Port Arthur

by Richard Barry

The first stage was the most vital military move, for once accomplished it meant the crumbling of the Russian line, though the defense might linger after that for months.

The second stage was politically the great essential, for not until it was well accomplished could the world be told that Port Arthur had fallen. Through this Chair fort the town was taken ten years ago, but now it rises so formidably that the Japanese have not even dared to attack it. It looks like the crater of an extinct volcano, bulwarked with loose sand at a seventy-five degree angle, so that on assault men sink to their knees and lie inert under merciless fire. “203” was but a semi-permanent outwork of this Chair fort, which dominated it.

Such was the project. Execution needed only Stoessel and his defenders to make the plan of the Tokyo War Office precise. They failed on the defense of the last three stages, so that when the Japanese accomplished the first stage, Port Arthur fell. Nogi’s original intention was to pierce the Russian right center through the line of forts from Keekwanshan and Ehrlungshan, while he demonstrated on the left, where lie “203” and Etzeshan. He pursued this plan to the end and was consistent through a bitter, costly half-year. He planned to enter Port Arthur, through Keekwanshan and Ehrlungshan, on August 21st. He entered Port Arthur through Keekwanshan and Ehrlungshan, January 2d—four months and a half late—but he got there, as he originally planned.

It was predicted that if the Russian line could be broken at any one point, the fortress would fall. No one but the mathematical heads in the War Office took stock in the idea of the four grand stages. But Nogi and his generals held to the plan by foreseeing beyond the actual defense, by checkmating it at every point that might possibly have bearing upon these various stages, and as a chess player surveys every possibility of defeat, counting on consummate ability in the opponent. Then they finally got what they were after, even before they expected it.

Had Nogi met what his foresight led him to expect—a consistently determined defense—his capture of Ehrlungshan and Keekwanshan in the last days of December would have left him only with one-quarter of his work finished. But as a general giving full credit to his adversary, he could not count on the Russian failure in the two vital respects which spelled the final surrender. These two vital things were ammunition and morale. If the Russians had had plenty of ammunition and had been pervaded, rank and file, with Stoessel spirit, they would have fought on while they held Anzushan and Etzeshan, and all of that great chain of forts from Golden Hill through to Liaotishan.

The siege of Port Arthur presents many phases—military, political, ethnical, scientific, spectacular, and dramatic—in short, all the great vital phases of human life. About the siege of Sebastopol the libraries hold thirty volumes—about Plevna twenty. Port Arthur surpasses both. Politically, vaster interests were at stake. In a military sense the operations were more extensive; so we cannot hope to cover the ground delved into by hundreds of writers about former sieges.

We can but pick the grand salient features that seared themselves into the memory of the few who lived through it. Of these the chief is the proof that human tenacity and valor are as great to-day as at any time in the world’s history. The great guns at Port Arthur were marvelous. They impressed one with that power seen in a jungle of elephants, yet they were sensitive and delicate as a little girl. The battling under searchlights was as grand a spectacle as the imagination can devise. The ingenuity and precision of the movements outlined by generals bred in all the duplicity and culture of the schools, and reared through every vicissitude of camp and march, were astounding. The ingenious, quiet deviltry of the engineer puzzled the brain. But all would have been useless without the private soldier. The boy in khaki—he did the trick.

And after all the story of Port Arthur has been thrashed out, its questions settled, that soldier of Nippon, with a calm, plain face, stamped with the soil, rises supreme, saluting his equally glorified yokel brother from the Trans-Baikal.

Shells make a lot of noise and led the hotel correspondents many miles away to see blood on the face of the moon, but at Port Arthur their damage was out of all proportion to their cost. Only one out of four hundred of the Russian shells was effective in the Japanese camp. It is not likely that more than twice that ratio—namely, one out of two hundred—would cover the proper statistics of Japanese effectiveness. Of course, the Japanese had the great advantage of a plain target.

Bullets did the harm. There were about forty million discharged during the five months of the siege, and forty million bits of steel flying with cutting velocity are bound to hit some hearts in Japan and other hearts in Russia. The weight of the total number of men killed at Port Arthur on both sides, if compared with the weight of the steel sent from the large and small guns of both armies, will show that the death of every soldier cost his weight in metal.