One morning in August General Nogi stood before his battalion commanders at Port Arthur with a pick in his hand. Its nose and heel had been worn away until the shank of rusted iron resembled an earth-dappled cucumber. Fondling it, the General said: “Take a lesson from this Russian pick. Your men must dig. They are too eager to ask, ‘Why intrench to-night when we are going forward in the morning?’”

Nogi here went to the heart of his problem. It had cost him 25,000 men to learn that the military engineer must precede siege assaults, as his brother, the civil engineer, precedes rapid transit in New York. The lesson, taught by Julius CÆsar to the legions in Gaul nineteen hundred years ago, Nogi and his heroes re-learned before Port Arthur in 1904. The advance in that cycle of time has been not in digging, but in ways of digging. The Japanese had to cross a valley a mile wide and six miles long, dominated at all points by every degree of hostile fire. This did not appall them. They accepted the problem, grappled with it, and mastered it.

They honeycombed the valley, in the classic manner, with eighteen miles of trenches and tunnels. The chief element in the problem was to hide these from an enemy with lookouts above the plain. “Till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane,” the prophecy that sounded Macbeth’s doom, had already been heeded by the Russians before Kuroki’s northern operations. Here the witch, whispering in Stoessel’s ear, might have warned him of his end when “maize-stalk fields shall climb the Dragon’s front”; for it was under the protection of maize-stalks, twisting through a shell-swept plain, that the sappers crept on their slow but inevitable advance.

The Japanese attachÉ in South Africa had seen the Boer commandos, under fire, suddenly vanish in waving stalks of corn, projected, screen-like, across a telltale front. It was a savage trick, learned by the Boers from the Kaffirs; and though school-bred British minds sneered at a ruse apparently so childish, yet many times their game was lost through such maneuvers. The Boers used their maize in wholesale fashion, covering their front with deep layers of whole sheaves. The Japanese improved on this. Students of nature, disciples of nature, they gave no gross imitations. In late autumn, over a field battle-tossed for three months, trampled by two armies, and sickled by the husbandman Death, they advanced, resurrecting the corn-fields as they went, till the Russian eye beyond could not guess the point where maize standing by chance left off and maize erected by besiegers began. Each angle of advance was concealed by these brown, withered sheaves.

But maize was only the screen, and could not hide the thousands of tons of earth which had to be taken from the plain. To throw the earth beside the trenches, thus bringing into Russian sight a furrow like that of a gigantic plow, would have revealed the Japanese position as clearly as a blue pencil could have diagrammed it on white paper.

To hide the earth of this digging was the appalling task. It was done gloriously. The advance sappers threw their first trickle of mole-like progress backward between their legs from the furious indent of their tiny spades. Helpers behind immediately deepened and widened the rivulet of shelter thus begun. The infantrymen, closing in at daybreak throughout the hot sun, perfected it, but the reserves accomplished the new thing. As fast as the earth was displaced they carried it with gabions and bamboo stretchers back through the zigzag lines behind the mountain range which concealed their own heavy guns. Here, parallel with the Russian defense, mile after mile of fresh-smelling mounds slipped up through the cautious, industrious months following that frightful August. Passing across the valley through these tunnels, deep enough to shelter regiments, three months after the Aceldama of midsummer, one could, in safety, be frowned on by hostile batteries, distant three hundred yards, or look into the plain gridironed with cunning trenches, and, like the foe above, see no evidence of life. The maize-stalks hid the trench turnings, and though the plain was alive with its thousands of armed men, even the practiced eye that had just been among them could not tell where they lay. Where had the output of that enormous digging gone? As well ask the chipmunk where he puts the dirt from his hole. It was a new experience for the Russians to fight a foe who could wiggle through the earth as easily as he could cross it, and, underneath, escape the death that he met on top.

