“We are perfectly safe here,” said the officer, and we looked out.
“Except from ricochet bullets,” added Villiers. “The zone of fire of those chaps yonder is away from us and as long as they exchange we’re all right. Shells can’t reach us, even shrapnel would be nullified by this covering, but when those bullets strike a stone no one can tell how they will come. They can shoot around a corner from a flat stone as easily as in the open through a loop-hole.”
I heard nothing. Standing up, secure, my eyes came upon him suddenly—the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who does the trick—at work. He was crouched under the parapet in front, rifle to cheek, its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. The tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down that barrel in deadly aim made me think of nothing but a great cat pausing for a spring. One leg was drawn up, his cap was pulled down viciously over his eyes, the sun beat upon him and he lay, venomous with pent-up passion, cut in silhouette against the trenches, a shade darker than the shale. A minute before he had offered me tea and a cigarette; now he was dealing out hot lead. Yet, who could suspect danger, with all so still and clear! But life most intense and death the most terrible and swift dwelt all about us. Through chinks in the wall a row of sand bags on a mound of earth could be seen. They marked the Russian trenches behind which the enemy lay as silent and deadly as the boys on our side. Not a minute passed without its bullet. Forty meters was the distance, the officer said, the closest place in the whole ten-mile front of the two armies. By day, when the Russians stay quiet, sentries stand three yards apart, by night, shoulder to shoulder. They are changed every thirty minutes so intense is the strain. A regiment can stay in the fort only seven days because the Russians are above and on three sides, and they must keep them out, while they stew in their own juice and their comrades rot beyond the wall. When a sortie is made neither side asks for quarter nor expects it. The Russians know that unless they regain their trenches they will not live, for to be wounded and fall in the bloody angle means slow death where no aid can come; to meet the Japanese line means instant death. The Japanese know their chances, if wounded, are the same, and if they reach the Russian lines they accept only two things—victory or death. So it is that here through long weeks the siege has concentrated its bitterest essence, living has come to be a burden and death a joy.
Then came the thud of a bullet. It was a different thud from any we had had up to that time, and though I had never before heard a bullet strike flesh, I could not mistake the sound. It goes into the earth wholesome and angry, but into flesh ripping and sick with a splash like a hoof beat of mud in the face.
I turned to look. I saw the nearest sentry sinking to his knees. His rifle had dropped and was leaning against the wall, butt down. He sank together all in a heap and his head hung limp, his chin against his breast.
“Poor chap,” said Villiers, “he was looking at us and got in front of the loop hole. I suppose we are so great a novelty in his strained existence that he could not resist the temptation to neglect his duty for a minute.”
We crawled back and out silently and quickly, bade a hurried good-by to the Colonel, hastened past the smiling, oblivious men—they are used to it—and over a mile and a half of chipmunk burrow. The General was waiting tiffin for us in his tent. There was a jar containing strawberry jam like grandmother used to make. With a flash it brought back all the comforts of home. An empty shell in the center of the table held some field daisies and wild chrysanthemums. All the fragrance of the fields and the beauties of nature came with them. At my mess plate lay an American newspaper, just delivered by this incomprehensible field post. With it civilization, its myriad passions and joys, floated in. As the cigars were passed I opened the paper. I found an interview with Dr. Nicholas Senn, of Chicago, in which he said:
“All the talk of inhumanity which some correspondents are sending out from the Orient is foolish. Statements of soldiers being wounded in the mouth and reports of all similar acts of atrocity can be set down as being without foundation. Russia has the best Red Cross Society in the world and the Russians are an extremely humane people. Likewise, this war is going to be a humane war. As for the Japanese, the worst that can be said of them is that they are a proud people.” I read this aloud. It was translated and the officers, Lieutenant-General Oshima and his staff, listened. None of them replied. Finally Villiers said:
“The question is not: Are the Japanese or the Russians a humane people, or not a humane people? It is: Are individual men, under conditions the most terrible the imagination can devise, Christians or savages? Both Japanese and Russians socially are delightful people. I’ve lived with the armies of both nations and their soldiers are delightful and humane. But that is not the question.
“Now, is it possible for soldiers living as we saw them to-day—in their own filth, unable to succor the wounded, preyed on by stenches from the dead, until battle in which they neither ask nor give quarter is a welcome relief—can the word ‘humane’ be uttered in speaking of lives such as theirs? Or can it be uttered of the Russians—driven into a trap, half-starved, night and day in the trenches, confronted by overwhelming numbers, with certainty of no relief, yet defending a lost hope with lives easier lost than lived? Would you be ‘humane’ under such conditions? I am sure I would not.