The singing ceases. There is a dreadful hush. It is eleven o’clock. Off toward Kinchow, which is hid by a fringe of low fir trees, something is moving. Soon hunchbacked dabs can be seen bobbing across the furze, leaping over the stones, pausing, searching, then onward dashing. The firing begins. Two machine guns—only ten of the one hundred and ten are quick-firers—lead off. You can easily tell them. The sound is little, like the popping of a dozen beer bottles in quick succession. Then silence. The strip of cartridges is torn aside, another inserted, again a dozen pops. So it goes until the ten are brought into action and there is no intermission. Flicks of dust are kicked up by the shells, most falling short, a few passing on through the trees. One of the bobbing dabs falls, the rest press on. Now the gunners are getting the range; the shells pick off more hunchbacks.
But there is no stop. This is not reconnoisance; it is battle. The skirmishers deployed and well up, now the main line advances. Out from the trees on a dog-trot springs a battalion. It is going to try that griddle of death. The men dash valiantly on, agile fellows, intense as fanatics. Now the hundred field cannon come into play. Most are Chinese of ancient date, some are modern, rim-firing. Smoke fills the plain. It is difficult to see. The torrent of lead is on. Snatched through the noise of firing you can hear great cries; they grow spasmodic, then cease. The firing slows. Soon only the automatic pops are heard. The smoke drifts off. The foremost man is there on the wire, gutted. He hangs, a frightful mass, limp on the barbs. Here and there a poor fellow is crawling, as you have seen some worm trodden on vainly seek its hole. Not a man of the battalion has survived. A thousand brave, faithful soldiers are gone. So this is civilized warfare!
Yes. They now see it was folly to attempt the hill of Nanshan. So they open up with artillery, a whole regiment of it, infinitely superior to the sixty antiquated cannon, the forty Canet pieces and the ten quick-firers. For an hour they rain that leaden taunt back at dubious Nanshan, who austerely barks out a thin reply, coughs a wheezy growl and ceases. Meanwhile the thousands in leash, battle inflamed, recall that the dead battalion are Osacca men, and, being merchants from the Japanese Chicago, had been hailed as cowards by sons of samurai. A company of Osaccans went down, stuck, like pigs, in the Kinshu Maru. But after Nanshan the pork packers of Osacca will hold their heads decently high with the boldest.
Toward three o’clock the second advance is ordered. Half the third division and a part of the first, nearly 15,000 men, close in. They get across the plain, dropping a few hundreds, and smash the wire. Drunkenly dizzy, flaring with the lust of battle, the vanguard tears clothes, limbs, and tosses on the treacherous barbs.
They have no scissors, no choppers, no axes. Worse, they have no time. They keep on at the fence, gashing shins, stripped of impediments, down to the instincts and passions, all discipline gone, every vestige of civilization lost. Now they are through, half-naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the very muzzles of the first entrenchment they surge, waver and break like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast. It seems no tide or wind can melt that precipitous front. But only seems. A rest, a terrible breathing spell, the slow, wounded gasp of an animal in pain, and again the intrepid Japanese lash their haggard forms against that low trench. Glory! They win! The Rising Sun glares in the afternoon as it greeted the sun of that morning above Kinchow.
Yet only a quarter of the battle is won. Another rest. Another assault. Again and again they go up. Nine times they hammer away, muskets to jowl, heads down like bulls in the ring, with one thought; nay! not a thought, an instinct—to win or die.
The officers are picked off by sharpshooters, as flies are flicked from a molasses jug. Two colonels are killed, the list of done captains swells. Then, through the haze, commanding the first division, looms a prince of the blood, the general whose peeress-mother is but this afternoon smiling serene on Tokyo heights. He below Kinchow, smoke-stained, grimed with death, hears the artillery report that ammunition is about gone, but one round left and Nanshan still Russian. Defeat stares Prince-General in the face. Retreat, disgrace seems right ahead. And orders were to “take Port Arthur.” Smiling, he tells the gunners to wait. “Charge again,” he says.
So up they go, for the tenth and last time. At the top more civilized warfare. Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage. Japanese bayonets clash with Russian sabers. Bayonets struck from hands they grasp knives carried suicidally in belts. Thus, hand to hand, they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of centuries sloughed, as a snake his cast-off skin, they spit and chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man.
The Prince-General waits, ready to fire his last round, and retreat, hopeless. It has been a desperate fight—yes, reckless, unparalleled. If lost he loses nobly. “Are you through, General?” his aide asks. “I have just begun my part of the fighting,” he answers. His name is Fushimi—remember it. As he speaks a weak cry goes up—weak because even victory cannot rouse spirits so terribly taxed.
It was a bloody sun going down in Korea Bay that night, but it saw its rising counterpart flaunting above Nanshan, while the Russians were making use of the best part of their apparel, sprinting towards the Tiger’s Tail.