For the first time in history armies battled under searchlights. There had before been fights at sea, and at Kimberley a few skirmishes under searchlights; but in front of Port Arthur they have lighted up decisive engagements, extensive maneuvers, and vast losses. Science has intensified war. It has limited numerical loss, but it has increased individual suffering; and, as in modern city life, it strains brain and nerves to the breaking-point.
In August, for seven days and seven nights without cessation, a great battle was fought—the first grand assault, which failed and failed and failed until Nogi learned his lesson. Maneuvers as intricate and almost as extensive as those in the north at Liaoyang were conducted alternately under sun, moon, and searchlight. The crux of this action rested on one of Stoessel’s searchlight tricks, played on the night of the seventh blow of Nogi’s hammer, desperately driving a wedge into the fortress. All the afternoon the Japanese artillery had been fiercely bombarding the ridges of the Cock’s Comb, the Eternal Dragon, and the Two Dragons. One by one the Russian batteries ceased firing. It seemed that they were silenced. Night fell, with prospects fair for assault. A rising storm increased the Japanese hope, for in wind and rain the searchlights would be nullified. Then, as night and rain came down together, the searchlights struggling with both, the Japanese shrapnel opened up against the lights. They had tried before, unsuccessfully, to reach the dynamos hidden in the hills. This time the attempt apparently succeeded. The man behind the light waited until a Japanese shell burst in the line of vision between him and his foes, and then turned off the switch, giving the Japanese the impression that the light had been shattered. In this manner, one after another, three of the searchlights playing over the center of the field were “shattered.” With lights and guns apparently out of the contest, and favored by the storm and the night, Japanese expectation rose higher.
After midnight the most desperate of the eleven assaults conducted through the seven days was made against the Cock’s Comb and the Eternal Dragon. Halfway up the slope of the Cock’s Comb the three “shattered” lights, converging at one point, threw the advance out in silhouette against the red earth and the white shale. At the same moment the “shattered” batteries opened up, every gun alive. Simultaneously a regiment of Siberian sharpshooters sortied from the Two Dragons, caught the flanks in their onslaught, and all but annihilated the two regiments in front. Reinforced, bringing to the task that dour pluck that has given the Anglo-Saxon his hold on his big corner of earth, a quality the possession of which by the Japanese was once questioned, the reserves hammered the Siberians into their trenches; and though the assault against the Cock’s Comb failed, shortly after dawn the Eternal Dragon fell. This was the tip of the wedge, driven at fearful cost into the Russian right center, and was the objective needed by the engineers to outline across the valley the vast mining operations of those three months.
Between the hostile lines, held all summer and autumn with desperate determination, lay a zone on which the dead were not buried or the wounded succored. To send Red Cross men into this field was to lose two fighting units for every one saved, and no general would be guilty of such folly. The intensity of scientific conditions, the forces of which are the searchlight and the star bomb, the military engineer and the hyposcope, thus brought the fulfillment of Archibald Forbes’s prophecy, made twenty years ago. The time has come, as he said it would, when the wounded cannot be rescued from a battlefield.
Kimberley saw the dawn of the fireworks branch of warfare. It was left for Port Arthur to bring into permanent use this feu de joie of holiday nights, a delight in peace, in war a spy. Rockets, such as we use on the Fourth of July, bursting above the plain, threw phosphorus over the advancing sappers and lighted up acres as though by candelabra of stars. The Russians used three batteries of such star bombs, and their dazzle added spectacle to horror. Some Japanese officers contended that they caused no annoyance, but my observation of the results was that they gave annoyance, but were not a decisive factor. By lying low, advancing troops could always escape being seen when the light came their way.
It was to be expected that a people like the Japanese, inventive, versatile, and industrious, would develop extraordinary resources when confronted with such a problem as Port Arthur, the reducing of which has caused them great agony and cost vast treasure. Archimedes would have rejoiced to know Colonel Imazawa. Major Yamaoka of General Nogi’s staff once said: “The world makes too much fuss over the unreasoning bravery of the private soldier. It pays too little attention to the obscure effort of the engineer, who risks as much, but with full realization of what it means.” Yamaoka was speaking of Imazawa. The two are friends.
Imazawa’s most effective device was the wooden grenade gun, an invention to save assaulters from death by their own explosives. He found that a soldier carrying hand-grenades of guncotton up a slope under fire, if properly hit, became a more frightful menace to his comrades than an opposing mine. So he made a wooden barrel three feet long, erected it at an angle of forty-five degrees on a wooden upright, and by a catch-spring tossed the balls of guncotton from it several hundred yards into the Russian parapet.
After the taking of Hatchimakiyama (the Turban Fort), Imazawa found his men for the first time on a height above the Russian trenches. Then he invented the dynamite wheel. This is a steel cylinder containing five hundredweight of dynamite, with a projecting shield for soldiers who roll it forward under fire until it reaches the declivity down which it is hurled. The opposing trench precipitates the explosion.
Imazawa also improved the saphead shield, used by besiegers since the Middle Ages. Formerly it was a heavy log of wood, protected by armor-plate, behind which pioneer soldiers advanced their trenches when close to the enemy and under outpost fire. A solid log was too heavy for the Japanese purposes, so Imazawa contrived a framework of kiri-wood, both light and tough, over which he built a steel shield such as Maxim put on his machine-gun. The shield stuck out in advance of the framework like a cow-catcher on a locomotive. It was rolled out of the saphead one or two feet toward the enemy. Behind it two sappers, on their bellies, dug out from under their legs the beginning of a wide, safe trench in which, two days later, a regiment could find shelter. Nervous work this, with bullets raining overhead like hail on a tin roof; but Imazawa made it practicable.
Before he finally hit on his grenade gun, Imazawa employed a bamboo grenade lift, his first device to let assaulters hurl their explosives into redoubts without danger to themselves. These were twenty-foot lengths of heavy bamboo, to the ends of which balls of guncotton were tied. Two soldiers carried one of these lifts up a slope, projected the grenade over a trench or a parapet, and let the furious Russians smash it and themselves into destruction.