cross a valley a mile wide and six miles long,

dominated at all points by every degree of hostile fire. This did

not appall them. They accepted the problem, grappled with it, and

mastered it.

They honeycombed the valley, in the classic manner, with eighteen

miles of trenches and tunnels. The chief element in the problem

was to hide these from an enemy with lookouts above the plain.

“Till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane,” the prophecy that sounded

Macbeth’s doom, had already been heeded by the Russians before

Kuroki’s northern operations. Here the witch, whispering in

Stoessel’s ear, might have warned him of his end when “maize-stalk

fields shall climb the Dragon’s front”; for it was under the

protection of maize-stalks, twisting through a shell-swept plain,

that the sappers crept on their slow but inevitable advance.

The Japanese attaché in South Africa had seen the Boer commandos,

under fire, suddenly vanish in waving stalks of corn, projected,

screen-like, across a telltale front. It was a savage trick,

learned by the Boers from the Kaffirs; and though school-bred

British minds sneered at a ruse apparently so childish, yet many

times their game was lost through such maneuvers. The Boers used

their maize in wholesale fashion, covering their front with deep

layers of whole sheaves. The Japanese improved on this. Students

of nature, disciples of nature, they gave no gross imitations. In

late autumn, over a field battle-tossed for three months, trampled

by two armies, and sickled by the husbandman Death, they advanced,

resurrecting the corn-fields as they went, till the Russian eye

beyond could not guess the point where maize standing by chance

left off and maize erected by besiegers began. Each angle of

advance was concealed by these brown, withered sheaves.

But maize was only the screen, and could not hide the thousands

of tons of earth which had to be taken from the plain. To throw

the earth beside the trenches, thus bringing into Russian sight

a furrow like that of a gigantic plow, would have revealed

the Japanese position as clearly as a blue pencil could have

diagrammed it on white paper.

To hide the earth of this digging was the appalling task. It was

done gloriously. The advance sappers threw their first trickle of

mole-like progress backward between their legs from the furious

indent of their tiny spades. Helpers behind immediately deepened

and widened the rivulet of shelter thus begun. The infantrymen,

closing in at daybreak throughout the hot sun, perfected it, but

the reserves accomplished the new thing. As fast as the earth was

displaced they carried it with gabions and bamboo stretchers back

through the zigzag lines behind the mountain range which concealed

their own heavy guns. Here, parallel with the Russian defense,

mile after mile of fresh-smelling mounds slipped up through the

cautious, industrious months following that frightful August.

Passing across the valley through these tunnels, deep enough to

shelter regiments, three months after the Aceldama of midsummer,

one could, in safety, be frowned on by hostile batteries, distant

three hundred yards, or look into the plain gridironed with cunning

trenches, and, like the foe above, see no evidence of life. The

maize-stalks hid the trench turnings, and though the plain was

alive with its thousands of armed men, even the practiced eye that

had just been among them could not tell where they lay. Where had

the output of that enormous digging gone? As well ask the chipmunk

where he puts the dirt from his hole. It was a new experience for

the Russians to fight a foe who could wiggle through the earth as

easily as he could cross it, and, underneath, escape the death that

he met on top.

Both sides had sailors on land. The Japanese emplaced the navy

six-inch guns in the bottom of a valley. The army field guns were

perched along the peaks in front, from which they could bark down

like noisy house-dogs. But the savage bite came from the big guns,

a quarter of a mile behind, the location of which was mistaken by

the Russians as identical with that of the blustering field-pieces

on the ridge. The sailors did not trust alone to the improbability

of their hiding-place. They cut out earth the size of a ship’s

hull, mended the broken crust with timber balks, and thrust the

noses of the six-inchers out of two square openings that might

have been turret-holes. Thus, entirely protected, though within

easy range of the enemy, they escaped serious injury. This was the

most effective Japanese battery; it has become famous for tenacity.

For the first time coast-defense guns battled with each other.

The Russians turned most of theirs landward. The Japanese learned

that field artillery was useless against either the fleet or the

permanent forts. Such knowledge prompted the assignment of a

naval brigade to the initial bombardment, which, with the first

grand assault, failed. Then they immediately turned to home for

heavier ordnance. Mortars for coast-defense along the Straits of

Shimonoseki and on the Bay of Yezo were all but completed in the

military shops at Osacca. Twenty-six of them were immediately sent

by transport to Dalny, and thence by rail over the tip of the

mended Trans-Siberian to the last station outside the zone of the

Russian fire.

