That Port Arthur would fall on the 21st of August was believed by every man in the Japanese army; the island nation was sure of it; the world thought it certain. And the Japanese did try. They lacked neither the bravery, nor the numbers, nor the skill. They failed because Nature stood in their way. Nature built the mountains, and without the mountains the Russians could not have defended Port Arthur as they did. The forts were so arranged that each was commanded by two or three others, and some by ten or twelve. One taken, the others immediately concentrated fire there and made it untenable. One thing only could be done—take all the forts simultaneously. Since there were seventeen permanent, forty-two semi-permanent, and eighteen improvised fortifications, two miles of fortified Chinese wall, and a triple line of trenches eight and a half miles long, defended by a stubborn foe, this was impossible.

“Impossible?” That is an English word. The Japanese do not understand it. “You are expected to do the impossible things,” read the first imperial order their troops received. They have done impossible things. So have the Russians done impossible things. The ordeal has raised the story of the siege of Port Arthur into an epic. Without the perspective of Troy, it has some of Troy’s grandeur. The glory, to us, is that we have touched shoulders with an age that has produced men as willing as any ever have been to fight nobly and die heroically.

Skill and bravery had their value, of course, but to take Port Arthur a man was needed—a man like Grant, who could fight it out on one line all summer and all winter. This man was Nogi; with a face parchment-crinkled, brown like chocolate, with beard gray, shaded back to brown where it met the skin, so that he seemed a monotone in sepia, with eyes small and wide apart, perfect teeth, tiny, regular nose, and a beautiful dome of a head flaring out from the temples in tender and eloquent curves. He stands five feet ten, unusually tall for a Japanese, showing the loose power of a master in his joints and in that mighty jowl shaded by the gray-brown beard. He has had to weather fierce storms of public indignation in Japan for two reasons—because he did not take Port Arthur as scheduled; and because he sacrificed so many lives. Turn over the pages of our history and read the story of Grant’s campaign from the Wilderness, through Cold Harbor and Spottsylvania, to Petersburg and Richmond, and you will read the story of Nogi’s campaign against Port Arthur. In northern Virginia the mighty battle-ax cut down the keen Damascene sword. On the Liaotung Thor’s hammer smashed the straying fasces of an overripe empire. The North cried out that the man who felt himself an agent of Destiny in conquering northern Virginia was a butcher; just so Japan cried “butcher” against the iron man who reduced Port Arthur.

In 1894 Nogi saw the Chinese besieged and Port Arthur taken by a feint. He saw the big Japanese demonstration then made against the front while the bulk of the army slipped along the coast to the west and south, enveloping the enemy’s left wing and driving the silly Chinese into a net where they were caught fast under the great forts, which speedily fell. Again, apparently, the same strategy was about to be repeated. But instead of making the real attack in the rear of the Russian left flank, Nogi made only a demonstration there, where “203” is on the west, and drove his straight, hard blow into the eastern line of permanent land defense. To pierce the Russian right center, enfilade its left flank, and stand Port Arthur on end—this was the plan. Gloriously it was attempted, gloriously it failed. Regiment after regiment went in, regiment after regiment went down. Corpses lay eight deep in the creek which ran red to the sea.