Both sides had sailors on land. The Japanese emplaced the navy six-inch guns in the bottom of a valley. The army field guns were perched along the peaks in front, from which they could bark down like noisy house-dogs. But the savage bite came from the big guns, a quarter of a mile behind, the location of which was mistaken by the Russians as identical with that of the blustering field-pieces on the ridge. The sailors did not trust alone to the improbability of their hiding-place. They cut out earth the size of a ship’s hull, mended the broken crust with timber balks, and thrust the noses of the six-inchers out of two square openings that might have been turret-holes. Thus, entirely protected, though within easy range of the enemy, they escaped serious injury. This was the most effective Japanese battery; it has become famous for tenacity.

For the first time coast-defense guns battled with each other. The Russians turned most of theirs landward. The Japanese learned that field artillery was useless against either the fleet or the permanent forts. Such knowledge prompted the assignment of a naval brigade to the initial bombardment, which, with the first grand assault, failed. Then they immediately turned to home for heavier ordnance. Mortars for coast-defense along the Straits of Shimonoseki and on the Bay of Yezo were all but completed in the military shops at Osacca. Twenty-six of them were immediately sent by transport to Dalny, and thence by rail over the tip of the mended Trans-Siberian to the last station outside the zone of the Russian fire.

The shipment of these great guns, the mortar-barrel of one weighing eight tons, up to that point where cranes, steamships, and locomotives of the finest type were available, was a gigantic undertaking. Arrived at the shattered station in the night—for day work was impossible—the task was only begun. From there the guns were hauled by hand, for horses or Manchu oxen could not be used where silence and concerted intelligence were essential. Eight hundred men were detailed to each gun, which was mounted on skids such as lumbermen use in the North Woods. Four abreast, with hemp thongs across their shoulders, and all attached to a long cable as thick as a man’s leg, the men labored on through the mud, after dark, with the Russian shells flinging out searching challenge over their heads, occasionally a quart of shrapnel bullets spurting promiscuously into their ranks. Of the positions to which the guns were thus taken the nearest were a thousand yards and the farthest three and a half miles away. Once they were there, no emplacement of shale or earth, such as sufficed for field artillery and for naval guns, would do. So under each gun was laid eight feet of concrete, firm and deep; and when it had hardened the gun was emplaced. All this was done under fire, in the night, the men being spat upon frequently by the glare of the searchlight, pelted sometimes by wind and rain, and, toward the end of autumn, seared by the winds howling in from two seas. It was prodigious toil, obscure heroism unbelievable. But it was successful, for it was this coast-defense artillery that sank the Russian fleet. None other could have done it. The monster labor of placing these guns on the bleak Manchurian hills, from which they have contested with the finest defenses in the world, is one of the thrilling engineering feats of modern times.

For the first time in history armies battled under searchlights. There had before been fights at sea, and at Kimberley a few skirmishes under searchlights; but in front of Port Arthur they have lighted up decisive engagements, extensive maneuvers, and vast losses. Science has intensified war. It has limited numerical loss, but it has increased individual suffering; and, as in modern city life, it strains brain and nerves to the breaking-point.

In August, for seven days and seven nights without cessation, a great battle was fought—the first grand assault, which failed and failed and failed until Nogi learned his lesson. Maneuvers as intricate and almost as extensive as those in the north at Liaoyang were conducted alternately under sun, moon, and searchlight. The crux of this action rested on one of Stoessel’s searchlight tricks, played on the night of the seventh blow of Nogi’s hammer, desperately driving a wedge into the fortress. All the afternoon the Japanese artillery had been fiercely bombarding the ridges of the Cock’s Comb, the Eternal Dragon, and the Two Dragons. One by one the Russian batteries ceased firing. It seemed that they were silenced. Night fell, with prospects fair for assault. A rising storm increased the Japanese hope, for in wind and rain the searchlights would be nullified. Then, as night and rain came down together, the searchlights struggling with both, the Japanese shrapnel opened up against the lights. They had tried before, unsuccessfully, to reach the dynamos hidden in the hills. This time the attempt apparently succeeded. The man behind the light waited until a Japanese shell burst in the line of vision between him and his foes, and then turned off the switch, giving the Japanese the impression that the light had been shattered. In this manner, one after another, three of the searchlights playing over the center of the field were “shattered.” With lights and guns apparently out of the contest, and favored by the storm and the night, Japanese expectation rose higher.