The shipment of these great guns, the mortar-barrel of one

weighing eight tons, up to that point where cranes, steamships,

and locomotives of the finest type were available, was a gigantic

undertaking. Arrived at the shattered station in the night--for

day work was impossible--the task was only begun. From there the

guns were hauled by hand, for horses or Manchu oxen could not be

used where silence and concerted intelligence were essential. Eight

hundred men were detailed to each gun, which was mounted on skids

such as lumbermen use in the North Woods. Four abreast, with hemp

thongs across their shoulders, and all attached to a long cable as

thick as a man’s leg, the men labored on through the mud, after

dark, with the Russian shells flinging out searching challenge over

their heads, occasionally a quart of shrapnel bullets spurting

promiscuously into their ranks. Of the positions to which the

guns were thus taken the nearest were a thousand yards and the

farthest three and a half miles away. Once they were there, no

emplacement of shale or earth, such as sufficed for field artillery

and for naval guns, would do. So under each gun was laid eight

feet of concrete, firm and deep; and when it had hardened the gun

was emplaced. All this was done under fire, in the night, the

men being spat upon frequently by the glare of the searchlight,

pelted sometimes by wind and rain, and, toward the end of autumn,

seared by the winds howling in from two seas. It was prodigious

toil, obscure heroism unbelievable. But it was successful, for

it was this coast-defense artillery that sank the Russian fleet.

None other could have done it. The monster labor of placing these

guns on the bleak Manchurian hills, from which they have contested

with the finest defenses in the world, is one of the thrilling

engineering feats of modern times.

For the first time in history armies battled under searchlights.

There had before been fights at sea, and at Kimberley a few

skirmishes under searchlights; but in front of Port Arthur they

have lighted up decisive engagements, extensive maneuvers, and vast

losses. Science has intensified war. It has limited numerical loss,

but it has increased individual suffering; and, as in modern city

life, it strains brain and nerves to the breaking-point.

In August, for seven days and seven nights without cessation, a

great battle was fought--the first grand assault, which failed

and failed and failed until Nogi learned his lesson. Maneuvers as

intricate and almost as extensive as those in the north at Liaoyang

were conducted alternately under sun, moon, and searchlight.

The crux of this action rested on one of Stoessel’s searchlight

tricks, played on the night of the seventh blow of Nogi’s hammer,

desperately driving a wedge into the fortress. All the afternoon

the Japanese artillery had been fiercely bombarding the ridges

of the Cock’s Comb, the Eternal Dragon, and the Two Dragons. One

by one the Russian batteries ceased firing. It seemed that they

were silenced. Night fell, with prospects fair for assault. A

rising storm increased the Japanese hope, for in wind and rain

the searchlights would be nullified. Then, as night and rain came

down together, the searchlights struggling with both, the Japanese

shrapnel opened up against the lights. They had tried before,

unsuccessfully, to reach the dynamos hidden in the hills. This time

the attempt apparently succeeded. The man behind the light waited

until a Japanese shell burst in the line of vision between him and

his foes, and then turned off the switch, giving the Japanese the

impression that the light had been shattered. In this manner, one

after another, three of the searchlights playing over the center

of the field were “shattered.” With lights and guns apparently out

of the contest, and favored by the storm and the night, Japanese

expectation rose higher.

After midnight the most desperate of the eleven assaults conducted

through the seven days was made against the Cock’s Comb and the

Eternal Dragon. Halfway up the slope of the Cock’s Comb the three

“shattered” lights, converging at one point, threw the advance out

in silhouette against the red earth and the white shale. At the

same moment the “shattered” batteries opened up, every gun alive.

Simultaneously a regiment of Siberian sharpshooters sortied from

the Two Dragons, caught the flanks in their onslaught, and all but

annihilated the two regiments in front. Reinforced, bringing to the

task that dour pluck that has given the Anglo-Saxon his hold on

his big corner of earth, a quality the possession of which by the

Japanese was once questioned, the reserves hammered the Siberians

into their trenches; and though the assault against the Cock’s Comb

failed, shortly after dawn the Eternal Dragon fell. This was the

tip of the wedge, driven at fearful cost into the Russian right

center, and was the objective needed by the engineers to outline

across the valley the vast mining operations of those three months.

