Ch XXIV.
THE BEGINNING OF THE GENERAL ASSAULT
WHEN a correspondent of the “Novoe Vremya” inspected the defenses of Port Arthur, his remark is reported to have been: “It is like an eagle’s nest that even a sky-scraping ladder cannot reach.” Yes, it was even so. As far as the eye could reach, every hill and every mountain was covered with forts and ramparts; the landward side was encircled with iron walls of tenfold strength, and its defenders were brave soldiers trained by the veteran General Dragomiloff,—courageous men, the strongest and quickest,—the flower of the Russian Army. We were now in front of this “impregnable” fortress to prove that it was “pregnable” after all. The 19th of August was the first day of the general attack, the starting-point of the historic incident of the fall of Port Arthur. The struggle that was to be characterized in the world’s history of warfare as the most difficult and most horrible of all struggles began on this day and lasted for more than four months. During this period our desperate attack was responded to by as desperate a defense, and our army paid an immense price for its victory, turning the mountains and valleys of Port Arthur into scorched earth honeycombed by shells, butchering men and capturing the fortress at last with bullets of human flesh shot out by the Yamato-Damashii itself. The gazing world was astonished by the wonderful efficiency of such a mode of warfare!
We, at the foot of Taku-shan, were hurrying on the various preparations for attack. We were making a special investigation of the ways and means of encountering the wire-entanglements, upon which the enemy depended as the most efficient of their secondary defensive works, and by the stakes and wires of which so many of our men had been killed in previous battles. All the hills in our sight, large or small, high or low, were wrapped about with these horrible things, that looked at a distance like dark dots on the ground.
We had to break these entanglements, step on them, and proceed. The cutting properly belonged to the engineers, but their number was limited while that of the wire-entanglements was almost limitless. So the infantry had to learn to cut them for themselves. An imitation entanglement was made on the bank of the river Taiko and we were taught by the engineers how to break it down. First of all, a group of shears-men would march up and cut the iron wires, then the saw-men would follow and knock down the stakes or else saw them through. When a part of the entanglement was thus opened, a detachment of men would rush through the opening.
This kind of work was of urgent necessity for us and we practiced it with zeal and diligence. But in actual fighting the work cannot be done so easily. The forlorn-hope engineers, who march up to destroy the entanglements, are always annihilated without exception, because they have to work before the very muzzles of the machine-guns. Moreover, it was discovered that these wires were charged with electricity. There were, however, two opinions about the electric current: one was that the electricity was strong enough to kill whoever touched the wires, and the other that it was only intended to inform the enemy’s watchtowers, by a weak current of electricity, of the approach of the destroyers. Whichever it might be, we could not cut the wires with ordinary scissors so long as they were charged with electricity, so we contrived to bind bamboo sticks to the handles of the shears to make them non-conducting. In spite of all these precautions, we found in actual fight that the wires were charged with a very strong current; some of our men were killed instantly by the shock, others had their limbs split like brushes of bamboo. We also practiced methods of crossing the enemy’s trenches with ladders, but again in actual fight we found that their trenches were too wide or too deep for these ladders to be of much use.
The fortress was protected by earth-mines, which were buried everywhere. They had to be destroyed by our engineers, by cutting off the fuse. Until the very day of our attack we could see through field-glasses groups of Russians at work here and there, burying these explosives in the ground with picks. We marked those places on our maps. We found out and remembered everything that we could; for instance, that each of the stakes of the entanglements was beaten down with twelve blows of a hammer, or how many earth-mines were being buried in any particular valley. Our reconnoitring parties found that every ravine up which our infantry was likely to march was set with mines, and that the methods of disposing them were very clever. To cite one example, where the ravine was narrowest there was buried a mine that would explode when stepped on. When the first man was killed in this way, the rest would of course divide themselves on either side of the ravine, where a series of mines would burst and kill all of the attacking party. It was extremely hard to go through these places in safety. On the top of all this, all the guns and rifles of all the forts and skirmish-trenches were so directed as to be able to aim at every ravine and every rock, so that none of us could escape the concentrated cross-fire from three directions. Their defense left almost nothing to be desired.
At dawn on the 19th of August, the whole line of our artillery opened fire simultaneously, with East Kikuan as our chief objective, but bombarding other forts at the same time. This was the first step in our general assault. Soon, our assaulting columns pushed on their way under cover of the artillery fire, approaching the enemy inch by inch, ready to rush upon them with one accord as soon as our fire began to take effect upon the Russians. Therefore our batteries devoted their whole energy to breaking the forts, shattering the bomb-proofs, and opening breaches in the skirmish-trenches through which our storming parties could enter.
No sooner had our firing begun than the enemy responded from all their batteries and tried hard to silence our artillery and impede the progress of our infantry. What a terrible scene presented itself when huge shells were exchanged between the heavy guns of both sides! Explosive shells as big as saké-casks[54] and spherical shells caused great vibrations in the air, and their groaning reverberation set at naught the fury of pealing thunders. The bursting of shells scattered lightning everywhere, and the smoke covered the scene with thick steamy clouds, in which it seemed impossible for any living thing to breathe. We nicknamed the enemy’s shells “train shells,” because they came moaning and shrieking just like a train leaving the station with sharp whistling. When we heard such a sound near us the whole earth shook, and in the tremendous roaring men, horses, rocks, and sand were all hurled up together. Everything that came into collision with these terrible trains was reduced to small fragments; these fragments would fall to the ground and then go up again, as if they had wings to fly with. One lieutenant’s neck was torn by a fragment of shell, and his head hung by the skin only. Both arms of a private were cut off clean from the shoulders by the same process.