Richard Barry

“ 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. ”

“ It reaches high over the mountains from the sea forts and above the center of the great plain falls, as a sailor casts a halyard over the yardarm on to the deck beyond. In mid-air bursts the feu de joie, the delight of fireworks, in war a spy. On other nights this deathly star bomb revealed all secret movements, but now the Japanese have allies in the mist and rain. Neither searchlight nor star bomb can penetrate the storm veil.
Now comes the crackle of infantry, followed by the pop, pop, pop, of quick-firers, the clatter of Hotchkiss howitzers, the more sprightly click of Maxims. ”

“ There was no regular firing, but only the desultory popping that is heard night and day along the whole ten-mile front, where sharp-eyed pickets are keen and cautious. The General became bold, raised his head—whit—a bullet through his brain.
Neither officers nor men can be said to be reckless, or even incautious. The army is devoid of that extravagance expected of war, when each man’s courage seems in question and cowardice impels bravado. Evidently, there is not a coward in the army, for the bravery of each soldier and of each officer seems taken for granted. ”

“ It seems ages and ages before the line-sergeant and his deploying figures leap to the skyline, reel for an instant, and disappear. The grist from the hopper below hastens and the rifle-butts spring from ground to shoulders. It was the first man who was needed. Now that the charm is broken, they no longer skulk, but run eagerly to the crater and tumble in. The hopper has fed well-eared corn into the mill, and it has come out ground meal. The grits lie scattered all along the slope. Some move. The most lie still, their battle with cold nights in exposed trenches finished, sentry duty done. ”

“ Not a life is thrown away, not a precious head wasted.
Not fifty yards up the Russian lookout scouts them, and then we see we are not facing a beaten foe, but a waiting one. Until that moment no sound came from the enemy. No shells chucked away at hidden batteries, no rifle ammunition plumped into the sandbags of parallels, no shrapnel sent hit-or-miss over the fields searching for an unseen foe—not any of that stupid, wild game for them. They have let the preparation go on, all the fuss and fury, the bombardment, the sapping, and now we see what they are up to. ”

“ Ho-o-zan (the Phœnix Mountain) , Manchuria, August 28th:—Ninety-six hours of almost incessant fighting—from sun to moon, from moon to searchlight and from searchlight to dawn—is more than human endurance, backed though it be by Japanese pluck, can stand, and there was nothing to do last night but rest. Only an occasional sentry pop or the roll off to the right of a wheezy cannon whose shot traveled on wheels in need of grease, told us that the sublime panorama of mountains and valleys lying before us hid a hundred thousand armed and warring men. ”

“ Far out on the plain, between the two armies, and between us on the mountain and the Russian forts, two miles off, a lone factory chimney up-slants to the blue; though bursting shells have been thick about there it is unharmed, and, so far as we can see, Port Arthur is unharmed. So far the Japanese have not shelled it at all. But we are told the navy has wrecked the Russian quarter. The army scorns to destroy the city which now lies at the mercy of its siege guns, just as it scorns to starve out the beleaguered garrison. ”

“ There was much pride in the chief gunner as he took a cartridge from its bomb-proof shell chest, ran to his gun, threw open the cordite chamber, pulled out the breech block, rammed in the shell, snapped the block, and stepped back to signal the lanyard man; more pride than is usual in the Japanese gunner, a timid, simple being, dexterously handling his delicate instrument with as little vanity as he would handle a potato hoe. ”

“ The foremost man is there on the wire, gutted. He hangs, a frightful mass, limp on the barbs. Here and there a poor fellow is crawling, as you have seen some worm trodden on vainly seek its hole. Not a man of the battalion has survived. A thousand brave, faithful soldiers are gone. So this is civilized warfare!
Yes. They now see it was folly to attempt the hill of Nanshan. So they open up with artillery, a whole regiment of it, infinitely superior to the sixty antiquated cannon, the forty Canet pieces and the ten quick-firers. ”

“ There the maize is untouched and the heavy heads of the millet fall from sheer weight, while the cabbages are crushed by infantry passing in the night. Fires have blackened the villages, the Manchurians have fled, and in ragged lines from sea to sea the two armies hold their hostile trenches, from which, through the twenty-four hours, goes up the intermittent ping and pop of rifle bullets.
What of the army? You cannot see it; much less can you hear it. An army of a hundred thousand men is here, around us, among us, but we do not know it, we can hardly guess it. ”