Between the hostile lines, held all summer and autumn with

desperate determination, lay a zone on which the dead were not

buried or the wounded succored. To send Red Cross men into this

field was to lose two fighting units for every one saved, and no

general would be guilty of such folly. The intensity of scientific

conditions, the forces of which are the searchlight and the star

bomb, the military engineer and the hyposcope, thus brought the

fulfillment of Archibald Forbes’s prophecy, made twenty years ago.

The time has come, as he said it would, when the wounded cannot be

rescued from a battlefield.

Kimberley saw the dawn of the fireworks branch of warfare. It was

left for Port Arthur to bring into permanent use this _feu de joie_

of holiday nights, a delight in peace, in war a spy. Rockets,

such as we use on the Fourth of July, bursting above the plain,

threw phosphorus over the advancing sappers and lighted up acres as

though by candelabra of stars. The Russians used three batteries of

such star bombs, and their dazzle added spectacle to horror. Some

Japanese officers contended that they caused no annoyance, but my

observation of the results was that they gave annoyance, but were

not a decisive factor. By lying low, advancing troops could always

escape being seen when the light came their way.

It was to be expected that a people like the Japanese, inventive,

versatile, and industrious, would develop extraordinary resources

when confronted with such a problem as Port Arthur, the reducing

of which has caused them great agony and cost vast treasure.

Archimedes would have rejoiced to know Colonel Imazawa. Major

Yamaoka of General Nogi’s staff once said: “The world makes too

much fuss over the unreasoning bravery of the private soldier. It

pays too little attention to the obscure effort of the engineer,

who risks as much, but with full realization of what it means.”

Yamaoka was speaking of Imazawa. The two are friends.

Imazawa’s most effective device was the wooden grenade gun, an

invention to save assaulters from death by their own explosives. He

found that a soldier carrying hand-grenades of guncotton up a slope

under fire, if properly hit, became a more frightful menace to his

comrades than an opposing mine. So he made a wooden barrel three

feet long, erected it at an angle of forty-five degrees on a wooden

upright, and by a catch-spring tossed the balls of guncotton from

it several hundred yards into the Russian parapet.

After the taking of Hatchimakiyama (the Turban Fort), Imazawa found

his men for the first time on a height above the Russian trenches.

Then he invented the dynamite wheel. This is a steel cylinder

containing five hundredweight of dynamite, with a projecting shield

for soldiers who roll it forward under fire until it reaches the

declivity down which it is hurled. The opposing trench precipitates

the explosion.

Imazawa also improved the saphead shield, used by besiegers since

the Middle Ages. Formerly it was a heavy log of wood, protected by

armor-plate, behind which pioneer soldiers advanced their trenches

when close to the enemy and under outpost fire. A solid log was too

heavy for the Japanese purposes, so Imazawa contrived a framework

of kiri-wood, both light and tough, over which he built a steel

shield such as Maxim put on his machine-gun. The shield stuck out

in advance of the framework like a cow-catcher on a locomotive. It

was rolled out of the saphead one or two feet toward the enemy.

Behind it two sappers, on their bellies, dug out from under their

legs the beginning of a wide, safe trench in which, two days later,

a regiment could find shelter. Nervous work this, with bullets

raining overhead like hail on a tin roof; but Imazawa made it

practicable.

Before he finally hit on his grenade gun, Imazawa employed a

bamboo grenade lift, his first device to let assaulters hurl their

explosives into redoubts without danger to themselves. These were

twenty-foot lengths of heavy bamboo, to the ends of which balls of

guncotton were tied. Two soldiers carried one of these lifts up a

slope, projected the grenade over a trench or a parapet, and let

the furious Russians smash it and themselves into destruction.

