General Nogi’s Headquarters Before Port Arthur, Oct. 22d: To-day we went to the Eternal Dragon, and looked in on the bloody angle. D’Adda was with me—the Marquis Lorenzo D’Adda of Rome, naval expert, military engineer, designer of the Niishin and Kasuga, which, even now, on clear days, our spyglasses can discern held in leash, ten miles off, by Togo.
Yesterday, from the Phœnix, D’Adda looked on the fortress—its two mountain ranges, its stone wall, its chain of twenty forts, its concrete glaces, its barbed wire morass, its artillery pregnant with repose, its infantry hideous with secret might—and said:
“Eemposseebl! Eet ees eemposseebl—absolutelee. Zee Japonaise can nevaire take. Eet ees stronger zan Sevastopol—stronger zan Gibraltar—absolutelee.”
To-day, from the foot of the Dragon, he looked down into a plain lost to the husbandman who bears on his arm no red cross, yet furrowed far deeper with vast and terrible furrows, its creased and aching joints curled into the glaring sun. Up, he looked under the muzzles of Russian cannon, useless now that the plain they were wont to fill with dead is lost to them.
“Extraordinaire—colossal!” he cried. “Port Art—eet will be one smoke puff zee nex attac.”
We had left the siege parallels and were climbing into the fort, our backs bent low so that no Russian sharpshooter might give his government cause to decorate the forgotten names of two noncombatants. We had wormed our way, zigzag, a mile and a half through the valley along a trench that a division might foot with equal safety, four abreast. Lives precious, toil enormous, and brains cunning and quick had hid their army from the enemy as prairie dogs hide their spring litters. A clever attaché with the Boers had shown how they who learned the tricks from the Kafirs, hid vulnerable turnings with maize stalks. Another, schooled with D’Adda in the arts that Julius Cæsar taught the legions in Gaul and which have not been improved on to this day, had outlined the most economic angles of advance, had shown how to take advantage of every gully, how to hide behind every terrace tuft, how to cross sodded planks above at equal distances until the way resembled the weave of an Indian basket. All of this that we had passed was but a sixth of the work of one division, of which the army holds three. And it has been done in less than two months.
The Marquis continued to exclaim that since the invention of gunpowder there has been no such engineering. “I know zee historee well,” he said, “veree well. I know Plevna, Sevastopol, Dantzig, Paris, Vicksburg, Metz, Ladysmith. Zay are no-thing. Port Art—eet ees zee greatest. Zee world cannot comprehend.”
Halfway back we had passed a Chinese village, shattered by shells, blackened by smoke, its tumbling walls utilized for the trench. Earthen wine pots had been filled with shale and placed on the sandbags to deceive the gunners beyond. Two days before there was rain and in one part the trench was filled with muddy water. We had to pick our way on submerged stones and planks. As I hurried along, looking at my feet, I noticed that the water grew dull red as though the wine pots above had burst. At that moment I stumbled and caught the wall for steadiness. My hand struck something flabby. I drew it back in horror and found sticking to the palm a white piece of flesh dented with convolutions—a bit of human brain. A pace away he lay, his feet toward me. A stray shell had blown him off from brain base to nose bridge. He was still warm and the officer called back shrilly for a soldier to come with pick and shovel. Then we took notice of the shells bursting, some five miles off, some a thousand yards away. This had happened within the hour.