General Nogi’s Headquarters Before Port Arthur, Oct. 22d: To-day we went to the Eternal Dragon, and looked in on the bloody angle. D’Adda was with me—the Marquis Lorenzo D’Adda of Rome, naval expert, military engineer, designer of the Niishin and Kasuga, which, even now, on clear days, our spyglasses can discern held in leash, ten miles off, by Togo.

Yesterday, from the Phoenix, D’Adda looked on the fortress—its two mountain ranges, its stone wall, its chain of twenty forts, its concrete glaces, its barbed wire morass, its artillery pregnant with repose, its infantry hideous with secret might—and said:

“Eemposseebl! Eet ees eemposseebl—absolutelee. Zee Japonaise can nevaire take. Eet ees stronger zan Sevastopol—stronger zan Gibraltar—absolutelee.”

To-day, from the foot of the Dragon, he looked down into a plain lost to the husbandman who bears on his arm no red cross, yet furrowed far deeper with vast and terrible furrows, its creased and aching joints curled into the glaring sun. Up, he looked under the muzzles of Russian cannon, useless now that the plain they were wont to fill with dead is lost to them.

“Extraordinaire—colossal!” he cried. “Port Art—eet will be one smoke puff zee nex attac.”

We had left the siege parallels and were climbing into the fort, our backs bent low so that no Russian sharpshooter might give his government cause to decorate the forgotten names of two noncombatants. We had wormed our way, zigzag, a mile and a half through the valley along a trench that a division might foot with equal safety, four abreast. Lives precious, toil enormous, and brains cunning and quick had hid their army from the enemy as prairie dogs hide their spring litters. A clever attachÉ with the Boers had shown how they who learned the tricks from the Kafirs, hid vulnerable turnings with maize stalks. Another, schooled with D’Adda in the arts that Julius CÆsar taught the legions in Gaul and which have not been improved on to this day, had outlined the most economic angles of advance, had shown how to take advantage of every gully, how to hide behind every terrace tuft, how to cross sodded planks above at equal distances until the way resembled the weave of an Indian basket. All of this that we had passed was but a sixth of the work of one division, of which the army holds three. And it has been done in less than two months.

The Marquis continued to exclaim that since the invention of gunpowder there has been no such engineering. “I know zee historee well,” he said, “veree well. I know Plevna, Sevastopol, Dantzig, Paris, Vicksburg, Metz, Ladysmith. Zay are no-thing. Port Art—eet ees zee greatest. Zee world cannot comprehend.”

Halfway back we had passed a Chinese village, shattered by shells, blackened by smoke, its tumbling walls utilized for the trench. Earthen wine pots had been filled with shale and placed on the sandbags to deceive the gunners beyond. Two days before there was rain and in one part the trench was filled with muddy water. We had to pick our way on submerged stones and planks. As I hurried along, looking at my feet, I noticed that the water grew dull red as though the wine pots above had burst. At that moment I stumbled and caught the wall for steadiness. My hand struck something flabby. I drew it back in horror and found sticking to the palm a white piece of flesh dented with convolutions—a bit of human brain. A pace away he lay, his feet toward me. A stray shell had blown him off from brain base to nose bridge. He was still warm and the officer called back shrilly for a soldier to come with pick and shovel. Then we took notice of the shells bursting, some five miles off, some a thousand yards away. This had happened within the hour.

As we came closer to the Dragon a stretcher was borne down by two red cross men. A bullet had picked a private through a peephole. Just ahead of us two soldiers were walking, one with his full kit, rifle and shovel on his back, the other bareheaded and barebacked. Both wore on their sleeves the two yellow stripes of the distinguished soldier. The finger of the one who was to go was held by the hand of the one who was to stay. Neither spoke. They walked silently and slowly in the full sunlight. He of the full kit was ordered into the thirty-minute trench to take the place of the one who had passed out on the stretcher. He, too, is almost sure to pass, ere long, the same way. As the two comrades walked toward the place of death I saw how true Dickens is, for it was precisely thus—finger in palm—that he sent Sydney Carton and the seamstress to la guillotine in “The Tale of Two Cities”; the one who was to go clasping the finger of the one who was to stay, the one who was to stay looking with kind, brave strength calmly into the face of the one who was to go.

“Ah! Tragique!” cried D’Adda.

The officer said we might one at a time go into the front trench. I started. It was a short climb over shale and debris of sundered shells and of a sudden I hobbled into a hollow space, girt with bags and silent, silent as is the place of execution the morning of capital punishment. It was the redoubt, thrust into the air like the maw of a dragon. The sun beat in beautiful and sure. The rocks, with deadly glare, spat up their challenge. An occasional bullet sang as a ripsaw tears through a pine knot. Then a machine gun rattled and the shale beyond pattered. I was carried back to a boiler factory and an automatic riveter. Of all war sounds that of the machine gun is least poetic, is the most deadly; it has the ring of business.

Silence, blankness, death. At first I could see no life, but the officer spoke a low word—here all words are whispers as they are beside the couches of those about to leave this world—and four spots on the wall that had seemed monotonous and brown as the shale moved. Four simple, peasant faces with the star of Nippon above looked at me. Then one, attracted by something beyond, suddenly kneeled, seized the rifle beside him, leveled it through a chink and pulled the trigger. That deadly rip sawed its knot.