The last thing Imazawa did was a mistake--not his, but still a

mistake. In preparing for the third grand assault on October 29th,

after the sapheads had been worked to within a hundred yards of the

parapet on the Two Dragons redoubt, it was found that a dry moat

separated the Japanese from their prey. The width and depth of this

moat were difficult to determine. In the most fiercely contested

zone, and on a plateau so situated that it could not be accurately

seen from any of the heights possessed by the Japanese, its exact

nature remained a mystery. Scouting was difficult, for it was

commanded not only by the batteries of the Two Dragons, but also by

the batteries of the greatest forts at Port Arthur--the Chair, the

Table, the Cock’s Comb, and Golden Hill. To reach it a scout would

have to cross several hundred yards of red earth, bare to every

sight, and commanded by sharpshooters. Of those who went in for

information about that mysterious dry moat, for a week none came

back. Finally one scout, more cautious than the rest, returned and

reported to Imazawa, “Ten meters.” Thirty-nine feet is big width

for a moat, and no one could wonder that, sneaking along there in

the dark, with momentary fear of searchlights and sharpshooters,

the scout, finding a hole wider than his imagination, thought the

distance great if it was ten meters. So Imazawa made his bamboo

ladders fourteen meters long. On the day of the assault, everything

having progressed favorably up to that point, the bombardment and

the flank work against forts on each side being successful, the

advance went in with Imazawa’s fourteen-meter ladders. Under fierce

fire nearly half of the men dropped from the ranks, and only enough

were left to handle three ladders, the glacis of the redoubt being

littered with four others whose bearers had been slain. The hardy

scaling party at last placed their ladders securely on one edge

of the moat and dropped them across, expecting the next moment to

dash across them to victory, leaving the reserves crouched in the

trenches, waiting for the word to follow. Judge of their dismay

when the ladders fell from the perpendicular to horizontal, from

the horizontal to the perpendicular again! They failed to touch

the other side, failed to touch bottom, and disappeared. The moat

was fourteen meters wide. The dismayed assaulters hastened back to

Imazawa. That night a party advanced and dropped a thousand bags,

at one point, into this terrible moat. These sand bags disappeared,

and not a ripple of their indent could be seen. This sunken road of

Ohaine baffled the army and was the chief reason that Port Arthur

did not fall on the Emperor’s birthday. Had they passed it, the

Two Dragons redoubt would have fallen and the town could have been

entered.

Those who charge the Japanese with suicidal folly should remember

that when confronted with this crack in the earth they did not

emulate emotional Frenchmen at Waterloo. They sat down and gave

Imazawa a chance to study. They did not die in a climax of frenzy.

Their sacrifice is for a grand and patriotic idea. Sensational

despatches about losses spread the belief that they die like flies.

The truth is, they never waste a life.

[Illustration:

_Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly_

THE OSACCA BABE

Loading the 11-inch Coast Defense Mortar during the general

bombardment of October 29. Two miles from Port Arthur.]

The use of many successful inventions showed the Japanese equal to

all the progress of the age. The hyposcope enabled them to observe

what went on in the town, and from 203-Meter Hill revealed the

fleet. This is a telescope cut in half, the front elevated two feet

above the rear by a further length of scope, and the line of vision

between made straight past the angles by two mirrors. It gives a

lookout within a few hundreds yards of the enemy’s line a chance to

explore calmly at his leisure.

Bombproofs for the generals were cut in the solid rock a thousand

yards in advance of the artillery and overtopping the firing-line.

Thus commanding officers could get the traditional bird’s-eye view

of the battlefield. Instead of sitting at headquarters, miles in

the rear, as the generals in the North were compelled to do, and

directing the action from an office desk, as a train-despatcher

regulates his system, the divisional, brigade, and regimental

commanders with their own eyes could observe all that was going on.

The commander-in-chief had a fine lookout in the rear center of

his army, two and a half miles from the town of Port Arthur. From

there his eye glanced over as grand a battlefield as the world has

yet produced, for within an area of ten square miles was brought

every possibility of modern warfare. Even cavalry maneuvered. While

his optic vision was extraordinary, his mental horizon was vast

and comprehensive. Telephones centering to a switchboard in the

next bombproof connected him with every battery and every regiment

under his command. He was in instant touch with the most outlying

operations, and, almost with the ease and certainty of Napoleon at

Austerlitz could march and countermarch, enfilade and assault.

Telephone and post office follow the flag. In the advance of the

Japanese army down the peninsula, telephone linesmen bearing

on their shoulders coils of thin copper wire, not much larger

and of no more weight than a pack-thread, followed through the

kaoliang-fields on each side of the commander. The moment he

stopped, a table was produced, a receiver was snapped on the wire,

and a telegrapher stood ready. More remarkable was the advance of

the telephone into the contested redoubt of the Eternal Dragon,

where a station was placed and operated for four months, with the

Russians holding trenches only forty meters distant and on three

sides. At this station, along the front of which twenty men a day

were slain by sharpshooters, mail was delivered every time that a

transport arrived, which was almost daily. Men on the firing-line

received postal cards from their sweethearts and mothers an hour

before death.

Telephone and post office followed the flag; the Red Cross preceded

it. The medical corps came, not in the wake of the army, but close

on the heels of the pioneers. Before even the infantrymen entered a

Chinese village it was explored, the water of its wells analyzed,

its houses tested for bacteria, and the lines of encampment

laid down. This unusual sanitation is looked upon by surgical

authorities as perhaps the chief cause of Japanese success.

