“We can’t tell what damage the big guns will do,” went on the aspirate voice out of the smoke. Gotoh was turning over the sentences now as fast as they came. “This is the first time in history that coast defense guns have battled with each other. We have brought ours from Japan. As the Russians cannot use theirs against our navy they have turned them landward.”
“Why not against your navy?”
“Because—” he quickly drew from a drawer a brass tube attached to a pot of India ink. Out of the tube he drew a brush and began sketching nervously on a piece of blotting paper. The brass tube was a yatate, the first one I have seen in the army. Generations before siege artillery Japanese warriors who took arrow holders from the enemy disgraced them by converting them into ink pots and brush holders, for to soil a thing with business in those days was to disgrace it. But merchants found the device a neat invention and made arrow holders in miniature. The idea spread and soon all the men of business in the empire carried yatates in their belts. The army discarded them in disgust. Now Kodama comes, oblivious of tradition, satisfying his caprice and comfort, and to his work, as a samurai of old, introduces the yatate. When he finds the samurai superstition concerning the gaining of eternal life by a soldier killed in battle of value in his chess game of war he cherishes the belief, but when the silly prejudice against business gets in his way he cuts acquaintance with the samurai.
Quickly, under the yatate brush, there grew a sketch of Port Arthur and the peninsula—curves for the east and west harbor, a cross for the town, fuzz for Liaotishan, a loop for the Tiger’s Tail. Then from east to west of the Liaotung he drew a dotted line in a semicircle and paralleled it with another dotted line.
“Our mines,” he said, pointing to the outer; “their mines,” pointing to the inner. “We have laid a series of electric mines counter to theirs, which, if firing at, they explode, will ignite their series and damage their coast defenses and harbor. Locked in this mutual mining our navy and their coast defense must remain inactive, as neither cares to take an initiative. So they have turned not only their coast defense, but their navy guns landward. We, in reply, have landed our navy guns and brought from Japan our coast defense artillery. So you will see the spectacle of two great naval equipments fighting on land. I wish I could bring all the tacticians in the world to witness. There will be much to learn for future warfare.” He puffed vigorously. The whiskers poised themselves. His eyes, looking at the sketch, were lost in introspection. He was reveling in the situation.
“You think it, then, a battle of strategists?”
“Only that. This is entirely a game of strategy. The chief question is: are our naval and siege guns, reinforced by field artillery, more powerful than their naval and coast defenses reinforcing the forts? Lesser questions concern the individual generalship of divisions and brigades.”
“But the boy in khaki—is he not the deciding force?” My mind ran back to those terrible August days when I lay in the broiling sun watching the soldiers hurled against the barbed wire, under the machine guns, onto the parapets, only to melt away like chaff before the wind. I thought of the night in the storm when the general in command gave the order to retreat, but before his aide could deliver it to the colonel in the field, the soldiers, impatient, went in and took the opposing trenches. I thought of all the sights in that mighty game I had just left; great guns in the shock of battle peppered by shrapnel but holding to their work like bulldogs on the grip, the sappers creeping with pick and shovel through the night hounded by shells, the pioneers going up with pincers to nip the wire met by the death sprinkle of Maxims, the infantry in a thin brown line following, the men popped out as expert drivers flick off flies with a whiplash, but advancing, advancing, till a handful out of a host creeps up, and flings itself, fanatical with the lust of battle, worn in the gory charge so that life never can be the same again in sweetness and in peace, into the redoubt paid for a dozen times with blood, and which even then is but curtain raiser for drama still more heartrending, because, beyond, rising tier on tier, series after series, are redoubts and forts, trenches and barbed wire, moats and gorges, rifles and cannon until the soul grows sick with the thought that Port Arthur must be bought with sacrifice so great, agony so monstrous.
“No,” said Kodama. “This is a question of military strategy.” He thrust the yatate from him, stretched back into his chair and puffed cigar wreathings into the air. They looked like the smoke of a volley from a battery of howitzers. As he settled down to the talk again, sometimes his eyes flashing, sometimes his mustaches, one black, the other white with a venerable sign, twitching, his bare toes twisting with suppressed energy, I thought I saw a huge black spider serene in the Russian chair.
“Will you bring any more reserves?”