In this way we went on for a long time, now crawling along on the ground, now standing up to our full height, Colonel Reiss suffering most inconvenience of all. He had to bend the whole time, as he was so tall that otherwise his head would have been quite a foot over the top of the parapets of the trenches.
At last we stopped. “What’s the matter?” we asked of those in front. “We have to run one by one across this piece of open ground.” I took my turn to run across. There was a good deal of firing going on here, I suppose in order to let the Japanese know that we were on the alert. The rifle firing, however, was accompanied by fairly frequent discharges of what appeared to be heavy guns.
Having made one more turn, we saw before us a magnificent spectacle, which at once explained the firing we had heard. It was not gun firing, but the bursting of the Japanese hand grenades hurled at Fort Chi-kuan. I thought how pleasant it would be to be hit on the head by such a projectile.
But it was indeed a wonderful sight. From behind the breastwork of Chi-kuan (we were near the gorge) hissing streams of fire, either singly or in “bouquets,” shot high into the air and, falling into the fort, burst with a report like that of a heavy gun.
For about five minutes we watched this wonderful firework display. An officer who had been farther to the front explained that the missiles were pyroxylin or melinite cartridges, to which was attached some wadding saturated with kerosene. The wadding was lighted and the cartridge thrown into the fort by some mechanical means, and there it burst as soon as the “slow-match” had burnt down.
The Japanese hoped by this means to set fire to the sand-bags, planks and beams that were piled up in stacks at the entrance to the fort.
Not knowing how long this display would last, we went across the entrance of the fort into a bomb-proof on the other side without any one being injured. Thanks to the light of some small lanterns and the flames of the wadding which was blazing everywhere, I was able to see that the fort was almost completely wrecked; parapets and traverses presented an absolutely ruined appearance, everywhere pieces of planks and beams from blown-up bomb-proofs were heaped up, and there were numbers of deep, wide holes where 11-inch shell had burst.
I noticed several riflemen on the parapet lying behind sand-bags. They were sentries. I also noticed a well-built retrenchment in the principal salient of the fort.
As I followed the others as quickly as possible into the stone bomb-proof, I became conscious that a moment before I had been somewhat uneasy as to whether I should escape without having my face damaged (just before I had seen a soldier with his face and arms horribly burnt).
The large vaulted casemate we had entered was filled with soldiers, quietly seated all round it. We passed through it and turned to the left, and then proceeded farther through several doors until we suddenly found ourselves in the brightly lit casemate of the officer commanding the fort. We had a short rest there. Colonel Grigorenko explained the situation, making it clear to us that the enemy’s mining parties, drilling their way through in two directions, had already got very close to the wall of the semi-caponiers which were placed in the chief salient of the fort, while we had counter-mined in two places.