But one could find another cause of Japanese success, if the

analytical probe is to be used and the mystic impulse which gives

men resolution for supreme sacrifice ignored. This great cause may

be called originality. The record of superficial observers of her

recent advance is that Japan to-day selfishly and slavishly reaps

the values wrung from time and chance through many centuries by

other nations. If this be true, she is original enough to survive

the ordeal of imitation. Had a single person shown the qualities

displayed at Port Arthur he would be charged with having the

audacity of genius. This audacity did not hesitate to make use

of anything, new or old, possible or impossible, conventional or

unconventional, which might win success from desperate conditions.

Let me give an instance: the problem that faced Japan’s soldiers

when they had dared to capture a minor position in the fortress’s

line of defense. Audacity won it, originality held it. The

trench-line of this bloody angle of the Eternal Dragon lay down

the slope and thus beneath the opposing Russian trench-line. The

maxims of assault declared it untenable unless the contiguous

positions to which it was subsidiary could be immediately taken;

wise generalship seemed to dictate that it be abandoned. To hold it

would be hardly worth the cost. Napoleon thus laid down in general

treatise and Von Moltke specifically so dictated; but not Nogi.

Give him an inch and he keeps it. Besides, he needed this inch for

his engineers.

In the bloody angle the ordinary sand-bag redoubt would not do.

There was no opportunity to erect the permanent masonry or even the

semi-permanent timber redoubt. The men must have some protection

that would let their heads be sheltered a foot or more below the

top of the trench, and yet give them loopholes for firing. Any

conventional trench built from experience or laid down in the

text-books was impracticable. A French, a German, an English, a

Russian soldier would have thrown up his hands because his father

and his grandfather knew no medicine for such a hurt. The American,

had he been far enough away from red tape, might have improvised.

The Japanese did not hesitate. Around the bloody angle he raised

a trench modeled on the medieval bulwarks of his samurai fathers.

It was built with ingenious quickness due to his twentieth-century

training. He erected a front of rock, like the turret of a

castle, and through the deep embrasures of this turret fired his

machine-guns, while the ragged skyline overtopped and kept him

safe. On the spot he married old with new. He was following the

destiny of his race--to tie the ages together.

Epilogue

THE DOWNFALL

D’Adda--the Marquis D’Adda of Rome--had studied history well,

and he declared that the end would come at “ze psychologique

mo-ment--in ze wind, ze rain, when ze high spirit go low.”

D’Adda was wrong. Port Arthur did not fall--it capitulated. It was

not stormed and won. It was worn out. The military critics of the

world were right. Port Arthur is impregnable, and well may some

other power some day learn this, when it is defended by Japanese

soldiery, properly provisioned, properly officered, and properly

supplied with ammunition. It was because the Japanese were ever

vigilant and never lost an opportunity to push their victorious

arms onward that they entered the city as soon as they did.

The end came unexpectedly with the new year. There was nothing

dramatic about it--nothing spectacular, and he who wanted

excitement would have required excess imagination to find in the

event the dramatic climax of a great war. When Port Arthur was

taken ten years before, it collapsed in a day, and the unspeakable

carnage before and after furnished one of the lurid chapters of

history. Chinese were massacred, the town was plundered, and the

world rang with outrage. When Plevna fell, thirty years before,

the Turkish prisoners marched through the snow, across the Volga,

dropping thousands of starved, scurvy-ridden, frozen comrades by

the ebbing mile stones. When Metz went down a vast army came to

the victor, and hemisphere-resounding was the scandal. Nothing

of the sort distinguished the surrender of Port Arthur on the

morning of January 2d, 1905. A stalwart, grim-visaged soldier in

Turkoman cap rode on a white charger out of the town to a little

village on the plain, saluted his victorious adversary, and

presented him the beautiful white horse. The adversary, Nogi, with

exquisite courtesy, refused the gift. On being pressed by Stoessel,

in the Turkoman cap, he accepted it on behalf of his army.

Complimented upon his achievement he replied: “I see no reason

for exaltation--the cost has been too great.” The next day this

courteous soldier, Nogi, the soul of chivalry, a prince of leaders,

marched in at the head of his worn but marvelous followers. The

Russians marched out, some to honorable parole, and some to tender

care among their enemies. There was no massacre, no spectacle, no

great dramatic incident. War had become a business. It was thus

that these two great men--Nogi and Stoessel--wrote “finis” at the

close of the first chapter of this interesting new volume, called

“Civilized Warfare.”

