“The Russians—they come—I fix them. They are very wild. Our men are very wild. Ah, it is a wild war.” The telephone rings. He runs to speak with the general. Then the sergeant informs me.
They had attempted an assault in the rain and dark. Beginning with shrapnel they had tried to find the searchlights. Charges burst above two of them nearest the Cock’s Comb, and they expired, as if hit. The guileless infantry then went in, supposing the way clear. Halfway up the glacis every searchlight, including the two apparently hit, converged on them, throwing them out, in spite of the rain, clearly against the red earth. More. They carried nippers able to cut wire theretofore found before Russian positions, but here the wire was as thick as the little finger, not cutable with their weapons. Thus, instead of a lump of dough to be bowled over the first dark night the advance regiment had found, even in the rain, that the Cock’s Comb stood out intact as a racing yacht stripped for her tryout.
Yet another Russian dodge, for a battlefield is as full of intrigue as a ballroom, completed the disaster. Under our fire of the afternoon which preceded the rivalry with the storm Stoessel had his batteries reply, but when we opened up with the storm he ordered his guns to cease, one by one, battery by battery. Soon our forces thought that like the searchlights the artillery was done for. So when the advance, after creeping through the nipper-defying barbed wire, expecting their job done, was about to leap with a “Banzai” over the parapet, they were met by light and fire. Turning to look for their comrades of the second regiment they found these deep in the dunga, attempting, not to come on, but to cut their way back, for a battery of pompoms and a regiment of sharpshooters had sortied, almost segregating them from the command. The whole brigade was threatened with annihilation and at this moment the reserves I had joined were ordered to the relief.
The regiment under fire of the machine guns retreated precipitately, leaving one-half its number on the slope. Turmoil again through the barbed wire and plump into the rear of the second regiment, also retreating, not into its own lines, but into the Maxims and Nordenfeldts. Overwhelmed on all sides, tricked, defeated, two-thirds of the men killed or wounded, grimy with sweat and powder and almost fainting in the muggy August, the decimated brigade, its regiments back to back, fought as Custer fought on the Little Big Horn, with a coolness that comes to men in the supreme hour.
Most of them died as Custer died, for out of that brigade of 6,000 men there are to-day uninjured but 640. These were saved by the reserves from Shuishiying, my lieutenant and his comrades, who, as dawn came in, hammered the Russian rear and drove the Siberians, sullen with the joy of successful trickery, up into their trenches.
Wandering back toward Ho-o-zan, the forenoon well on, the rain almost finished, I wondered was it “reverse” or “repulse”? Coming to a place where the rear guard had been at my descent of the mountain before dawn I looked for them in vain. Instead of the greeting I expected from the side of the road the dust about me, here and there, was flicked up, as if stones were thrown at me.
“Is this a bit of soldier fun?” The pelting kept up. One of the stones struck a few inches from my toe, when I heard the well-known voice of Ricalton yelling from behind a shoulder of rock:
“Here—out of that, you young ass!”
Then I saw him frantically waving, from behind his shelter. But why should he look for shelter there? The artillery fire was down. All I could hear was a counter-attack of infantry a mile and a half in my rear. But as soon as I got near him he ran out and dragged me into the ditch at his side.
