Willow tree village, Headquarters Third Imperial Army, Manchuria, four miles from Port Arthur, Oct. 5th:
It was in August that the Japanese took the Eternal Dragon, advanced their outposts beyond its walls, threw up trenches, and settled down this inch nearer the coveted goal. In this fearful fight a certain part of the field was taken and retaken seven times, and finally, for strategic reasons, though the fort which was the bone of contention rested with the victors, a piece of dead ground beyond, over which these repeated charges had occurred, lay partly within the Russian lines and partly within our own. Dead bodies mingled with wounded—Russians jowl by cheek with Japanese—lay over it so thick that a man might have walked from one trench to another without touching the earth. The wounded could not be succored, the dead could not be buried except when they lay behind the opposing trenches. Between, no living thing could exist. The lines were but three hundred yards apart—a distance at which even a poor marksman could shoot fatally, and through all the twenty-four hours the two trenches were lined by sharpshooters a rod apart and on the constant lookout.
The weather was perfect. By day the sun shone; by night the moon, assisted by searchlights and star shells, kept the plain of death as light as day. The light showed the loopholes of the trenches so well that they could not be used, for the moment a shadow appeared behind one a marksman from the other side would put a bullet through it. The men sighted the hyposcope—an instrument first used extensively at this siege—which is a telescope arranged with mirrors at a reflex angle, so the scope goes over a wall while the eye sees in perfect safety twelve inches below. At occasional places, carefully shadowed, they kept chinks covered by stones, which, when the sun sank to the proper angle, or at dawn, could be uncovered to make a peephole large enough for a man’s eye.
Now for a month, under a torrid sun, unmarred by a day of rain or scarce a fleck of cloud, hundreds of dead have lain rotting in that compact space. A flag of truce to bury them was out of the question. The Japanese had far the worst of it, as their lines, drawn in a lunette, partly surrounded the charnel house below which they lay, steeped in its noisome drains. Moreover, in hastily throwing up their trenches the night of the battle, corpses, loosely covered; had been used to improvise the walls, so bodies and stones together formed a shelter which in life the men thus commandeered could not have made. Well the Russians knew of the disease the sun was breeding, and refused a truce, for the dead played well into their hands. Stench could be a weapon more effective than bullets or strategy. So, day after day they held the Japanese there, as a dog’s nose is rubbed in his own mess.
Watch on sentry posts was cut from four hours to two, and at the worst portion of the line to one hour. The pickets swathed their thin brown faces in towels and the commissary supplied smelling salts. An officer who served on that picket line twelve days told me that the sun alone was enough to defeat an ordinary man in four hours. Added to that the slightest zephyr bore a fetid breath more foul than the lowest of a city’s sewers.
During the first day groans could be heard occasionally from the contested ground. Wounded—no one could guess how many—lay there dying. To have attempted succor would have been suicide. The pickets did all they could. They threw rations of biscuits beyond the trenches, scattering them along the ground, blindly, of course, but carefully as a farmer strews a field. A company divided itself; one part sacrificed its water bottles, slinging across their shoulders beer bottles, instead of the handy and handsome aluminum ones furnished by the army. Then the aluminum bottles, that would stand the shock of striking, which might shatter a beer bottle, were tossed over to the starving, thirsty wretches.
The second morning there came some desultory groans from the farther side. The groans suddenly ceased. Successive rifle pops told that the Russian sharpshooters had picked off the wounded. Picket duty in the trenches became more deadly. The army had settled, with quiet determination, into a siege. One night, as the moon rose over another division of the army, two thousand yards to the west, there appeared above the trenches a cap. A bullet pierced it instantly, but it was only a feint cap on the end of a stick. The picket nearest saw it was a Japanese cap, and called his challenge, “Who goes there?”
“Tomodachi!” (a friend) came the response.