This grand assault—the first—began August 19th. For seven days and nights without cessation the battle raged, in the vain endeavor to pierce that right center. It is said that the Japanese are all heroes—that none are cowards. Some are also sensible. There was the Eighth Regiment, which, when ordered in to the assault where the regiment before it had been swept down, sent back through its commanding officer the word that the way was impossible. This word was so new to the Brigade-General that he ordered the regiment to the rear for fatigue duty, the worst punishment that can come to Japanese soldiers in an army where there are no guard-houses. Another regiment, the immortal Ninth, was ordered to cross the field to the foot of the slope on which lay, dead and dying, many of the men of the regiment which had gone before. The Colonel, Takagagi, surveying the task set for his regiment, sent back a report that it was not feasible. The Brigade-General Ichinobe replied hotly that one regiment was enough to take one battery. Takagagi stepped out of the ravine, in which he had been seeking shelter, at the head of his command. Before, he had been marching, as colonels usually do, in the rear, while his line officers led the advance. Now, he leaped forward up the slope, out in front of his men. A dozen paces from the ravine he fell with four bullets through his breast. The Lieutenant-Colonel took up the lead and was shot a few yards farther on. The majors were wiped out. Every captain but one went down. The last Captain, Nashimoto, in charge of D Company, found himself, at length, under the Chinese Wall with seventeen men. Looking down upon the shell-swept plain, protected for the moment from the sharpshooters above, with that handful of heroes, a mile and a half in advance of the main body of the Japanese army, he grew giddy with the success of his attempt. Of a sudden he concluded that he could take Port Arthur with his seventeen men. He started in to do it. There was only the wall ahead—the wall and a few machine-guns—beyond, the city itself—a five minutes’ run would have brought him to the citadel. He scaled the wall and fell across it—his back bullet-broken. Eight of his men got over, scaling the height beyond, called Wangtai or the Watch Tower, a place to which the Russian generals formerly rode on horseback to survey the battlefield. On this slope, for three months, in full sight of both armies, the eight lay rotting. The Russians referred to them as “The Japanese Garrison.”

This was the high tide of the advance made in August. Nogi paid a frightful price to learn his terrible lesson—that he could not so quickly wipe out a foe thus allied with Nature. The lesson cost him twenty-five thousand men. After the first ghastly assault he sat down with his army and went sensibly and slowly at the enormous task. Instead of storming Port Arthur with his army, he and Kodama saw that he must dig into it. Realizing that Nogi was sure to pass into the fortress through the earth where he had failed to enter above ground, Kodama might well have chuckled as he said that he held the besieged city in the hollow of his hand.

Yet both Kodama and Nogi thoroughly realized what they had to face. The permanent forts of the Russians were built on the advantageous shoulders that projected two-thirds of the way down the slopes. The mountains, fortunately for the Russians, were so situated that, though irregular in detail, yet their line formed a complete semicircle enveloping the city. Making use of these natural advantages, they were able to build a grand fortress with seventeen locks, for every one of which they held the key. The Japanese might spring one of the locks, but the fortress could be instantly closed with any or all of the other sixteen. Each depression between the main shoulders of the mountains was used for the emplacement of a battery. Batteries and forts were connected with barbed-wire entrenchments, and the glaces were made sheer and slippery. Some were formed of concrete, some were built crater-like of a sliding sand, so that a man advancing found himself slipping to the knees and quagmired. Around the great forts moats of unknown depth and width were built. In these moats caponieres were placed to enfilade daring assaulters. Some of the barbed wire was electrically charged, so that men attempting to cut it with nippers were electrocuted. Down the forward slopes of the mountains mines were sunk in the earth; some were exploded by contact with an electric button on the surface, others by direct contact from some tripping man as he passed over the spot. Around two of the forts torpedoes taken from the ships were buried, and their finlike stems were turned into contact flanges projecting from the earth. All these defenses were connected with a network of covered ways; in two places deep tunnels ran from fort to fort, and from all of the principal forts back to the Chinese Wall was a deep tunnel. Behind the wall lay machine guns, the most deadly weapons in modern warfare, sprinkling bullets as a hose sprinkles water.

The very names of these forts characterized the forms of the granite of which they were built and out of which they rose. The Eternal Dragon, the Two Dragons, the Chair, the Table, the Lion’s Mane, and that flippant old rooster, who is the grimmest and sauciest of them all, the Cock’s Comb, stood out defiant in Chinese hoariness.

To get across the plain, up the slopes, and into those forts by digging trenches and tunnels was the problem, and the Japanese were able to solve it. In those two months one hundred men at a time did the job, for only that number could work at once in the tunnels. Often shells found them out; rifle-fire harassed them every hour. The loss was many companies, but they never lacked the one hundred to do the work, always by night, always silently; crawling through the night, pick and shovel in hand, came that antlike hundred, the individuals constantly varying, as figures in a kaleidoscope where death is at the handle, but never quitting its terrible task.