Boldened by the presence of soldiers kneeling as I was, I began to look around. A groan, first aspirate, then low, as of an asthmatic man snoring, brought my eyes across the bag-protected dragon’s mouth and I saw two figures kneeling above a third. Presently the two lifted the third into a stretcher and filed past me with it. I saw a face blood-dabbed, the lips piteously moving. A bandage across the eyes saved me the worst. The officer beckoned for me to peek through the farther hole. The incident was but a bit of the day’s work for him. I followed and saw a shattered field glass under the parapet. It told the story. He was—had been—a non-commissioned officer in charge of the sentry squad and was looking across at the Russians when a sharpshooter spotted the glass. I felt that I was hurt more than he, for I lay awake thinking of it much of that night, only to remember that the surgeon-general had told me that a man shot through the brain is instantly unconscious, though his lips move and he moans for minutes.

“Each day—how many?” I asked the officer.

“Twenty.”

“And how many days?”

“Fifty-nine.”

“How many to take the fort?”

“Four thousand six hundred and fifty-three.”

“With each night a battle to resist a sortie?”

“Yes. Each night a sortie, each night a battle.”

“Thus—by night—how many to hold this awful place?”

“Since the beginning? Perhaps a regiment, perhaps a few more.”

He motioned me to the corner hole—the hole through which a minute before the bullet had sped into the officer’s eye. I emulated neither bullet nor officer, but at a respectful two feet glimpsed a ridge ghastly and glimmering in the sun like any other ridge in this hell hole. Quite near enough to reach in a short dash—200 yards, the officer said—a row of sandbags were backed business-like toward me. Between us were five heaps of blue clothes, four in a huddle and one a bit off—Russian dead killed in the battle of Hatchimakiyama four days ago in the zone where nothing lives. Grass withers there. Vermin alone germinate.

Behind those sandbags and behind these men crouch and have crouched every minute for two months hunting game the most lordly and the most cunning, the most deceitful and the most contemptible, the boldest and the fiercest, the most inspired and the most depraved this earth can boast.

The Russians on three sides held us in a vise. The bottom of the crater was paved with empty cartridge shells and bullets flattened on the rocks. Constantly more knots were being ripped by the saw above. Except for that rasp—a rasp that bore in with crescendic violence on the nerves—the silence was profound. Life was everywhere—intelligence at the keenest pitch, ingenuity the most diabolical, agility the most intense, sacrifice heroic, daring, sublime—but not a sound, not a motion. Everywhere the silence kept—the unendurable silence of the Eternal Dragon. Its insatiable maw thrust up there in the ghastly sunlight, drenched in blood, yet cried for more.

Sick with the thought that through this bloody angle, bought at so dear a cost, held at so terrible a price, there must yet be fought the supreme fight that will eventually reduce the citadel I turned to go. At the top of the downward trench I paused, kneeling, where three soldiers stood with rifles waiting to relieve the sentry on duty. Down through the plain swept the ten-mile front of the two armies—the might of Russia and the might of Japan, locked in a struggle so desperate there was no sound but the asthmatic wheeze of the ripsaw buzzing above. It was very close to the other world—yet the resources of two empires centered there, the heartthrobs of great people, raging like the wind in from two seas, swept it all into a typhoon of gore and grief.

I felt my hand clasped by a palm moist and gentle with feeling, friendly with comradeship. The eyes I looked into were not those of a beast of prey. They were quite pleasant eyes, even lovable. The face was touched with soil. I could see it came from the rice paddies, yet it had sympathy, and pity, and much capacity for happiness. Was there not also capacity for suffering? The low word came and he went off, food for powder. Will he be one of the twenty? The sun was quite as devilish as ever in the Dragon’s maw as he stepped into it. As I scrambled into safety I saw him propped against the wall, his rifle against a chink, his cheek to the breech, “sniping.” It was a salute and an appeal that he pressed into my hand, a reproach and a challenge. I was a white man, he a yellow, and he was killing white. What difference was there between us? Could I not also have found friends two hundred yards farther on? Still the ripsaw buzzed the knots. Again the machine gun rattled, without poetry, business-like and deadly.

“Tragique!” whispered D’Adda, as he came back from the same journey and sat beside me. “Zis ees zee focal point—most eentense, most sublime. Perhaps here Port Art will be taken—and by surprise. I know zee historee. I study Plevna, Sevastopol, Metz, Gibraltar, Vicksburg, Ladysmith. Always by surprise. Zee physical is but zee one aspect of zee situation. Zere are zee three aspect—zee physical, zee mental and zee moral. Zee moral aspect will be—what you call it? zee final decidence. When what you call zee psychologique mo-ment come—in zee wind, zee rain, zee storm, zee quick rush—zen zee high spirit go low—phwaat! like zat—zen Port Art fall. By a surprise. One sergeant he take Dalny, one private soldier he will take Port Art.”

We loiter along the parallel on our way back. The ripsaw strikes a knot above our heads and we shy to windward. D’Adda reminds me that once when Skoboleff, greatest of all Russian soldiers, thus ducked in giving way to a purely physical reflex action, he immediately leaped to the parapet, and walked along in full view of the enemy, until two members of his staff dragged him down as he sputtered out his disgust with himself.

We stop, winded. Again the ripsaw. Again the shrink. Then, content with what breath we have, fearful we may have no more, we hurry on, our knees sprung, our heads drawn in, like turtles slinking through the mud. We have no troops to encourage, no reputations to sustain. We are not Skoboleffs.