“But I’ve got to get a strip of real action—I’ve got to see the little beasts go,” he muttered at length. “It’s a long chance, but I’ve got to get a touch of the blood-end—to do it right. It is as necessary as the lay of the land.”
And down he went, forgetting fear and passing time, even during certain moments, forgetting the outer world that would cry, “Bingley! Bingley!” when he was through.... Deeper and deeper he sank into the white mist of smoke which five minutes before had been torn by flame and riven with rifle crashes.
It was a moment of lull between Nodzu’s infantry charges. A land current of air cleared the low distance. The southern line of intrenched Russian infantry looked less than a mile away. Behind them, the land was pitted and upheaved with defenses to the very wall of the city, having the look, as Bingley observed, as the wind swiftly cleared away the smoke, of the skin of a small-pox convalescent. There was no sign of life in the Russian works, but his quick eye marked that shrapnel was emplaced on the higher mounds.... Had he lived a thousand years for the single purpose of viewing a battle—hundreds of acres of embattled thousands straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked and strewn with life essences, yet swarming with more raw material for murder—he could not have judged his advent better. It was the thirtieth of August—the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly sacrifices to hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki flanked.
Suddenly—it was like a tornado, prairie fire, and stampede rolled into one—Nodzu of the pastelle-brush beard called up his swarm from thicket, hummock, gulley, ditch, from the very earth, and launched it forward against the first blank ridge of the Russians. This brown cyclone tore over Bingley of the Thames and across the ruffled valley. The “Horse-killer” sat in awe. There was not yet a shot. The Russian trenches had the look of desertion.
“Hell!” he snapped viciously. “Those trenches are abandoned. Kuropatkin might as well be cooling his toes in Lake Baikal for all Nodzu will find there, and he’s rushing as if——”
At this instant the Russian works were rubbed out of vision in a burst of white smoke, and the sound of Russian bullets was like the swooping of ten thousand night-hawks.... A terrific crash, a blast of dust, burnt powder, filings, sickening gases—and that which a moment ago was a dashing young captain with upraised sword was now wet rags and dripping fragments of pulp.
“Shrapnel,” said Bingley. “He’s happy now. He was playing to a gallery of Samurai saints—that little officer.... Nervy devils all—never doubt it.... But we’re walloped—walloped sure as hell. We can never take those works.”
The position of the enemy was now obscured by trembling terraces of white smoke, out of which poured countless streams of death, literally spraying Nodzu’s command, as firemen play their torrents upon a burning building. A rat couldn’t have lived out a full minute in the base of that valley. The Japanese left a terrible tribute, but the few sped on and upward to the first line of Russian entrenchments. A peculiar memory recurred to Bingley. Once in London he had seen a runaway team of huge grays attached to a loaded coal-cart. The tailboard of the cart jarred loose, and the contents streamed out behind as the horses ran. So the hard-hit streamed out from the Japanese charge as it passed over the base of the valley.
Even as the maddest of the Japanese survivors were about to flood over the first embankment, it was fringed with bayonets as a wall with broken glass; and along the length of the next higher trenches shot a ragged ring of smoke—clots of white strung like pearls.... As a train boring into a mountain is stopped, so was Nodzu’s brown swarm halted, lifted, and hurled back.
“The little brown dogs!” observed Bingley with joyful amazement. “Why, they’d keep the British army busy!... And they smile, dam’ ’em—they smile!”