Its sides are covered with huge stones, piled in volcanic confusion, partly by nature, partly by the concussion of balls.
This point, as all remember, was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and heaps of sand bags.
On one edge men passed over living flesh and dying flesh, their hands torn from the sockets, as they mounted up a perpendicular side of some three hundred feet.
The hills on the land side are well covered with the rough and tumble of the up-torn rocks, pieces of bone and rusty implements and the torn sand bags are still there. Seventeen thousand men fell on this hill and it took five days to capture it.
Once on top after a climb of some twenty minutes of slow scrambling, like the ascent of the pyramids, you reach the summit. Then you realize why Russia wanted to keep it and Japan to win it at any cost. It is a center of billowy hills on the land side and of the whole sweep of bays and promontories stretching out towards the Yellow Sea and Pechilli Bay.
Port Arthur is the sharp beak of the promontory, which cuts into two waters and can guard the lands of Japan, Korea and China. As you stand then on the top of “203 Metres Hill” you have at your back hills, in the front the towns, the circling mountains about the water, the advanced cliffs of the defensive works and the bays and the sea. Your guns can command any point and your view has every detail before it. You are, as I remember, about one mile and a half from town.
This latter is composed of a small park from which the adorning center has been removed, whether in disgrace as offensive to non-classical taste or not I do not know.
The Civil Office building is new or repaired and not specially attractive as the Japanese do not seem to care to put beauty in their public buildings. A new and very elaborate hotel soon to be opened, is being put up.
This is made out of concrete and stone, quarried, I believe, out of the near-by mountains. The roads leave everything to be desired; they are full of ruts and must be horrible in the rainy months.
The Czar’s mother built the “Red Cross Hospital” whose gigantic outlines of red warm the heart during the frozen months of a Manchurian winter.