One morning in August General Nogi stood before his battalion commanders at Port Arthur with a pick in his hand. Its nose and heel had been worn away until the shank of rusted iron resembled an earth-dappled cucumber. Fondling it, the General said: “Take a lesson from this Russian pick. Your men must dig. They are too eager to ask, ‘Why intrench to-night when we are going forward in the morning?’”
Nogi here went to the heart of his problem. It had cost him 25,000 men to learn that the military engineer must precede siege assaults, as his brother, the civil engineer, precedes rapid transit in New York. The lesson, taught by Julius Cæsar to the legions in Gaul nineteen hundred years ago, Nogi and his heroes re-learned before Port Arthur in 1904. The advance in that cycle of time has been not in digging, but in ways of digging. The Japanese had to cross a valley a mile wide and six miles long, dominated at all points by every degree of hostile fire. This did not appall them. They accepted the problem, grappled with it, and mastered it.
They honeycombed the valley, in the classic manner, with eighteen miles of trenches and tunnels. The chief element in the problem was to hide these from an enemy with lookouts above the plain. “Till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane,” the prophecy that sounded Macbeth’s doom, had already been heeded by the Russians before Kuroki’s northern operations. Here the witch, whispering in Stoessel’s ear, might have warned him of his end when “maize-stalk fields shall climb the Dragon’s front”; for it was under the protection of maize-stalks, twisting through a shell-swept plain, that the sappers crept on their slow but inevitable advance.
The Japanese attaché in South Africa had seen the Boer commandos, under fire, suddenly vanish in waving stalks of corn, projected, screen-like, across a telltale front. It was a savage trick, learned by the Boers from the Kaffirs; and though school-bred British minds sneered at a ruse apparently so childish, yet many times their game was lost through such maneuvers. The Boers used their maize in wholesale fashion, covering their front with deep layers of whole sheaves. The Japanese improved on this. Students of nature, disciples of nature, they gave no gross imitations. In late autumn, over a field battle-tossed for three months, trampled by two armies, and sickled by the husbandman Death, they advanced, resurrecting the corn-fields as they went, till the Russian eye beyond could not guess the point where maize standing by chance left off and maize erected by besiegers began. Each angle of advance was concealed by these brown, withered sheaves.
But maize was only the screen, and could not hide the thousands of tons of earth which had to be taken from the plain. To throw the earth beside the trenches, thus bringing into Russian sight a furrow like that of a gigantic plow, would have revealed the Japanese position as clearly as a blue pencil could have diagrammed it on white paper.
To hide the earth of this digging was the appalling task. It was done gloriously. The advance sappers threw their first trickle of mole-like progress backward between their legs from the furious indent of their tiny spades. Helpers behind immediately deepened and widened the rivulet of shelter thus begun. The infantrymen, closing in at daybreak throughout the hot sun, perfected it, but the reserves accomplished the new thing. As fast as the earth was displaced they carried it with gabions and bamboo stretchers back through the zigzag lines behind the mountain range which concealed their own heavy guns. Here, parallel with the Russian defense, mile after mile of fresh-smelling mounds slipped up through the cautious, industrious months following that frightful August. Passing across the valley through these tunnels, deep enough to shelter regiments, three months after the Aceldama of midsummer, one could, in safety, be frowned on by hostile batteries, distant three hundred yards, or look into the plain gridironed with cunning trenches, and, like the foe above, see no evidence of life. The maize-stalks hid the trench turnings, and though the plain was alive with its thousands of armed men, even the practiced eye that had just been among them could not tell where they lay. Where had the output of that enormous digging gone? As well ask the chipmunk where he puts the dirt from his hole. It was a new experience for the Russians to fight a foe who could wiggle through the earth as easily as he could cross it, and, underneath, escape the death that he met on top.
Both sides had sailors on land. The Japanese emplaced the navy six-inch guns in the bottom of a valley. The army field guns were perched along the peaks in front, from which they could bark down like noisy house-dogs. But the savage bite came from the big guns, a quarter of a mile behind, the location of which was mistaken by the Russians as identical with that of the blustering field-pieces on the ridge. The sailors did not trust alone to the improbability of their hiding-place. They cut out earth the size of a ship’s hull, mended the broken crust with timber balks, and thrust the noses of the six-inchers out of two square openings that might have been turret-holes. Thus, entirely protected, though within easy range of the enemy, they escaped serious injury. This was the most effective Japanese battery; it has become famous for tenacity.
For the first time coast-defense guns battled with each other. The Russians turned most of theirs landward. The Japanese learned that field artillery was useless against either the fleet or the permanent forts. Such knowledge prompted the assignment of a naval brigade to the initial bombardment, which, with the first grand assault, failed. Then they immediately turned to home for heavier ordnance. Mortars for coast-defense along the Straits of Shimonoseki and on the Bay of Yezo were all but completed in the military shops at Osacca. Twenty-six of them were immediately sent by transport to Dalny, and thence by rail over the tip of the mended Trans-Siberian to the last station outside the zone of the Russian fire.
The shipment of these great guns, the mortar-barrel of one weighing eight tons, up to that point where cranes, steamships, and locomotives of the finest type were available, was a gigantic undertaking. Arrived at the shattered station in the night—for day work was impossible—the task was only begun. From there the guns were hauled by hand, for horses or Manchu oxen could not be used where silence and concerted intelligence were essential. Eight hundred men were detailed to each gun, which was mounted on skids such as lumbermen use in the North Woods. Four abreast, with hemp thongs across their shoulders, and all attached to a long cable as thick as a man’s leg, the men labored on through the mud, after dark, with the Russian shells flinging out searching challenge over their heads, occasionally a quart of shrapnel bullets spurting promiscuously into their ranks. Of the positions to which the guns were thus taken the nearest were a thousand yards and the farthest three and a half miles away. Once they were there, no emplacement of shale or earth, such as sufficed for field artillery and for naval guns, would do. So under each gun was laid eight feet of concrete, firm and deep; and when it had hardened the gun was emplaced. All this was done under fire, in the night, the men being spat upon frequently by the glare of the searchlight, pelted sometimes by wind and rain, and, toward the end of autumn, seared by the winds howling in from two seas. It was prodigious toil, obscure heroism unbelievable. But it was successful, for it was this coast-defense artillery that sank the Russian fleet. None other could have done it. The monster labor of placing these guns on the bleak Manchurian hills, from which they have contested with the finest defenses in the world, is one of the thrilling engineering feats of modern times.