Cloudy! Yes, but what day could smile in the face of such a row as this? The grand bombardment has been on for five days. We call it the “grand” bombardment, to distinguish it from that other trifling bombardment of a few hundred field guns that was on for nearly three months. Now the big coast defense mortars from Osacca, hurling shells the size of donkeys, are ripping the lining from the doomed fortress. We cry for rest, but there is no rest. Night and day the fearful din keeps up. The paper windows of the Manchurian house where we live, two miles away, have been blown out twice by concussions. The mountains tremble. If you get within a hundred yards of the guns, you must wear cotton batting in your ears and walk tiptoe to save ear-drums. This for a ten-mile front, with infantry and regular artillery hammering the spaces out, was enough to discourage the sun. Sun, however, is an incident. War waits for no weather.
Halfway in among the batteries I paused for guidance. There were certain lines between our batteries and the Russian batteries which were called “lines of fire,” and these lines were good places to avoid. Soon two soldiers, each with a rice bag on his back, came along, and I picked up their trail. There was a narrow valley which led to the Ninth Division, whose firing line was to be the center of the attack and for which I was bound. Along the center of this valley seemed to me the right way, but the soldiers headed straight across it, business-like, stolid, as if they knew where to go, and I followed. We were fair in the midst of it then. In ravines on both sides the Osacca mortars were hid. From behind and directly over our heads a naval battery was firing, and in front of us there were four or five batteries of field artillery, opening the engagement. There was never a moment without two or three shells in the air directly over our heads. So long as they were friendly shells—imagine a shell being friendly!—no one seemed to mind. (That “seemed” is a good word to describe my state.) But directly they came viciously from across the valley—look out! Presently one did come that way. I knew it was coming. How? I felt it. So the ground in front found my stomach and my nose sniffed the gravel. It could not have passed very far above our heads—this shell—for when it exploded behind the dust showered over us, and I thanked myself for lying down, else a fragment might have rapped me so I would have cared nothing for dust or dirt of stale encampments. Of course, the soldiers must have lain down, too—they surely must have known the danger. I looked up to laugh with them, but they were trudging on stolidly, as if they were carrying a pound of meat home from the butcher’s. When the dust came they blinked—that was all. I was so ashamed I hardly dared show myself; yet I needed my legs to get on out of the line of fire, and there are times one forgets his pride. I ran; but no need to be ashamed; they had not seen me fall, had neither quickened nor lessened pace, had turned not so much as an eyelash to left or right. They had orders to take that rice to the battery, and to the battery they were going. So I paused—amazement surviving fear—and looked at them, cogs of the machine, secret of an army’s strength, of its indomitable bravery. As well expect the shafts of an engine to cry quits when the trucks spring a hot box!
At length I found myself where the pewit of bullets beat a quickstep for the inferno aloft. It was on the crest in front of the farthest field artillery, at the rear of the parallels in which the infantry lay, huddled masses of blue dabbed above with glints of bayonet steel, waiting for the assault. Occasionally the sun came out and sent a heliograph message from those bayonets to me, and then, like myself, sought cover again. The four forts slated for attack by the two divisions in my view lay directly in front, about a mile and a half by parallels and approaches, but, as my vision went, eight hundred yards for the nearest, fifteen hundred for the farthest. From the rear that assorted pack of war-dogs flung suspense and agony, surprise and death, over my head. Beyond, the forts, hung like a corona of barbarous gems on the brow of the mountain range, gushed forth pain and disgust.
The Pine Tree fort (Shodzuzan) on the extreme right was afire, had been for two hours, and the smoke from it, blown by a northwest wind, lifted raggedly square across the field. Through the slight haze each explosion opposite could be seen, as it tore out, now a chunk of a mountain and now a crater from a parapet. About half-past twelve the star bomb chamber of the south battery, the one nearest, was struck, and for ten minutes an explosion of day fireworks held the line. On the north battery two guns hung across the parapet, their backs broken, useless. On the two smaller forts between, the P and M redoubts, men could be seen feverishly working at a rear intrenchment. Evidently they were preparing to retire from the front line, where they already scented danger. But they as evidently showed determination to fight to the last ditch—which they did. All four of these forts, spread fanwise halfway down this mountain slope, formed the group called the Cock’s Comb (Keikan, Japanese; Keekwan, Chinese), and above them on the skyline the comb could be plainly seen, lacking only the dab of red, later to be given its approaches, to give it the cock color. It was on the Cock’s Comb that half of the great losses in August occurred. Some ten thousand Japanese had already been mowed down there, for every slope was prepared for enfilading by two batteries, the moats were deep, the fortifications of masonry and the glacis sheer and slippery. Yet the Cock’s Comb once taken, the Russians must yield, for it was to the siege of Port Arthur what Nanshan was to the campaign—the decisive position. Once driven from there, the enemy’s back would be broken. The fall of the Cock’s Comb and the Two Dragons, on December 31st, forced Stoessel’s surrender.
Copyright, 1905, by Collier’s Weekly
At one o’clock the bombardment seemed to have reached a climax of intensity. The parapets of the four forts were alive with bursting shrapnel. A hundred a minute were exploding on each (at fifteen gold dollars apiece). The air above them was black with the glycerine gases of the mortar shells, and the wind blowing toward the sea held huge quantities of dust. Timber splinters were in the air and rocks were flying. Not a fort replied, and from the entire eight-and-one-half-mile front of the Russian line there were few answers. Once about every ten minutes a wheezy battery off on the Liaotishan Peninsula sent a shell promiscuously into our vast field, apparently to show that the defense was yet at least gasping for breath.
In the front parallels the infantry seemed on the move. There was a shifting of rifles, and in three of them, from end to end, a man could be seen running. The night before I had been up there to find all of the soldiers changing their linen and sponging themselves off as best they could with old towels and soiled handkerchiefs. They were purifying themselves for death. A superstition as old as Japan says that a man who dies dirty finds no place among the Shinto shades. Now they were waiting calmly, each with an overcoat and spade across his back. Why the spade? Will it be necessary to hastily intrench for the night far up the slope? Each had an “iron” ration in his pocket, and a pint of cold tea in his flask. Two hundred rounds of ammunition in his three leather pouches go to help the bayoneted rifle that he slings by its strap, its butt dragging as he goes up the hill. What a job it is, this, of living in a pocket handkerchief, on compressed air, giving and receiving death, for three cents a day!
At one-fifteen our fire changes. The four forts are left to their silence and devastation, and the fat balls travel westward to the Pine Tree and the Two Dragons. For a moment the slopes stand out, ghastly with smoke, pitted like strawberries, each pit a shell hole deep enough to give a man shelter.
Before anyone knows it the assault is on. The four get it at once. From the bottom of each, out of the approach sapped there in the night, a handful of men is fed, as corn might drop, grain by grain, ground from a hopper. They get a few rods up when another handful is fed, then another, until the whole face of the hill is swarming with tiny figures, their blue turned in the distance to black, the space between each at no place less than two yards, at none more than two rods. Not in battalion phalanx, as the picture books show, shells dismembering, arms thrown aloft, faces wild with battle’s glory, terror, agony, but steadily, sanely seeking every cover, deploying with skirmish formation, they go on and up, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell. Not a life is thrown away, not a precious head wasted.