In darkness a company begins its labor in unison. Guided by clever engineers, the picks advance through the blackness; the shovelers smartly after. The Russian searchlight swings menacingly to play upon the little group. A shell hurtles in. A dozen men fall, some never to rise again. Up with the first aid, down with the stretchers, to the rear with the victims. Advance another squad—on goes the hundred. So for two months—and then through the finished trenches the rest of the army walked impudently in the broad sun, laughing at those useless bullets singing so saucily overhead.

The plain lay overripe with harvests, but not a living thing was on its surface. The autumn sun hung indolent and golden. Blackened villages were deserted. Among the chain of forts, bristling with cannon, there lay one with its nearest side completely honeycombed. All the other forts were silent and bare on their near sides. That honeycomb was made by the gridironing of Japanese trenches. Between it and the line of mountains, parallel to the Russians on the north, the ground was ridged with mounds of fresh earth, as if some gigantic mole had zigzagged across the plain. From neither army was there the slightest evidence of life, except that between the two lay that telltale fresh earth, as though a huge animal had been busy in the night. 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; regiments of men receiving instructions—how to escape beri-beri, how to keep nightdews from the rifle-barrels, how to bind a fractured leg, how to scupper an adversary in a hand-to-hand fight—but on the field of battle, on the opposite sides of which the opposing hosts were held like hounds in leash, there was nothing human—only silence, beauty, sublimity.

From September 19th to the 25th occurred what is known as the second assault, although it might more properly be described as a reconnaissance in force. As an assault it failed. Then on the last day in October the war-demon awoke again to his full ferocity. Where the twenty-five thousand had been lost in August, a division could now be poured right up to the parapets of the Russian forts without losing a man. Coast-defense guns had been brought from Japan to battle against the Russia coast-defense guns, which had been turned landward. The Japanese had hauled their guns by hand, eight hundred men to a gun, through mud, up the mountains, in the dark, under fire, and had placed them in silence on solid concrete foundations. But after they had crossed the valley the Japanese still had a frightful obstacle to face. There was but one way to get to the forts—up the slopes. Every inch of these was commanded by guns trained carefully through three months of actual use against a real foe and through four previous years against an imaginary one. The Russians lay confident and calm above their terrible fortress. They did not have to bluster with bombardments. They knew their strength. They merely waited until the Japanese advance reached a certain spot on the slopes. It was not a question of aiming the guns, as it is where troops are constantly fighting over fresh ground. All that was necessary was to pull the triggers. There was about the proceeding little of the sport of war. The order to advance was as certainly fatal as the hangman’s signal in an execution-chamber, and when the Japanese did advance the few who survived the murderous fire found behind those superb entrenchments men just as brave, just as cunning, just as strong as they themselves. If it is ever asked which is the braver, Japanese or Russian, no answer can be given. No one nation distinguished itself at Port Arthur. The glory belongs to both.

It was in the third grand assault, when the final operations commenced, that General Ichinobe, the commanding officer who had ordered the sacrifice of Takagagi and his immortal Ninth Regiment and who had summarily sent the sulking regiment to the rear, became the Japanese Marshal Ney. Two battalions under his command succeeded in entering the P redoubt, an outwork of the great Cock’s Comb fortification. Ichinobe left his battalions after midnight, secure in the conviction that his work had been successful. Toward three o’clock in the morning he was roused by an orderly, who reported that the men had been driven from the P redoubt. Ichinobe was then half a mile as the crow flies, nearly one and a half miles as the trenches lay across the valley, from the slope of the redoubt. Leaping from his couch, he called about him his staff-officers, issued hurried orders to the reserves, and, at the head of his immediate followers, ran through the zigzag trenches. Reaching the foremost line, now under the fire of Russian machine-guns, he found his men not demolished, but surprised, outnumbered, and being driven sullenly back. Drawing his saber, Ichinobe thrust the ranks aside, passed through, and charged up the slope, leading his heroes for the second time into the contested fort. With his own hand he killed three Russians. When dawn came his brigade occupied the P redoubt. His immediate commander, General Oshima, had an account of the exploit telegraphed to the Emperor at Tokyo. That afternoon an Imperial order reached the army, christening the fort “Ichinobe.”