“ Just as the sun went down, at the bottom of Namicoyama, whose heights war had swept but a day before, in sight and sound of the grim proofs of his last victory—emplaced batteries and occupied field hospitals—the body of the major-general was given to the flames, while his men in the trenches above sternly held the Russians at bay. Occasional cannon rent the air, infantry popping cracked in the stillness, myriad tent lights twinkled up into the moonlight ”

“ They have no scissors, no choppers, no axes. Worse, they have no time. They keep on at the fence, gashing shins, stripped of impediments, down to the instincts and passions, all discipline gone, every vestige of civilization lost. Now they are through, half-naked, savage, yelling, even Japanese stoicism gone. Up to the very muzzles of the first entrenchment they surge, waver and break like the dash of angry waves against a rock-bound coast. ”

“ How like a live thing a shell snarls—as some wild beast, in ferocious glee thrusting the cruel fangs in earth and rock, rending livid flesh with its savage claws, and its fetid breath with poison powder scorching the autumn wind! ’Most always it fizzes and funks in shameful waste. Bullets are the nasty things; a who-whit, a dry spat, a thin hole drilled in a frightful way, as snakes sling their venom in sly and easy scorn. When we got halfway up, and into the angle, so that Russian trenches were on three sides, a number sped about us. ”

“ Yet, behind the northern parallel range, the distance of a rifle-shot from the Russians in Port Arthur, ominously silent, monstrously at work in preparation, was the Japanese army—siege-mortars cocking their twenty tons of steel on solid masonry as a Mauser pistol cocks on a man’s fist; monster naval guns, rakish devils, buried in the earth, with frightful noses menacing the blue; howitzers perched on peaks; lines of transport laden with rice and biscuit; hospitals brilliant as the sunlight and quiet as its stillness ”

“ This the Japanese are to assault before noon. There is no timber, only a few bushes and rock the size of a bull’s head, hard things to wade through, but no defense. They must cross the open plain, 500 yards, in full range of those one hundred and ten cannon, smash the barbed wire, climb the terraced plateaus where they will be picked off like rabbits in a shooting gallery, assault the trenches and finally take the heights. To take one trench seems heroic achievement, four an impossibility. ”

“ Occasionally the figures are huddled, piteously deprived of action, sending upward the silent, unanswerable appeal that death makes. But most of them have that curious upward slant, bodies rigid, as of determined men hugging the ground. Were they bulleted straight? Anyway, it is a glorious death—this of the infantry soldier storming Port Arthur, lifted on the crest of the world’s fiercest passion, puffed into vapor as the crest of a storm-tossed wave! ”

“ Noon found me well up toward the firing line, assured by the staff that it would be the day of days. To get there I passed a mile and more of batteries—the Osacca guns vomiting balls of fire, puff-balls of smoke and fat, heavy balls of steel; the howitzers—coyotes of artillery—spitting from peaks, snapping, louder than the monsters growl below; the naval six-inch turret firers, rakishly sunk in valleys, their greyhound noses dappled with mud, baying out reverberations at which even the sulking sun might have shuddered ”

“ Through, over, and beyond these few, the Japanese finally entered Port Arthur.
Science is well, up to a certain point. Then [312] it becomes useless and cruel. The genius of the engineer helps the soldier across the valley and to the parapet, but there leaves him in an agony of suspense, over electric mines, under dynamite batteries, crisscrossed by machine guns. If the nerves of this marvelous soldier survive the ordeal, and if his body escapes the flying chunks of steel, he is reserved for the extremity of modern torture—hand-to-hand fighting in scientific warfare. ”

“ Thus it is we have faith that some morning the world will wake to hear that the Rising Sun flies over Port Arthur, which the military experts of the Powers have declared impregnable.
Bitter as the contest is, war has not touched the bowels of the land. Looking into the plain behind me I can see a score of busy and peaceful villages serene in a sea of golden harvest. Maize and buckwheat, beans and millet, cabbage and barley alternate green and russet over the meadows. Springless bullock carts, ancient as Jerusalem, helped by tiny donkeys and naked children, painfully garner the grain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down that barrel in deadly aim made me think of nothing but a great cat pausing for a spring. One leg was drawn up, his cap was pulled down viciously over his eyes, the sun beat upon him and he lay, venomous with pent-up passion, cut in silhouette against the trenches, a shade darker than the shale. A minute before he had offered me tea and a cigarette; now he was dealing out hot lead. Yet, who could suspect danger, with all so still and clear! But life most intense and [228] death the most terrible and swift dwelt all about us. ”