“Show your arm.”
A small grimed hand on an emaciated forearm was thrust above the parapet. The picket grasped it and pulled sharply. With a groan of agony and relief a bundle of rags, dirt and clotted blood tumbled into the trench. The picket forgot his duty as he knelt over his comrade, for, ground in filth and caked as it was with dried blood, he could not mistake the universal brown khaki, and under an arm was slung a bit of cotton-incased wood—a Shinto emblem, for this time, at least, triumphant. The wounded soldier fainted.
Copyright, 1905 by Collier’s Weekly
In a field hospital this afternoon I was privileged and honored in looking upon and talking with this hero. He is a distinguished soldier of the famous Ninth Regiment, the Black Watch of Japan, which lost all but ten per cent. of its forces in that illustrious assault under the Chinese wall. So marvelous is the recovery of the wounded that the soldier smiled as he lay, speaking occasionally a few words in response to my interpreted questions. His head and legs were swathed in bandages and he was sipping saké—a present from his Emperor. How these soldiers love their Emperor! Well they may, for a week ago there sailed into Dalny harbor a transport laden with presents from His Majesty to his sick soldiers. All the privates got saké, all the officers brandy. In addition, every private received a present of three yen in cash, the non-commissioned officers from three to ten yen, and the commissioned officers from ten to sixty yen each.
Here is the soldier’s remarkable account:
“I was one of the few who reached the Chinese wall that terrible August afternoon. There were but a few of us left, scarce half a company out of a regiment, when the Captain in command ordered us to scale the wall. I had but reached for the stones when my legs went from under me—melted away. A shell fragment had smashed them as a bamboo pole is smashed under a hammer. The pain was little, but it gradually spread over my body. I became numb, then unconscious, and though shells were busy all about me, lay for hours with no further hurt. I came to, under the stars.”
The soldier told little of what he felt and saw, but it can be imagined; the vast plain, silent but alive with hostile trenches; the gloomy fortress above, bristling with cannon, but silent; the concealed batteries—his own—miles beyond, from which an occasional boom and whiz startled the gaunt and shivery searchlights in their fantastic pencilings; then his sense of comrades lost, of dear ones perhaps dead within sound of his voice, with memories of home and better days; then desolation at defeat, the foe victorious, pride alone resolute, triumphant to the last.
He could hear sounds of pick and spade scratching the chilly earth, clamping into the shale. Only a few rods away the reinforcements were hastily throwing up earth-works to hold the hard-won ground. He saw indistinct forms groping in the dusk, pulling about other forms, inanimate ones, and hastily covering them with earth. The dead were being used to more quickly fill in the embankments. In a few days those carcasses—rotting—would charge usurious toll for all the improvised help they were this fatal night.
The soldier tried to crawl toward his comrades, but he could move only a few inches at a time, so intense was the agony in his legs, for the cool of night and renewed circulation had brought back his senses in full keenness.