Port Arthur

by Richard Barry

Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again, this time in other parts of the field, but the shells and bullets so often passed over him that he came to think of himself as a dead man and lived on only because nature exerted her just law. Like an opossum he feigned death. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair. Then biscuits began falling from his own trenches; one fortunately fell near him. He also managed to get a tossed-over water bottle. To reach it he was obliged to crawl a few feet and as his hand touched it he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and the blood trickled. A bullet had pinked him. Instinctively he fell as if dead.

It was then that there occurred the thing which has inflamed the army as tow is inflamed on bonfire nights. The whole vast amphitheater was quiet. It was sundown. Nature was in her most gorgeous raiment. Both armies were at supper and an involuntary truce seemed to still the hills and valleys so lately fire-ringed. In the midst of this peace and beauty a desultory firing rang from the Russian trenches nearest the bloody angle in which lay the soldier with his comrades—dead and worse than dead. The bullets were directed, not into the opposing trenches, but into the wounded in the bloody angle.

“Stand to your guns, men!” came from the Japanese trenches, and the men sprang as though to resist a sortie.

But there was no sortie. The Russians were killing the wounded, that the bodies might rot and drive their comrades from below.

The moving ceased, the groans ceased, the sun went down, the stars and searchlights came. Impelled by the first law of nature the soldier dragged on, wearily, as he supposed, toward his friends. But the ground was level and he must have gone laterally. Toward dawn he tumbled into a deserted trench and found a sort of sheltered dugout. It was a covered passage to the Russian fort and untenable now by either side. In it were two Japanese so desperately wounded they could not move and could barely speak. He shared his last drop of water with them.

As they were drinking a figure slouched along the trench and blocked the doorway. It wore a black-visored cap, shiny with celluloid—a Russian cap. Searching the gloom the Russian found the three wounded soldiers. Then he poked his rifle in and fired three bullets—one at the brain of each. Two died instantly. The third—the soldier who had already survived as by a miracle—passed into what he thought was the rigor of death. All grew black before his eyes. Never from that moment to this—seventeen days later—has he seen even a glimmer, nor will he ever see again. The bullet passed across his eyes as he lay side down and shattered the optic nerve.

The Russian thought his work complete. Leaving his rifle outside he passed into the dugout and emptied the pockets of the two dead men and the third, whom he believed to be dead. Then sneaking back up the passage, the Russian regained his own lines.

For five days the soldier lay in the dugout, unable to move, unable to see, numb from long suffering. Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he at length severed the arteries of one of his fallen comrades, newly dead, and lived on. He found worms crawling in the wounds of his legs. He tore up the shirt of a corpse and bound them.

Then began as memorable a journey as man ever made, as heroic a combat for life as pioneer or warrior ever underwent. He started to crawl to the Japanese lines. Blinded, paralyzed, his legs shattered, one arm useless, half dead with fatigue, his tongue swollen with thirst, and starving, he made his piteous way a few yards each night.