Port Arthur

Willow tree village, Headquarters Third Imperial Army, Manchuria, four miles from Port Arthur, Oct. 5th:

It was in August that the Japanese took the Eternal Dragon, advanced their outposts beyond its walls, threw up trenches, and settled down this inch nearer the coveted goal. In this fearful fight a certain part of the field was taken and retaken seven times, and finally, for strategic reasons, though the fort which was the bone of contention rested with the victors, a piece of dead ground beyond, over which these repeated charges had occurred, lay partly within the Russian lines and partly within our own. Dead bodies mingled with wounded—Russians jowl by cheek with Japanese—lay over it so thick that a man might have walked from one trench to another without touching the earth. The wounded could not be succored, the dead could not be buried except when they lay behind the opposing trenches. Between, no living thing could exist. The lines were but three hundred yards apart—a distance at which even a poor marksman could shoot fatally, and through all the twenty-four hours the two trenches were lined by sharpshooters a rod apart and on the constant lookout.

The weather was perfect. By day the sun shone; by night the moon, assisted by searchlights and star shells, kept the plain of death as light as day. The light showed the loopholes of the trenches so well that they could not be used, for the moment a shadow appeared behind one a marksman from the other side would put a bullet through it. The men sighted the hyposcope—an instrument first used extensively at this siege—which is a telescope arranged with mirrors at a reflex angle, so the scope goes over a wall while the eye sees in perfect safety twelve inches below. At occasional places, carefully shadowed, they kept chinks covered by stones, which, when the sun sank to the proper angle, or at dawn, could be uncovered to make a peephole large enough for a man’s eye.

Now for a month, under a torrid sun, unmarred by a day of rain or scarce a fleck of cloud, hundreds of dead have lain rotting in that compact space. A flag of truce to bury them was out of the question. The Japanese had far the worst of it, as their lines, drawn in a lunette, partly surrounded the charnel house below which they lay, steeped in its noisome drains. Moreover, in hastily throwing up their trenches the night of the battle, corpses, loosely covered; had been used to improvise the walls, so bodies and stones together formed a shelter which in life the men thus commandeered could not have made. Well the Russians knew of the disease the sun was breeding, and refused a truce, for the dead played well into their hands. Stench could be a weapon more effective than bullets or strategy. So, day after day they held the Japanese there, as a dog’s nose is rubbed in his own mess.

Watch on sentry posts was cut from four hours to two, and at the worst portion of the line to one hour. The pickets swathed their thin brown faces in towels and the commissary supplied smelling salts. An officer who served on that picket line twelve days told me that the sun alone was enough to defeat an ordinary man in four hours. Added to that the slightest zephyr bore a fetid breath more foul than the lowest of a city’s sewers.

During the first day groans could be heard occasionally from the contested ground. Wounded—no one could guess how many—lay there dying. To have attempted succor would have been suicide. The pickets did all they could. They threw rations of biscuits beyond the trenches, scattering them along the ground, blindly, of course, but carefully as a farmer strews a field. A company divided itself; one part sacrificed its water bottles, slinging across their shoulders beer bottles, instead of the handy and handsome aluminum ones furnished by the army. Then the aluminum bottles, that would stand the shock of striking, which might shatter a beer bottle, were tossed over to the starving, thirsty wretches.

The second morning there came some desultory groans from the farther side. The groans suddenly ceased. Successive rifle pops told that the Russian sharpshooters had picked off the wounded. Picket duty in the trenches became more deadly. The army had settled, with quiet determination, into a siege. One night, as the moon rose over another division of the army, two thousand yards to the west, there appeared above the trenches a cap. A bullet pierced it instantly, but it was only a feint cap on the end of a stick. The picket nearest saw it was a Japanese cap, and called his challenge, “Who goes there?”

“Tomodachi!” (a friend) came the response.

“Show your arm.”

A small grimed hand on an emaciated forearm was thrust above the parapet. The picket grasped it and pulled sharply. With a groan of agony and relief a bundle of rags, dirt and clotted blood tumbled into the trench. The picket forgot his duty as he knelt over his comrade, for, ground in filth and caked as it was with dried blood, he could not mistake the universal brown khaki, and under an arm was slung a bit of cotton-incased wood—a Shinto emblem, for this time, at least, triumphant. The wounded soldier fainted.

In a field hospital this afternoon I was privileged and honored in looking upon and talking with this hero. He is a distinguished soldier of the famous Ninth Regiment, the Black Watch of Japan, which lost all but ten per cent. of its forces in that illustrious assault under the Chinese wall. So marvelous is the recovery of the wounded that the soldier smiled as he lay, speaking occasionally a few words in response to my interpreted questions. His head and legs were swathed in bandages and he was sipping saké—a present from his Emperor. How these soldiers love their Emperor! Well they may, for a week ago there sailed into Dalny harbor a transport laden with presents from His Majesty to his sick soldiers. All the privates got saké, all the officers brandy. In addition, every private received a present of three yen in cash, the non-commissioned officers from three to ten yen, and the commissioned officers from ten to sixty yen each.

Here is the soldier’s remarkable account:

“I was one of the few who reached the Chinese wall that terrible August afternoon. There were but a few of us left, scarce half a company out of a regiment, when the Captain in command ordered us to scale the wall. I had but reached for the stones when my legs went from under me—melted away. A shell fragment had smashed them as a bamboo pole is smashed under a hammer. The pain was little, but it gradually spread over my body. I became numb, then unconscious, and though shells were busy all about me, lay for hours with no further hurt. I came to, under the stars.”