After midnight the most desperate of the eleven assaults conducted through the seven days was made against the Cock’s Comb and the Eternal Dragon. Halfway up the slope of the Cock’s Comb the three “shattered” lights, converging at one point, threw the advance out in silhouette against the red earth and the white shale. At the same moment the “shattered” batteries opened up, every gun alive. Simultaneously a regiment of Siberian sharpshooters sortied from the Two Dragons, caught the flanks in their onslaught, and all but annihilated the two regiments in front. Reinforced, bringing to the task that dour pluck that has given the Anglo-Saxon his hold on his big corner of earth, a quality the possession of which by the Japanese was once questioned, the reserves hammered the Siberians into their trenches; and though the assault against the Cock’s Comb failed, shortly after dawn the Eternal Dragon fell. This was the tip of the wedge, driven at fearful cost into the Russian right center, and was the objective needed by the engineers to outline across the valley the vast mining operations of those three months.

Between the hostile lines, held all summer and autumn with desperate determination, lay a zone on which the dead were not buried or the wounded succored. To send Red Cross men into this field was to lose two fighting units for every one saved, and no general would be guilty of such folly. The intensity of scientific conditions, the forces of which are the searchlight and the star bomb, the military engineer and the hyposcope, thus brought the fulfillment of Archibald Forbes’s prophecy, made twenty years ago. The time has come, as he said it would, when the wounded cannot be rescued from a battlefield.

Kimberley saw the dawn of the fireworks branch of warfare. It was left for Port Arthur to bring into permanent use this feu de joie of holiday nights, a delight in peace, in war a spy. Rockets, such as we use on the Fourth of July, bursting above the plain, threw phosphorus over the advancing sappers and lighted up acres as though by candelabra of stars. The Russians used three batteries of such star bombs, and their dazzle added spectacle to horror. Some Japanese officers contended that they caused no annoyance, but my observation of the results was that they gave annoyance, but were not a decisive factor. By lying low, advancing troops could always escape being seen when the light came their way.

It was to be expected that a people like the Japanese, inventive, versatile, and industrious, would develop extraordinary resources when confronted with such a problem as Port Arthur, the reducing of which has caused them great agony and cost vast treasure. Archimedes would have rejoiced to know Colonel Imazawa. Major Yamaoka of General Nogi’s staff once said: “The world makes too much fuss over the unreasoning bravery of the private soldier. It pays too little attention to the obscure effort of the engineer, who risks as much, but with full realization of what it means.” Yamaoka was speaking of Imazawa. The two are friends.

Imazawa’s most effective device was the wooden grenade gun, an invention to save assaulters from death by their own explosives. He found that a soldier carrying hand-grenades of guncotton up a slope under fire, if properly hit, became a more frightful menace to his comrades than an opposing mine. So he made a wooden barrel three feet long, erected it at an angle of forty-five degrees on a wooden upright, and by a catch-spring tossed the balls of guncotton from it several hundred yards into the Russian parapet.

After the taking of Hatchimakiyama (the Turban Fort), Imazawa found his men for the first time on a height above the Russian trenches. Then he invented the dynamite wheel. This is a steel cylinder containing five hundredweight of dynamite, with a projecting shield for soldiers who roll it forward under fire until it reaches the declivity down which it is hurled. The opposing trench precipitates the explosion.

Imazawa also improved the saphead shield, used by besiegers since the Middle Ages. Formerly it was a heavy log of wood, protected by armor-plate, behind which pioneer soldiers advanced their trenches when close to the enemy and under outpost fire. A solid log was too heavy for the Japanese purposes, so Imazawa contrived a framework of kiri-wood, both light and tough, over which he built a steel shield such as Maxim put on his machine-gun. The shield stuck out in advance of the framework like a cow-catcher on a locomotive. It was rolled out of the saphead one or two feet toward the enemy. Behind it two sappers, on their bellies, dug out from under their legs the beginning of a wide, safe trench in which, two days later, a regiment could find shelter. Nervous work this, with bullets raining overhead like hail on a tin roof; but Imazawa made it practicable.

