A clatter on the stones below comes nearer, steadily, rhythmically. Listen! The tread of soldiers marching! Soon an indistinct line wavers into sight. A low whistle and it turns square across the Valley of the Shadow toward that terrible din. Another whistle and it twists up from single to double file. Each man has his full kit on his back, an extra pair of hobnailed boots, the pick, the shovel, the rifle. The steel is hooded with brass caps, a challenge to the dew. Officers’ swords, sheathed in dull cloth, defy the glitter of sunlight and of searchlight. It is the reserve regiment advancing to reinforce at dawn. Company by company it passes, and at the end marches the gray-haired colonel, stumbling in the dark, peering off at the searchlights, blinking at their bravado. The troops enfile into the farther ravine and deploy by battalions. The din lessens not. So another grist is fed into the mill of war.
The reserves’ echo dies to the incoming of crunches on the stones as of a wagon lumbering—a heavy wagon. Then out of the mists a caisson rolls behind six horses, the mounts walking, calmly, slowly. Another caisson and another, then the guns—one, two, three, four, five, six in all—while overhead whistles the shot and beyond gleams the searchlight. The rear battery is going forward, past the front battery, almost to the base of Namicoyama, where, at a sixty-degree angle, it can reinforce the infantry as the sun comes up.
Sleep is fitful when blaze is flirting with blackness and sentries with death. Long before light the trench guards on the front ridge are waiting for the big guns to salute the morn. The fire has slackened. There is fair quiet. When one has heard the wild gabble of a thousand guns he is blasé before the chatter of a dozen. Down the Valley of the Shadow a shell sometimes wings a nasty way and the searchlights hold vigil, but the infantry sleeps.
Then a little light fades the immense shadows, and soon over the rim of the world peers a new day. Peace, beauty, tingling health—this for another moment—when off to the right a shell wheezes. The snap is touched. The army wakes. Again it is on—the fearful din, the unendurable bombardment. So it has been for two months; so it will be until the end. Again and again.
But what is that under the crest of Namicoyama where it rises, furze covered, its incandescent struggle fighting fog? A patch of brown, then a patch of blue, then a flag—yes, a flag—a white flag, with a red sun in the center, the most legible flag in the Volapük of bunting, the Rising Sun of Japan!
In the night they have done it because they have slipped the thongs of civilization and risen triumphant to the hold of rice paddy and sacred mountain. What they did was simple—they changed shoes; rather, they threw away shoes. If one asks how the Japanese took “203” the answer is in terms of feet.
Such heights had been attacked before with scant success. Boots, though the nails be hobbed, help no man trained as the chamois to nature’s aid. Yet boots were all they had. The government in flirting with the ways of white men recognized nothing but leather and thread as proper footgear for Mikado worshipers. But that was before “203.” Here, at last, the soldiers knew more than the officials of state. They knew enough to toss aside a weapon made for pavement fighting when they went against precipice and moss. Reduced to essentials, fighting for life, they forgot the ambitious new ways. Instead of boots they tied on their feet waraji, the Japanese straw sandal. Having none of proper make, they improvised from the rough rice sacking brought by the commissary. Since then the government has been compelled to officially supply waraji.
Barefooted, but for the tight cling of the straw, hid from the searchlights by the shadows of Namicoyama and “203,” in the night they had climbed the heights and are now waiting the introduction of Mr. Bombshell before they reel audaciously across the parapet.