The soldier told little of what he felt and saw, but it can be imagined; the vast plain, silent but alive with hostile trenches; the gloomy fortress above, bristling with cannon, but silent; the concealed batteries—his own—miles beyond, from which an occasional boom and whiz startled the gaunt and shivery searchlights in their fantastic pencilings; then his sense of comrades lost, of dear ones perhaps dead within sound of his voice, with memories of home and better days; then desolation at defeat, the foe victorious, pride alone resolute, triumphant to the last.

He could hear sounds of pick and spade scratching the chilly earth, clamping into the shale. Only a few rods away the reinforcements were hastily throwing up earth-works to hold the hard-won ground. He saw indistinct forms groping in the dusk, pulling about other forms, inanimate ones, and hastily covering them with earth. The dead were being used to more quickly fill in the embankments. In a few days those carcasses—rotting—would charge usurious toll for all the improvised help they were this fatal night.

The soldier tried to crawl toward his comrades, but he could move only a few inches at a time, so intense was the agony in his legs, for the cool of night and renewed circulation had brought back his senses in full keenness.

Soon dawn came and with it hell. The battle was on again, this time in other parts of the field, but the shells and bullets so often passed over him that he came to think of himself as a dead man and lived on only because nature exerted her just law. Like an opossum he feigned death. Within his sight were more than a hundred dead and twice as many wounded. Groans welled up like bubbles from a pot. Arms tossed feverishly. Backs writhed in despair. Then biscuits began falling from his own trenches; one fortunately fell near him. He also managed to get a tossed-over water bottle. To reach it he was obliged to crawl a few feet and as his hand touched it he felt a sharp pain in his shoulder and the blood trickled. A bullet had pinked him. Instinctively he fell as if dead.

It was then that there occurred the thing which has inflamed the army as tow is inflamed on bonfire nights. The whole vast amphitheater was quiet. It was sundown. Nature was in her most gorgeous raiment. Both armies were at supper and an involuntary truce seemed to still the hills and valleys so lately fire-ringed. In the midst of this peace and beauty a desultory firing rang from the Russian trenches nearest the bloody angle in which lay the soldier with his comrades—dead and worse than dead. The bullets were directed, not into the opposing trenches, but into the wounded in the bloody angle.

“Stand to your guns, men!” came from the Japanese trenches, and the men sprang as though to resist a sortie.

But there was no sortie. The Russians were killing the wounded, that the bodies might rot and drive their comrades from below.

The moving ceased, the groans ceased, the sun went down, the stars and searchlights came. Impelled by the first law of nature the soldier dragged on, wearily, as he supposed, toward his friends. But the ground was level and he must have gone laterally. Toward dawn he tumbled into a deserted trench and found a sort of sheltered dugout. It was a covered passage to the Russian fort and untenable now by either side. In it were two Japanese so desperately wounded they could not move and could barely speak. He shared his last drop of water with them.

As they were drinking a figure slouched along the trench and blocked the doorway. It wore a black-visored cap, shiny with celluloid—a Russian cap. Searching the gloom the Russian found the three wounded soldiers. Then he poked his rifle in and fired three bullets—one at the brain of each. Two died instantly. The third—the soldier who had already survived as by a miracle—passed into what he thought was the rigor of death. All grew black before his eyes. Never from that moment to this—seventeen days later—has he seen even a glimmer, nor will he ever see again. The bullet passed across his eyes as he lay side down and shattered the optic nerve.

The Russian thought his work complete. Leaving his rifle outside he passed into the dugout and emptied the pockets of the two dead men and the third, whom he believed to be dead. Then sneaking back up the passage, the Russian regained his own lines.

For five days the soldier lay in the dugout, unable to move, unable to see, numb from long suffering. Almost crazed by thirst and hunger, he at length severed the arteries of one of his fallen comrades, newly dead, and lived on. He found worms crawling in the wounds of his legs. He tore up the shirt of a corpse and bound them.

Then began as memorable a journey as man ever made, as heroic a combat for life as pioneer or warrior ever underwent. He started to crawl to the Japanese lines. Blinded, paralyzed, his legs shattered, one arm useless, half dead with fatigue, his tongue swollen with thirst, and starving, he made his piteous way a few yards each night.

Directions were useless. Seeing nothing he could not tell whether firing came from friend or foe. He only knew that his way was down. So down he crawled. Bullets and shells passing over him became so common he lost all sense of them. By a terrible mistake—an error that cost twelve days of agony, for otherwise he might have traveled the few essential yards in a night—he missed the captured fort which marked the apex of the wedge driven into the Russian lines. And so his fearful, sublime crawl was for a thousand yards along the front of his own lines, into which at any time, had he turned straight along the face of the hill, he might have come and found sound legs and new, clear eyes. But down was his direction and down he went—a thousand yards in twelve nights. He found a few new dead with biscuit in their pockets and blood in their veins—this saved him.

So history repeats itself. Ten years ago—to the month—the Japanese lay without Port Arthur as they do to-day. Instead of Russians, Chinese were inside. But as the Japanese advanced along the western wall they suddenly at a bend in the way came upon ten bodies—no more—of their own comrades, stripped and mutilated, the heads grinning from pikes above. The Chinese had visited their own vengeance on successful enemies. But the act lost them Port Arthur. The Japanese became an army of fanatics, a tribe of solemn, righteous men, inflamed with the zeal of retribution, blazing with revenge, as did once that ancient civilization founded on the prophetic watchword, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The next day Port Arthur fell. Those ten bodies cost the Chinese a province, a fortune and an island kingdom.

How will the Russians pay? I asked this of a certain Lieutenant-General, who told me some of the details I have just related. He raised his arm and pointed beyond the bombproof in which we sat to where the western harbor, with its magnificent Russian stone dwellings rising beyond could be plainly seen.

“We have a proverb in our country,” said he, “like this, ‘Once won, well won; twice won, never lost.’”