Port Arthur

by Richard Barry

HOME
The Shack occupied for three months (800 yards from the firing line) by General Oshima, Commander of the Ninth Division.

PLUNDER
Adjutant Hori, Secretary to General Oshima shown standing amid a quantity of plunder from one of the captured Forts.

Skill and bravery had their value, of course, but to take Port Arthur a man was needed—a man like Grant, who could fight it out on one line all summer and all winter. This man was Nogi; with a face parchment-crinkled, brown like chocolate, with beard gray, shaded back to brown where it met the skin, so that he seemed a monotone in sepia, with eyes small and wide apart, perfect teeth, tiny, regular nose, and a beautiful dome of a head flaring out from the temples in tender and eloquent curves. He stands five feet ten, unusually tall for a Japanese, showing the loose power of a master in his joints and in that mighty jowl shaded by the gray-brown beard. He has had to weather fierce storms of public indignation in Japan for two reasons—because he did not take Port Arthur as scheduled; and because he sacrificed so many lives. Turn over the pages of our history and read the story of Grant’s campaign from the Wilderness, through Cold Harbor and Spottsylvania, to Petersburg and Richmond, and you will read the story of Nogi’s campaign against Port Arthur. In northern Virginia the mighty battle-ax cut down the keen Damascene sword. On the Liaotung Thor’s hammer smashed the straying fasces of an overripe empire. The North cried out that the man who felt himself an agent of Destiny in conquering northern Virginia was a butcher; just so Japan cried “butcher” against the iron man who reduced Port Arthur.

In 1894 Nogi saw the Chinese besieged and Port Arthur taken by a feint. He saw the big Japanese demonstration then made against the front while the bulk of the army slipped along the coast to the west and south, enveloping the enemy’s left wing and driving the silly Chinese into a net where they were caught fast under the great forts, which speedily fell. Again, apparently, the same strategy was about to be repeated. But instead of making the real attack in the rear of the Russian left flank, Nogi made only a demonstration there, where “203” is on the west, and drove his straight, hard blow into the eastern line of permanent land defense. To pierce the Russian right center, enfilade its left flank, and stand Port Arthur on end—this was the plan. Gloriously it was attempted, gloriously it failed. Regiment after regiment went in, regiment after regiment went down. Corpses lay eight deep in the creek which ran red to the sea.

This grand assault—the first—began August 19th. For seven days and nights without cessation the battle raged, in the vain endeavor to pierce that right center. It is said that the Japanese are all heroes—that none are cowards. Some are also sensible. There was the Eighth Regiment, which, when ordered in to the assault where the regiment before it had been swept down, sent back through its commanding officer the word that the way was impossible. This word was so new to the Brigade-General that he ordered the regiment to the rear for fatigue duty, the worst punishment that can come to Japanese soldiers in an army where there are no guard-houses. Another regiment, the immortal Ninth, was ordered to cross the field to the foot of the slope on which lay, dead and dying, many of the men of the regiment which had gone before. The Colonel, Takagagi, surveying the task set for his regiment, sent back a report that it was not feasible. The Brigade-General Ichinobe replied hotly that one regiment was enough to take one battery. Takagagi stepped out of the ravine, in which he had been seeking shelter, at the head of his command. Before, he had been marching, as colonels usually do, in the rear, while his line officers led the advance. Now, he leaped forward up the slope, out in front of his men. A dozen paces from the ravine he fell with four bullets through his breast. The Lieutenant-Colonel took up the lead and was shot a few yards farther on. The majors were wiped out. Every captain but one went down. The last Captain, Nashimoto, in charge of D Company, found himself, at length, under the Chinese Wall with seventeen men. Looking down upon the shell-swept plain, protected for the moment from the sharpshooters above, with that handful of heroes, a mile and a half in advance of the main body of the Japanese army, he grew giddy with the success of his attempt. Of a sudden he concluded that he could take Port Arthur with his seventeen men. He started in to do it. There was only the wall ahead—the wall and a few machine-guns—beyond, the city itself—a five minutes’ run would have brought him to the citadel. He scaled the wall and fell across it—his back bullet-broken. Eight of his men got over, scaling the height beyond, called Wangtai or the Watch Tower, a place to which the Russian generals formerly rode on horseback to survey the battlefield. On this slope, for three months, in full sight of both armies, the eight lay rotting. The Russians referred to them as “The Japanese Garrison.”

This was the high tide of the advance made in August. Nogi paid a frightful price to learn his terrible lesson—that he could not so quickly wipe out a foe thus allied with Nature. The lesson cost him twenty-five thousand men. After the first ghastly assault he sat down with his army and went sensibly and slowly at the enormous task. Instead of storming Port Arthur with his army, he and Kodama saw that he must dig into it. Realizing that Nogi was sure to pass into the fortress through the earth where he had failed to enter above ground, Kodama might well have chuckled as he said that he held the besieged city in the hollow of his hand.

Yet both Kodama and Nogi thoroughly realized what they had to face. The permanent forts of the Russians were built on the advantageous shoulders that projected two-thirds of the way down the slopes. The mountains, fortunately for the Russians, were so situated that, though irregular in detail, yet their line formed a complete semicircle enveloping the city. Making use of these natural advantages, they were able to build a grand fortress with seventeen locks, for every one of which they held the key. The Japanese might spring one of the locks, but the fortress could be instantly closed with any or all of the other sixteen. Each depression between the main shoulders of the mountains was used for the emplacement of a battery. Batteries and forts were connected with barbed-wire entrenchments, and the glaces were made sheer and slippery. Some were formed of concrete, some were built crater-like of a sliding sand, so that a man advancing found himself slipping to the knees and quagmired. Around the great forts moats of unknown depth and width were built. In these moats caponieres were placed to enfilade daring assaulters. Some of the barbed wire was electrically charged, so that men attempting to cut it with nippers were electrocuted. Down the forward slopes of the mountains mines were sunk in the earth; some were exploded by contact with an electric button on the surface, others by direct contact from some tripping man as he passed over the spot. Around two of the forts torpedoes taken from the ships were buried, and their finlike stems were turned into contact flanges projecting from the earth. All these defenses were connected with a network of covered ways; in two places deep tunnels ran from fort to fort, and from all of the principal forts back to the Chinese Wall was a deep tunnel. Behind the wall lay machine guns, the most deadly weapons in modern warfare, sprinkling bullets as a hose sprinkles water.

The very names of these forts characterized the forms of the granite of which they were built and out of which they rose. The Eternal Dragon, the Two Dragons, the Chair, the Table, the Lion’s Mane, and that flippant old rooster, who is the grimmest and sauciest of them all, the Cock’s Comb, stood out defiant in Chinese hoariness.

To get across the plain, up the slopes, and into those forts by digging trenches and tunnels was the problem, and the Japanese were able to solve it. In those two months one hundred men at a time did the job, for only that number could work at once in the tunnels. Often shells found them out; rifle-fire harassed them every hour. The loss was many companies, but they never lacked the one hundred to do the work, always by night, always silently; crawling through the night, pick and shovel in hand, came that antlike hundred, the individuals constantly varying, as figures in a kaleidoscope where death is at the handle, but never quitting its terrible task.