Before he finally hit on his grenade gun, Imazawa employed a bamboo grenade lift, his first device to let assaulters hurl their explosives into redoubts without danger to themselves. These were twenty-foot lengths of heavy bamboo, to the ends of which balls of guncotton were tied. Two soldiers carried one of these lifts up a slope, projected the grenade over a trench or a parapet, and let the furious Russians smash it and themselves into destruction.

The last thing Imazawa did was a mistake—not his, but still a mistake. In preparing for the third grand assault on October 29th, after the sapheads had been worked to within a hundred yards of the parapet on the Two Dragons redoubt, it was found that a dry moat separated the Japanese from their prey. The width and depth of this moat were difficult to determine. In the most fiercely contested zone, and on a plateau so situated that it could not be accurately seen from any of the heights possessed by the Japanese, its exact nature remained a mystery. Scouting was difficult, for it was commanded not only by the batteries of the Two Dragons, but also by the batteries of the greatest forts at Port Arthur—the Chair, the Table, the Cock’s Comb, and Golden Hill. To reach it a scout would have to cross several hundred yards of red earth, bare to every sight, and commanded by sharpshooters. Of those who went in for information about that mysterious dry moat, for a week none came back. Finally one scout, more cautious than the rest, returned and reported to Imazawa, “Ten meters.” Thirty-nine feet is big width for a moat, and no one could wonder that, sneaking along there in the dark, with momentary fear of searchlights and sharpshooters, the scout, finding a hole wider than his imagination, thought the distance great if it was ten meters. So Imazawa made his bamboo ladders fourteen meters long. On the day of the assault, everything having progressed favorably up to that point, the bombardment and the flank work against forts on each side being successful, the advance went in with Imazawa’s fourteen-meter ladders. Under fierce fire nearly half of the men dropped from the ranks, and only enough were left to handle three ladders, the glacis of the redoubt being littered with four others whose bearers had been slain. The hardy scaling party at last placed their ladders securely on one edge of the moat and dropped them across, expecting the next moment to dash across them to victory, leaving the reserves crouched in the trenches, waiting for the word to follow. Judge of their dismay when the ladders fell from the perpendicular to horizontal, from the horizontal to the perpendicular again! They failed to touch the other side, failed to touch bottom, and disappeared. The moat was fourteen meters wide. The dismayed assaulters hastened back to Imazawa. That night a party advanced and dropped a thousand bags, at one point, into this terrible moat. These sand bags disappeared, and not a ripple of their indent could be seen. This sunken road of Ohaine baffled the army and was the chief reason that Port Arthur did not fall on the Emperor’s birthday. Had they passed it, the Two Dragons redoubt would have fallen and the town could have been entered.

Those who charge the Japanese with suicidal folly should remember that when confronted with this crack in the earth they did not emulate emotional Frenchmen at Waterloo. They sat down and gave Imazawa a chance to study. They did not die in a climax of frenzy. Their sacrifice is for a grand and patriotic idea. Sensational despatches about losses spread the belief that they die like flies. The truth is, they never waste a life.

The use of many successful inventions showed the Japanese equal to all the progress of the age. The hyposcope enabled them to observe what went on in the town, and from 203-Meter Hill revealed the fleet. This is a telescope cut in half, the front elevated two feet above the rear by a further length of scope, and the line of vision between made straight past the angles by two mirrors. It gives a lookout within a few hundreds yards of the enemy’s line a chance to explore calmly at his leisure.

