The Struggle on the East Front
On February 24 his army delivered a tremendous assault on the Russian positions at Tsinkhetchen, preceding the infantry advance by a bombardment of great force and effectiveness. Three lines of entrenchments were literally destroyed by the fire of siege guns which had been brought from Port Arthur, and despite the tremendous difficulty involved had been placed within range of the Tsinkhetchen positions. The Russian defence was stubborn, but the Japanese were irresistible, and after a few hours of awful carnage General Rennenkampff, commanding the Russians, ordered a retreat. Kuroki failed in an effort to envelop the position, and the Russians reached in safety their main position on this flank at Da Pass. Here one of the bloodiest struggles of the war followed, opening on February 28 and continuing until March 1, when, despite one of the most gallant resistances credited to the Russians, General Kuroki flanked the Pass notwithstanding insuperable obstacles offered by the rugged nature of the country. Then followed a retreat and pursuit, every step of which was marked by fighting of the most desperate nature, thousands of bodies carpeting the gradually rolling country, which finally became the plains along the Hun. Fushun was the Japanese objective. Kuroki bent every energy to roll back the front which Rennenkampff presented, but for ten days after the plain had been reached his army was fought to a standstill. General Linevitch, commanding the division of which Rennenkampff's command was part, checkmated every attempt made to cross the Hun and flank him, while at his front he rolled back as many as thirteen infantry assaults in a single day. This section of the field was remote from the main battle line and few of the details reached the world. With the slow filtering of the story of this fighting it has become apparent that here was waged a struggle even more desperate than that which made history west of Mukden. Kuropatkin appreciated the vital necessity of preventing the turning of his left flank at Fushun, and it must be said to the credit of the Japanese that they were fighting here a force twice the size of their own and one that was continually being reinforced by every battalion that could be spared from the west. The marvel is that Kuroki's army was not utterly annihilated. It was the tremendous fight he made that compelled Kuropatkin to weaken his right to support Linevitch, and it was the fact that the right had been so weakened that made possible the brilliant victories won by the Japanese on the west. Hence, in addition to credit for the great fight he made in carrying out his own share in the battle, Kuroki stands for credit in drawing strength from other positions which materially aided in the ultimate outcome. Nevertheless, until fateful March 10, his army had been fought to a standstill within five miles of Fushun, its objective. The outcome here even encouraged Kuropatkin in the belief that the battle was going his way.
The Battle at the Center
It is necessary, in recording the story of the battle, to leave Kuroki, still fighting in vain to take Fushun and open the road to the Russian rear, and to record events on other parts of the field. The battle line, when both armies had actually been joined, extended for a distance between eighty and one hundred miles. Every event at every position dovetailed into the whole strategy of the battle, yet a vast difficulty is imposed in collating all of the scattered events into a continuous story. No one observer, possibly not the Generals-in-chief themselves, could follow all of the swift moving events, and the best and at that a most difficult achievement was to follow the main trend of events interpreting separate achievements, advances, retrogressions, as they bore on the grand object of each army.
The battle of Mukden was, in fact, four battles in one. One of those battles was fought between Kuroki and Linevitch on the east. The second battle within the battle of Mukden was fought between the centre armies and focussed in the beginning of the conflict at Lone Tree, or Putiloff Hill, just east of the railroad, forty-five miles south of Mukden. Here General Nodzu commanded the Japanese and General Kuropatkin in person and General Zassulitch, divisional commander, directed the Russian defence. The battle here began on February 24, the date on which General Kuroki delivered the attack on Tsinkhetchen. General Nodzu's immediate task was to keep the Russian centre too well occupied and in fear of a general assault, thus preventing the sending of reinforcements to the flank, where Kuroki was at his important work. The artillery duel which waged around the centre positions has never been equalled in the history of war. The Russians had at this point alone 530 guns, fifty of them siege guns on permanent emplacements firing eight-inch shells. Putiloff and Novgorod Hill bristled with field and machine guns, and these commanding hills were flanked east and west by fortifications upon which five months' work had been expended and which are perhaps the finest defensive works ever erected on a battlefield.
The Russian centre was the hope of the Russian Commander. He claimed impregnability for it, and impregnable it proved. Nevertheless Nodzu sent scores of assaults at its steep slopes, and the later advances were made by the Japanese over the bodies of comrades who had fallen in earlier efforts. The Russian centre resisted without a break, and only left its positions March 7, when events elsewhere resulted in the order to fall back north of the Sha-ho. The story of the struggle here is an exact replica of many which waged in the bloody days of the siege of Port Arthur, though here the loss of life was heavier, since none of the protective engineering devices used at Port Arthur were resorted to. The assaults were simply dashes by Japanese infantry up the bare slopes of a hill rising five hundred feet in the air. It was man unprotected against steel in armor, and the man lost. Behind the Russians was the Sha-ho River. Their second line of defences was sunk in the hillsides and hilltops there. With the river in front, the ice weakened until it was questionable whether men in any numbers could make safe crossing, this position was only a little less strong than the first. All in all, it is little wonder that the Japanese Commander elected only to feint here and deal his blow at other positions. The second line, however, availed the Russians little except to hold in check the pursuit and leave General Nodzu to be only a minor factor in the culmination of the disaster that finally befell the Russians. The centre army, while it played no conspicuous part in the battle, while it was not called upon to repel, and was not expected to take the Russian positions as a vital part of the Japanese strategy, possibly even greater credit belongs to these men who died in droves, knowing that they were being sacrificed as a matter of secondary importance, that upon others elsewhere, miles and miles away, was falling the really great events and upon whom would fall the glory. Whether they knew it or not, there was no faltering. With cries of "banzai" they stormed up Putiloff Hill, up Novgorod Hill; by regiments they fell, and regiments as loyal and heroic took their places, apparently satisfied that all the sacrifice was only to prevent reinforcements from the centre from being sent to the lines northeast, northwest, where their brothers were writing victory in blood across Manchuria's plains. War is essentially waste; waste of men, waste of money. Here the spirit of waste was fully exemplified, yet the waste was a factor if victory was to be won, and Oyama sent his armies to their work bent on victory as perhaps never an army was bent on victory.
THE RUSSIAN FLEET IN THE BATTLE OF THE JAPAN SEA.
Battle Culminates on West
The battle of Mukden, as the whole struggle has been officially called, had its climax on the west. The strategy of Marshal Oyama, as has been explained, culminated in the attack by the army of Port Arthur veterans, commanded by General Nogi. This attack was but part of the assault on the Russian right. The actual Japanese left army was commanded by General Oku, and during the long winter season had occupied a position extending westward from the Sha-ho River to the Hun, upon which at the front the Russian right rested, though when the battle had gotten under way this line was extended fifteen miles farther west to the banks of the Liao River. General Oku's lines and also the Russian lines, which he opposed, occupied a series of unmapped villages, most of them only occupied during the spring, summer and fall, when the fertile river valleys are in cultivation, the products of the region being similar to those of the Northern Central United States, east and west from Chicago as a centre. The village huts are built of rough hewn stone, the walls being of primitive build and oftentimes twelve inches thick. Stone walls around fields are of common occurrence, so that while the country generally was level, it had in these houses and walls many features offering protection to soldiery. To-day not a wall or fence in the whole region but shows the signs of the struggle that waged around them. Immediately after the battle heaps of dead marked every one of these shelters, showing where hand to hand struggles had taken place, as the Japanese, foot by foot, from house to house, from wall to wall, from village to village, had advanced across the plain.