Science is well, up to a certain point. Then it becomes useless and cruel. The genius of the engineer helps the soldier across the valley and to the parapet, but there leaves him in an agony of suspense, over electric mines, under dynamite batteries, crisscrossed by machine guns. If the nerves of this marvelous soldier survive the ordeal, and if his body escapes the flying chunks of steel, he is reserved for the extremity of modern torture—hand-to-hand fighting in scientific warfare. At a moderate distance he tosses balls of guncotton; he closes with stones and stinkpots; he parleys with the bayonet, and finishes with teeth and fists.
IN ACTION
Loading a 4.7 gun of the ordinary field artillery during the assault of September 20.
By chance, one morning in September, as the dawn came in, there was revealed in a captured bombproof one little instance of the hideousness of the conflict. The arm of a Japanese boy in khaki hung limply across the back of a huge blond fellow in baggy trousers. From the hand of the boy had fallen a pistol, which had caught in the blouse of the big one; it had not fallen too soon, for just below the muzzle the blouse was matted thick with the life stream that had welled out in response to the death call. The big teeth were clinched deep and tight into the little jugular. On the boy’s slant-eyed face, good-natured, yet stamped with the strange pathos of a people close to the soil, was written a mute appeal for mercy. To that appeal there was no answer. The boy’s dead face stared into the unresponsive block timber of the bombproof.
In the bloody angle of the Eternal Dragon, the most fiercely contested zone at Port Arthur, you might have seen these boys any day of those three frightful midsummer months, when the slim wedge was being driven inch by inch into the Russian right center. Everything was covered with the white powder of dried mud. All was wrecked. The path lay through a series of shell holes, connected rudely with pick and spade. Up to that point the ground had been neatly cut, but here it became rough and crude. No inch of dirt had been unnecessarily touched, because the enemy lay within forty yards on three sides. The débris of battle was all about—torn Russian caps, conical and heavy, mingled with the light brown of Japanese uniforms, cartridge pouches half filled, shattered rifles, demolished sabres, a gun carriage smashed till the wheel spokes splintered the breech, rocks pounded by bullets as by a hammer, and, over the wall, seen as you stole by the chinks, khaki bags, loose over rotting bones.
All through the night when this bloody angle was first taken and after it had been protected with trenches from recapture, Oshima, the general commanding the division, sat in his tent without sleep. He was shaken by sobs, for he had been compelled to order that the entrenchments be made of the bodies of the dead and wounded. Only rock was there and to hold the place a quick shelter was essential. The half-dead men whose bodies were used by comrades to stop the steel hail smiled in approval at the work; they knew it was done for the best, but Oshima could not sleep; he wept bitterly all night.
Along that bloody angle and through all the eight-mile front for many months lay on duty the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who won the victory. He crouched under the parapet, rifle to cheek, its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. The tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down the barrel in deadly aim, made him look like a great cat pausing for a spring. One leg was drawn up and his cap was pulled viciously over his eyes. The sun beat upon him as he lay, venomous with pent-up passion, cut in silhouette against the trench, a shade darker than the shale. A minute before he had offered tea and cigarettes; now he dealt out hot lead. He might be a university student, or a merchant, or a professional man. Wherever he came from he was the pride of his neighborhood. Physically he was superb—perfect eyes and teeth, digestion hardy and fit as clockwork; this must have been so or he would not have been allowed to enlist. Moreover, he was a veteran of four months’ severe campaigning, seven pitched battles, and two months’ hard siege. Here he stood, far out on the firing line, clashed between two civilizations, hurled into the pallor of conflict, tossed by the greed of nations. Yes. Down there in the ditches lived the real besieger of Port Arthur. Not science, nor generalship, nor race bravery reduced Port Arthur; it was done by men who could live and die with the simple heroism of cavemen and vikings.