Bombproofs for the generals were cut in the solid rock a thousand yards in advance of the artillery and overtopping the firing-line. Thus commanding officers could get the traditional bird’s-eye view of the battlefield. Instead of sitting at headquarters, miles in the rear, as the generals in the North were compelled to do, and directing the action from an office desk, as a train-despatcher regulates his system, the divisional, brigade, and regimental commanders with their own eyes could observe all that was going on. The commander-in-chief had a fine lookout in the rear center of his army, two and a half miles from the town of Port Arthur. From there his eye glanced over as grand a battlefield as the world has yet produced, for within an area of ten square miles was brought every possibility of modern warfare. Even cavalry maneuvered. While his optic vision was extraordinary, his mental horizon was vast and comprehensive. Telephones centering to a switchboard in the next bombproof connected him with every battery and every regiment under his command. He was in instant touch with the most outlying operations, and, almost with the ease and certainty of Napoleon at Austerlitz could march and countermarch, enfilade and assault.

Telephone and post office follow the flag. In the advance of the Japanese army down the peninsula, telephone linesmen bearing on their shoulders coils of thin copper wire, not much larger and of no more weight than a pack-thread, followed through the kaoliang-fields on each side of the commander. The moment he stopped, a table was produced, a receiver was snapped on the wire, and a telegrapher stood ready. More remarkable was the advance of the telephone into the contested redoubt of the Eternal Dragon, where a station was placed and operated for four months, with the Russians holding trenches only forty meters distant and on three sides. At this station, along the front of which twenty men a day were slain by sharpshooters, mail was delivered every time that a transport arrived, which was almost daily. Men on the firing-line received postal cards from their sweethearts and mothers an hour before death.

Telephone and post office followed the flag; the Red Cross preceded it. The medical corps came, not in the wake of the army, but close on the heels of the pioneers. Before even the infantrymen entered a Chinese village it was explored, the water of its wells analyzed, its houses tested for bacteria, and the lines of encampment laid down. This unusual sanitation is looked upon by surgical authorities as perhaps the chief cause of Japanese success.

But one could find another cause of Japanese success, if the analytical probe is to be used and the mystic impulse which gives men resolution for supreme sacrifice ignored. This great cause may be called originality. The record of superficial observers of her recent advance is that Japan to-day selfishly and slavishly reaps the values wrung from time and chance through many centuries by other nations. If this be true, she is original enough to survive the ordeal of imitation. Had a single person shown the qualities displayed at Port Arthur he would be charged with having the audacity of genius. This audacity did not hesitate to make use of anything, new or old, possible or impossible, conventional or unconventional, which might win success from desperate conditions.

Let me give an instance: the problem that faced Japan’s soldiers when they had dared to capture a minor position in the fortress’s line of defense. Audacity won it, originality held it. The trench-line of this bloody angle of the Eternal Dragon lay down the slope and thus beneath the opposing Russian trench-line. The maxims of assault declared it untenable unless the contiguous positions to which it was subsidiary could be immediately taken; wise generalship seemed to dictate that it be abandoned. To hold it would be hardly worth the cost. Napoleon thus laid down in general treatise and Von Moltke specifically so dictated; but not Nogi. Give him an inch and he keeps it. Besides, he needed this inch for his engineers.

In the bloody angle the ordinary sand-bag redoubt would not do. There was no opportunity to erect the permanent masonry or even the semi-permanent timber redoubt. The men must have some protection that would let their heads be sheltered a foot or more below the top of the trench, and yet give them loopholes for firing. Any conventional trench built from experience or laid down in the text-books was impracticable. A French, a German, an English, a Russian soldier would have thrown up his hands because his father and his grandfather knew no medicine for such a hurt. The American, had he been far enough away from red tape, might have improvised. The Japanese did not hesitate. Around the bloody angle he raised a trench modeled on the medieval bulwarks of his samurai fathers. It was built with ingenious quickness due to his twentieth-century training. He erected a front of rock, like the turret of a castle, and through the deep embrasures of this turret fired his machine-guns, while the ragged skyline overtopped and kept him safe. On the spot he married old with new. He was following the destiny of his race—to tie the ages together.