THE LITTLE FATHER.
Although the correspondent of the _Bulletin_ was not aware of the fact
when he started on his eventful journey northward, active hostilities
had already begun at the front. The two immense armies, as we have seen,
lay entrenched, facing each other, in lines extending, nearly one
hundred miles from east to west, across the railroad south of Moukden,
the ancient capital of the Manchus. While the Japanese had thrown up
temporary earthworks here and there, and of course had taken advantage
of the configuration of the ground to secure their positions against
surprise, as well as to afford shelter for their troops against the
inclemency of the Manchurian winter, the Russians were far more strongly
fortified and were determined to hold their ground. Railroad trains,
running between Moukden and Harbin, their great military base, supplied
them with constantly renewed stores of ammunition, food, and clothing,
and, moreover, removed the sick and wounded from the front and filled
their places with fresh recruits as fast as they arrived from the west
over the Trans-Siberian route.
Such was the situation when Field Marshal Oyama, having kept his vast
armies under perfect discipline all winter, and replaced the losses
incurred at Liaoyang, determined to move on the enemy, who, refreshed
and confident, awaited behind their ramparts the advance of the
Japanese.
Exactly the same tactics were employed as at Liaoyang. The ends of the
hundred-mile frontal line struck heavily, and bent the Russian bar of
steel inward at both extremities. The attack began on February 20th, and
four days later the Japanese were in possession of a strong Russian
position at the village of Tsinketchen, far to the east of Moukden. At
the same time the Japanese left wing began its march on Sinmintin, at
the western end of the line. The Russians, out-flanked, fell back. The
extremities of the two wings would doubtless have been effectively
reinforced had not the crafty Oyama delivered a simultaneous assault
upon the very centre at Putiloff, or "Lone-Tree Hill," to use the name
that soon became familiar to newspaper readers all over the globe. A
furious artillery fire was opened upon this hill by the Japanese. It was
taken and retaken. The scenes that had horrified the world at Port
Arthur and Liaoyang were repeated. Assault after assault was delivered,
but for a week the devoted band of Muscovites held that little acre of
ground on the hill-top, while regiment after regiment of the soldiers of
Nippon melted away before the terrific fire from the fortress. It was
like wading up streams of molten lava, to fight a volcano in full
eruption. The Russians were never driven from the hill by direct
assault; but Kouropatkin, seeing his wings bent inward and backward
farther and farther, and his front once more assuming the terrible
horse-shoe shape, reluctantly gave orders to his brave men to withdraw
from Putiloff and fall back on the line of the railroad.
In the division of the Japanese troops to whom the capture of this
hill--the keystone of Kouropatkin's arch--was assigned was the regiment
in which Oshima served. Thus far Oto's old friend had seemed to bear a
charmed life. He had fought in battle after battle, but had received no
wound of any moment. His company had been decimated again and again, but
the ranks had been filled and the stern young captain still held his
place in front, as it wheeled into line when the regiment was called
upon for new duties.
Upon hearing the order to move upon Lone-Tree Hill, the men set up a
cheer. The officers burnished their swords and stepped alertly to and
fro, aligning the ranks and glancing along the files to see that every
equipment was in order and every man ready. This was in the early
afternoon. It was understood that the artillery would open upon the hill
batteries at sundown, and two hours later the assault would be made.
Impatiently the compact mass of small brown men waited for the word. The
great siege guns, brought with infinite labour from Port Arthur, roared
and thundered. Putiloff answered, and shrapnel burst over the Japanese
troops, who burrowed as best they might in trenches and holes and behind
every hillock, while they hastily devoured their scant field rations.
The night came on, dark and heavy. At last the welcome word was
received.
"Forward!" cried Oshima, brandishing his sword so that it glittered in
the flashes of the cannon.
The regiment hurled itself upon the slopes of the hill, solid shot
ploughing awful furrows through their ranks. The survivors kept on,
undaunted. That night meant for them victory or a glorious death. No one
thought of retreat.
As he saw his men swept downward by the pitiless hail of steel, Oshima
lost all sense of danger, and the old spirit of his Samurai ancestors
blazed out. "Strike! Strike!" he shouted to his men, springing in front
of them as the broken line faltered for a moment. "Up the hill! It is
ours! _Banzai dai Nippon!_"
With the wild cheer of Japan upon his lips he suddenly threw his arms
aloft and fell headlong to the ground. The column swept by and over him
in the darkness. Then two slightly wounded men raised their captain, his
hand still grasping his sword, and tottered down the hill with him,
stumbling over the bodies of the fallen.
Not far in the rear were Red-Cross workers, and the silent figure of the
brave officer was borne swiftly to a hospital tent, where he partly
regained consciousness. He was shot through the body, and the surgeons
shook their heads as they examined the wound. Still, there was a chance
for his life, and Oshima was despatched to the coast, the first part of
the way in an ambulance, then by railway. At Antung he remained until
the hospital ship was ready to sail with its sad freight of torn,
pierced, and mangled soldiers. The staunch vessel--painted white, with a
broad green stripe along its hull, like the sash of a military
surgeon--conveyed him safely to Hiroshima, where he was placed in a cot
near an eastern window. Kind hands ministered to him, and gentle faces
bent over him. As he recovered full possession of his senses he saw one
sweet face that was familiar to him.
"Hana!" he whispered. "O-Hana-San, is it you?"