It is less than fifty years since Sebastopol fell, and not forty

since Lee abandoned the trenches at Petersburg. Yet the weapons

used at these memorable sieges are now as obsolete as the catapult

and the crossbow. And yet Port Arthur was won as were Tyre, and

Carthage, and Constantinople. Men will charge on machine guns as

readily as on crossbows. Apparently no defensive works or engines

can stop first-class soldiers. Nothing so well describes the last

few days of the great siege as this letter which came to me in New

York a month after Stoessel started on his way to St. Petersburg.

It was written by a man whose whole knowledge of English came from

his own countrymen. His position is that of Adjutant of the Ninth

Division of the Third Imperial Japanese Army; his service that of

private secretary to Lieutenant-General Oshima, who commands the

division.

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

“NEAR PORT ARTHUR,

“_Jan._ 3d, 1905.

“_Dear Sir_:

“At last Port Arthur strongly defended and well known in the

world came to the end quite late yesterday. Let me tell you

a little about it. After you left here we took front part of

Niryuzan as far as to the ditch which was 14 meters wide and

deep. We made two roads into the ditch destroying two caponires

and reaching the other side of the ditch, we dug four holes under

the Russian bom-proof--the holes were about 14 meters deep. Then

we filled them up with gun cotton to blow it up. On the 28th of

last month we blew that up using 2.700 kirogram of gun cotton,

at the same time our soldiers made an asolt, and took hold of it.

By that explosion many Russians, large stones, and sand went up

high into air. It was just like a volcano. The Russians increased

and threw out many hand granates and very hard fighting went on.

But about 5:30 of that evening the whole fort was occupied by our

men, after six hours of continual fighting. After that we opened

the road to push out beyond Niryuzan. On the 31st the first

division captured Shojuzan greatly helped by our men in Niryuzan.

Before the dawn of the 1st of this month this division took hold

of all Russian line from H. peak to Banryuzan new fort, except

Bodai. By a severe attack of the 35th regiment at 4:20 of that

afternoon, Bodai was taken by us. Though we had a good battle

on the happy new years day, yet the rest of the army did not

have any. Early next morning General Stoessel sent in an officer

and had the letter of surrend sent to General Nogi. On the 2nd

negociation took place and the battlefield began to be entirely

calm, by and by no sound of a rifle. I felt something.

“I really wished you could stay here till this time to walk in

together to Port Arthur. I got slightly wounded after you left

and lost hearing of one ear. Wishing to see you at Mukden and

with best regards,

“Yours faithfully,

“LIEUT. K. HORI,

“9th Division.”

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been

corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within

the text and consultation of external sources.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,

and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained. For example,

bomb-proof, bombproof; machine gun, machine-gun; firing-line,

firing line; hyposcope; tensity; deviltry; diapason.

Pg 12, ‘defense motar’ replaced by ‘defense mortar’.

Pg 17, ‘SEIGE, AND CAPTURE’ replaced by ‘SIEGE, AND CAPTURE’.

Pg 23, ‘subterreanean mines’ replaced by ‘subterranean mines’.

Pg 46 (caption), ‘leaving Dalney’ replaced by ‘leaving Dalny’.

Pg 61, ‘parchment-krinkled’ replaced by ‘parchment-crinkled’.

Pg 68, ‘the fragant air’ replaced by ‘the fragrant air’.

Pg 70, ‘His silk tile’ replaced by ‘His silk tie’.

Pg 74, ‘primeval ectasy’ replaced by ‘primeval ecstasy’.

Pg 136 ‘rice paddie’ replaced by ‘rice paddy’.

Pg 160, ‘reduce the catidel’ replaced by ‘reduce the citadel’.

Pg 203, ‘commssioned officers’ replaced by ‘commissioned officers’.

Pg 221, ‘To the Colenel’ replaced by ‘To the Colonel’.

Pg 230, ‘wild crysanthemums’ replaced by ‘wild chrysanthemums’.

Pg 240 (caption), ‘the Jananese soldier’ replaced by ‘the Japanese

soldier’.

Pg 240 (caption), ‘preceeding the battle’ replaced by ‘preceding the

battle’.

Pg 303, ‘chistening the fort’ replaced by ‘christening the fort’.

Pg 319, ‘have diagramed it’ replaced by ‘have diagrammed it’.

Pg 325, ‘guns apparenly’ replaced by ‘guns apparently’.