The regiment hurled itself upon the slopes of the hill, solid shot ploughing awful furrows through their ranks. The survivors kept on, undaunted. That night meant for them victory or a glorious death. No one thought of retreat.
As he saw his men swept downward by the pitiless hail of steel, Oshima lost all sense of danger, and the old spirit of his Samurai ancestors blazed out. "Strike! Strike!" he shouted to his men, springing in front of them as the broken line faltered for a moment. "Up the hill! It is ours! Banzai dai Nippon!"
With the wild cheer of Japan upon his lips he suddenly threw his arms aloft and fell headlong to the ground. The column swept by and over him in the darkness. Then two slightly wounded men raised their captain, his hand still grasping his sword, and tottered down the hill with him, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen.
Not far in the rear were Red-Cross workers, and the silent figure of the brave officer was borne swiftly to a hospital tent, where he partly regained consciousness. He was shot through the body, and the surgeons shook their heads as they examined the wound. Still, there was a chance for his life, and Oshima was despatched to the coast, the first part of the way in an ambulance, then by railway. At Antung he remained until the hospital ship was ready to sail with its sad freight of torn, pierced, and mangled soldiers. The staunch vessel—painted white, with a broad green stripe along its hull, like the sash of a military surgeon—conveyed him safely to Hiroshima, where he was placed in a cot near an eastern window. Kind hands ministered to him, and gentle faces bent over him. As he recovered full possession of his senses he saw one sweet face that was familiar to him.
"Hana!" he whispered. "O-Hana-San, is it you?"
Day after day the battle raged in Manchuria. Shells began to fall in Moukden, and in an hour the city was a scene of ghastly confusion and panic. Hospital trains, loaded to the doors with wounded and dying, pulled out of the station, the groans and shrieks of the sufferers mingling with the clank and clatter of the iron wheels. Men and women rushed to and fro in the muddy streets—for this was the first week in March, and a few warm days had turned snow and ice to mire, ankle deep—and fought each other in a frenzied fear as they struggled for places in carts and railway cars, with such of their personal effects as they could carry in their arms. Thieves and drunken soldiery looted shops and private houses boldly.
It was rumoured that the awful Japanese line was closing in on the north, and that the railroad would be cut. This added to the panic. Dazed, mud-stained, deafened with the roar of battle, half senseless with intoxication, thousands of stragglers and camp-followers staggered through the city, joining the mad rush. "To the north! To the north!" was the one thought, the one wild cry. Emerging from the densely populated town, the throng of refugees fled up the valley. Wherever the defile narrowed, the crowd crushed together, screaming, pushing, fighting their way on; through back alleys of little villages on the route; along the railroad track, separating to allow a train to roar through their midst, shaking frenzied fists at it as it passed and left them behind; flinging away food, clothing, household treasures to which they had thus far clung mechanically; shouted at by retreating battalions whose progress they blocked, and cursed by artillery-men as the horses sprang forward over the clogged and miry road, or crashed through the low willows and over mud-walls surrounding the hovels of the natives; still on and on, through the black night and the chill grey dawn, the frantic multitude streamed northward toward Harbin and safety.
At Tie Pass there was a halt. Here Kouropatkin made a desperate attempt to stand, and did succeed in checking the enemy until the shattered Russian forces could reunite in the semblance of a disciplined army, while the wounded, and such stores and guns as had been saved from the disastrous defeat, were sent northward. Then the army fell sullenly back, a few versts each day, repulsing the attacks of the exhausted Japanese. These attacks diminished in number and force, until Kouropatkin could breathe more freely and even consider establishing a new line of permanent defence. Before, however, he could reorganise his troops or lay out a single line of fortifications a despatch flashed over the wires from St. Petersburg removing him from the supreme command of the army and appointing General Linevitch, his former subordinate, in his place.
Like a brave and generous soldier he not only laid down his command without a word of protest, but at once petitioned for and obtained permission to serve under Linevitch. Truly, the "Little Father" had reason to be proud of his children!