Day after day the battle raged in Manchuria. Shells began to fall in
Moukden, and in an hour the city was a scene of ghastly confusion and
panic. Hospital trains, loaded to the doors with wounded and dying,
pulled out of the station, the groans and shrieks of the sufferers
mingling with the clank and clatter of the iron wheels. Men and women
rushed to and fro in the muddy streets--for this was the first week in
March, and a few warm days had turned snow and ice to mire, ankle
deep--and fought each other in a frenzied fear as they struggled for
places in carts and railway cars, with such of their personal effects as
they could carry in their arms. Thieves and drunken soldiery looted
shops and private houses boldly.
It was rumoured that the awful Japanese line was closing in on the
north, and that the railroad would be cut. This added to the panic.
Dazed, mud-stained, deafened with the roar of battle, half senseless
with intoxication, thousands of stragglers and camp-followers staggered
through the city, joining the mad rush. "To the north! To the north!"
was the one thought, the one wild cry. Emerging from the densely
populated town, the throng of refugees fled up the valley. Wherever the
defile narrowed, the crowd crushed together, screaming, pushing,
fighting their way on; through back alleys of little villages on the
route; along the railroad track, separating to allow a train to roar
through their midst, shaking frenzied fists at it as it passed and left
them behind; flinging away food, clothing, household treasures to which
they had thus far clung mechanically; shouted at by retreating
battalions whose progress they blocked, and cursed by artillery-men as
the horses sprang forward over the clogged and miry road, or crashed
through the low willows and over mud-walls surrounding the hovels of the
natives; still on and on, through the black night and the chill grey
dawn, the frantic multitude streamed northward toward Harbin and safety.
At Tie Pass there was a halt. Here Kouropatkin made a desperate attempt
to stand, and did succeed in checking the enemy until the shattered
Russian forces could reunite in the semblance of a disciplined army,
while the wounded, and such stores and guns as had been saved from the
disastrous defeat, were sent northward. Then the army fell sullenly
back, a few versts each day, repulsing the attacks of the exhausted
Japanese. These attacks diminished in number and force, until
Kouropatkin could breathe more freely and even consider establishing a
new line of permanent defence. Before, however, he could reorganise his
troops or lay out a single line of fortifications a despatch flashed
over the wires from St. Petersburg removing him from the supreme
command of the army and appointing General Linevitch, his former
subordinate, in his place.
Like a brave and generous soldier he not only laid down his command
without a word of protest, but at once petitioned for and obtained
permission to serve under Linevitch. Truly, the "Little Father" had
reason to be proud of his children!
But the Czar of all the Russias, in his white palace on the Neva, had
cares beyond even those which gathered, bat-winged, around the prospects
of his army in the Far East. Throughout his vast realm, from the
Caucasus to the Baltic, from Sebastopol to the Arctic Seas, in the
remote provinces and at the very gates of his palace, signs multiplied
that a long-dreaded event was coming to pass: the Russian peasant was
awakening! Aroused by proclamations of Nihilists, by sermons and appeals
from religious leaders, by stinging words from such patriots as Tolstoi
and Gorky, the peasant stirred in his long sleep, he smiled in his
stupid, good-humoured, harmless way; he grew graver as the import of the
fiery words that were borne on every breeze penetrated his dull brain.
Cruelty--oppression--injustice--could it be true? Nay, the Little Father
would put it all right. They would tell him about it; they would go to
him with these wrongs as a little child kneels at his bedside and prays
sleepily and trustfully, to his Father in Heaven; and he, the Ruler of
all the Russias, the White Czar, the father of his people, would listen
and would hear their prayer and grant relief, if relief were needed.
A great throng of such peasants, headed by a priest, flocked to the
city, asking, poor, bewildered souls, to see the Czar, and to be allowed
to pray to him. They were rebuffed and roughly ordered back by men with
glistening bayonets. Then, still childlike and foolish, they actually
tried to force their way to their father's house, believing that
although his minions might use them rudely, he, whom they loved with all
their big, ignorant, devoted hearts, would suffer them to come unto him,
and forbid them not.
Another surge forward, over the paved street, to the fatal bridge.
"Halt! Disperse!"
They would not. Their priest leader held his cross aloft and waved them
on.
Then it came--a rattling crash like the near thunder close upon the
lightning. Shrieks and moans of dying men and children. Another volley,
and another. And the Little Father was so near--could he not hear them?
The people fled from the cruel streets, the red pavement, the hoofs of
the war-horses and the flashing sabres of their riders. Back, in a
helpless, frightened throng, to the open country, as the fugitives fled
from Moukden. But the fierce enemy that was behind them was no foreign
foe, thirsting for their lives. It was their Little Father!
Did the young, black-bearded Czar think of all this, as he sat in his
gorgeously draped throne room in the palace? Did his cheeks blanch and
his lips quiver at the distant sound of musketry in the streets of St.
Petersburg? Who can tell? Only He who knoweth all hearts and whose love
holds both Czar and peasant.
While Russia was thus torn with internal troubles, the situation in the
East grew daily more threatening. The danger was now apparent to all. At
Harbin the great railway forks, one branch going southward to Port
Arthur, and the other continuing eastward to Vladivostock. If the
Japanese, pushing northward with their victorious hosts, could cut the
line east of Harbin Junction, Russia's one port, her last hope of sea
power on the North Pacific, would be at the mercy of the Japanese.
Despatches were sent to Rojestvensky to hurry his ships to the scene of
war. Two squadrons were already united under his command. A third was on
its way through the Mediterranean, and shortly afterward rendezvoused at
Jiboutil, near Aden, at the southern end of the Red Sea. This third
squadron was also ordered to proceed eastward across the Indian Ocean at
full speed, and overtake the Baltic fleet if possible. Early in April
Rojestvensky's ships were sighted off Acheen, at the extreme
north-western point of Sumatra.