But the deaths were not frightful. It was life that was frightful. In the contested redoubt of the Eternal Dragon, where the Japanese drove the tip of their wedge into the Russian right center in mid-August, and which they held against numberless sorties for three months, the Japanese soldiers lived in conditions that would be impossible to men of any other race. The enemy was within forty yards of them on three sides. Their way back to their base of supplies was across half a mile of valley, every yard of which was swept by the enemy’s fire. Few prisoners were taken on either side. Through the four chief months of the siege only seventy-one Russians were captured, and the number of Japanese found alive in Port Arthur at the time of its surrender was less than one hundred.
There are a few instances on record of mutual devotion between the enemies, which is vastly heightened by the other frightful record of mutual unswerving hatred. One day a Russian sergeant appeared in front of a Japanese trench, bearing over his shoulder a wounded Japanese lieutenant, whom he had picked up with a shattered leg under the parapet of one of his own forts. This sergeant had been on the point of thrusting his bayonet through the brain of the Japanese lieutenant, when the other man moved, moaned, opened his eyes, and from his pocket took a bit of biscuit, offering it to the other. The Russian dropped his bayonet, bound the shattered leg, hoisted the Japanese to his shoulders, and walked by moonlight that night to the opposing trenches.
[Chapter Seventeen]
A CONTEMPORARY EPIC
That Port Arthur would fall on the 21st of August was believed by every man in the Japanese army; the island nation was sure of it; the world thought it certain. And the Japanese did try. They lacked neither the bravery, nor the numbers, nor the skill. They failed because Nature stood in their way. Nature built the mountains, and without the mountains the Russians could not have defended Port Arthur as they did. The forts were so arranged that each was commanded by two or three others, and some by ten or twelve. One taken, the others immediately concentrated fire there and made it untenable. One thing only could be done—take all the forts simultaneously. Since there were seventeen permanent, forty-two semi-permanent, and eighteen improvised fortifications, two miles of fortified Chinese wall, and a triple line of trenches eight and a half miles long, defended by a stubborn foe, this was impossible.
“Impossible?” That is an English word. The Japanese do not understand it. “You are expected to do the impossible things,” read the first imperial order their troops received. They have done impossible things. So have the Russians done impossible things. The ordeal has raised the story of the siege of Port Arthur into an epic. Without the perspective of Troy, it has some of Troy’s grandeur. The glory, to us, is that we have touched shoulders with an age that has produced men as willing as any ever have been to fight nobly and die heroically.
