[Chapter Five]
CAMP
Before Port Arthur, Headquarters Third Imperial Army, Oct. 9th: We have left the mountain—the Phœnix—where by day we saw artillery duels and by night flashes of lightning illumining the big guns, while the plains stood out under the searchlights. There we could step from our lunch table and, down the cliff, look into the upturned ecstasy of a victorious army, or feel the dull weight of its despair surge in and close upon us.
Now we are with the army, part of it. From the Manchurian hut, where we live in insect powder, on tinned beef, biscuit and jam, we go a few rods to a plateau and look into Port Arthur. The path of the army can be traced by beer bottles—Asahi, Yebisu, Kabuta and Saporo—but in all the army there is not a guardhouse. If the company has a man who doesn’t smoke cigarettes he is pointed out as a curiosity; the empty boxes—Peacock, Tokiwa, Pinhead, Old Rip, Cherry and Star—dot the fields thick as the beer bottles; the price of a box is two days’ pay; there is no way to have money sent from Japan to the front, but a field savings bank to take it back; and yet, into this field bank, from the three cents a day pay, in spite of the beer and the cigarettes, over $10,000 has gone since the opening of the campaign. Approach a battery and find a lot of uncouth boys, gentle and friendly as children, curious as savages, as lacking in assertion as a comedian off the stage; you take them for menials, for most Americans in such a place would carry mountains of dignity and be covered with placards, “hands off.” These are expert gunners, handling scientific instruments, and yet simple. Generals the same! It is an unaccountable thing, this naturalness and modesty, like the morality of a man of genius. A paradox? Yes; when you think of what fighters they are! But how does a hen know when to turn her eggs, and where does a girl carry her powder puff?
But to us, of whom there are three—Frederic Villiers, the war artist, James Ricalton, the war photographer, and myself. The public knows about Villiers, hero of Plevna and the Soudan, discoverer of artistic Abyssinia, decorated by seven governments, veteran of seventeen campaigns, dean of the war correspondents, who has traveled the world round lecturing, sketching, writing. The public knows less of Ricalton, one of its obscure great men. He has gone through a long life with his nose to his work, like a dog to a scent, heedless of fame and money. He is original, alone, and has done things no other man has done. It was he that Thomas A. Edison sent into all the tropical jungles twenty years ago to search for a vegetable fiber for the electric lamp. He took most of the photographs for John H. Stoddard’s lectures. He was the first foreigner to walk through northern Russia, 1,500 miles from Archangel to St. Petersburg. He has traveled through every country on the globe, exposing 75,000 negatives, and has photographed most of the great men of his generation. Of late years he has become one of the most expert of war photographers. In the Philippines he was the only man to get troops actually firing on the foe. At the battle of Caloocan a soldier near him was winged; Ricalton picked up the useless rifle, grabbed the cartridge belt and went up with the skirmishers. At the siege of Tien Tsin he stood on the walls and photographed Americans as they were dropped by Chinese bullets. Little the public knows when it sees photographs of war how few of them come from the front. Ricalton is one of the few who gets the real thing. He is sixty years old, yet he tramps ten and twenty miles a day with a thirty-pound camera under his arm, for he sneers at the snap shot and will carry a tripod. Yet he outlasts the young men on the march. Here he goes everywhere—into captured forts while the corpses are still about, through the most dangerous artillery positions, among reserves waiting for battle, into the actual fighting if they would let him. To-day he is off to gratify one of his few remaining ambitions, for he is sighing like Alexander at already exhausting the world. He wants to get one of the new siege shells, 500 weight, as it leaves the gun on its trip to the battleships in the bay. Four of these shells were dropped yesterday into the Retvizan and Pallada. To-day the gunners will try to put in another. Ricalton plans to have his camera all set and tilted at the proper angle behind. Then as the gunner pulls the lanyard he presses the bulb. He has stuffed his ears with cotton so the shock will not break the drums, for a gunner yesterday was deafened for life. He will probably be hurled to the ground and his camera may be smashed, but he wants that shell hurtling through the air, no bigger than a bee, while the dust of the recoil curls up over the emplacement and all the grand tensity of power and motion is about the place.
“Why take the risk?” say I, “when you can so easily take the gun at rest and then paint in a little dust and that wee dot up in the air.”
BO-O-OM!
Discharge of the Japanese 11-inch Mortar during the Grand Bombardment of October 29. The gun is a mile and a half away, and is firing into the Two Dragon Redoubt. The vibration made a clear photograph impossible.