In the assault of August 19th to 26th, the few men who reached the parapets had received in their faces storms of what the Chinese call “stinkpots”; that is, balls of fresh dung. This assault wholly failed. The dead were left to rot, and the wounded were shot as they lay, the stench of the corpses being used as a weapon of offense against the Japanese, who were trying to maintain the advantage they had gained at the foot of the slope. The demonstration of September 19th, which also failed, was met with hand-grenades of guncotton. In the third assault on October 29th, halfway up the Cock’s Comb, the advance stumbled over a mine, and the entire lower shoulder of the mountain was blown into the air, taking with it some twenty-five men, heads awry, legs and arms twisted, trunks shattered. Nevertheless, new volunteers advanced through the crater thus formed, up the glacis of the redoubt, until they reached a new and dangerous obstruction. This was a moat so cunningly concealed under the very edge of the parapets that an observer below could gain no hint of its existence even with the most powerful field-glasses. The ditch was so deep that once in, a man could not get out even by climbing over another man’s shoulders. To fall in was certain death, for in every turn of the concealed moat was a masonry projection called by the cunning men who devise such traps, a caponiere. These caponieres were built of stone and covered with earth. They were tiny forts, concealing and protecting four or five Russian riflemen and a machine-gun. Consequently, under perfect protection and with their foe in limited area, trapped like woodchucks in a hole, unable to escape, the Russians merely had to deal out whistling steel at their leisure. The Japanese did not falter. The first men who leaped into that moat knew that they were leaping to certain death, but they knew, too, that the men in the caponieres could be overwhelmed by the force of the numbers to come after. The two caponieres were captured at once.

Under the parapets of this fort, dominated by all the artillery of the two armies, occurred some of the grimmest fighting that history records. It was at midnight of the second day of final occupation. The black mountains lay behind, the black forts in front, the blacker plain below. A Japanese lieutenant, Oda, asked for a volunteer Keissheitai, or certain-death party. Thirty Keissheitai men came forward. Oda put himself at their head and ventured along the bed of the moat toward the rearmost caponiere, with the idea of capturing it. The fort is very long—about one and a half times the length of an ocean liner—so he found room and time for adventure. There was no moon, and the moat was too close to the Russians for them to depress their searchlights sufficiently to illuminate it. In the blackness, halfway down the moat, Oda and his men met a Russian lieutenant prowling with a squad of men behind him, bent on the recapture of the two caponieres which the Japanese had seized. They had it out, not with bullets, but bayonet to bayonet, fist to fist, and even teeth and nails. Oda and the Russian, in locked embrace, reeled back and forth, falling, rising, scratching, first one on top and then the other, each losing sight and control of his men, all of whom were engaged in individual combats just as savage.

The two leaders, grappling for an opportunity that each sought, bumping against the walls of the narrow moat, reached, without knowing it, an embrasure which led to the rear of the fort and into the gorge. Tripping over this, not knowing where they were going, the two plunged headlong down the slope. Above frowned two Russian batteries. Beyond rose the great red-capped sky line of the Cock’s Comb. A hundred yards, scratched by the stones, smashed by the shale, they slipped and writhed, until they struck a tiny plateau halfway down the mountain. Here the two, clinched, stopped as might a dislodged stone toppling from its socket. In the struggle Oda had been able to get his right arm free, which he reached over across his enemy’s back, grasping the hilt of his straight, samurai sword. Pulling it halfway out of the scabbard, which was tightly lashed to his waist, he sawed and pulled until the slender, tapering steel had gashed through the Russian’s clothing, full to his backbone.

Late the following night, after the sun had gone, Oda crawled into his own trenches at the base of the mountain. His men had been repulsed by a second party of Russians who had made a sortie to relieve the first. But, still the Japanese held the two caponieres in front and the Russians the two in the rear. Oda got no medals nor applause. Two days later a breast-wound which sent him to a hospital in Japan saved his life, for had he stayed he would have certainly gotten himself killed.

The Japanese during the first two nights hastily dug out approaches and had a partially covered way from the base of the mountain to the moat. This gave them their vital hold on the north battery of the Cock’s Comb. So resolute were the Russians in holding every inch of ground that it was a full month and a half after that before the Japanese could take the complete fortification. And when the complete fortification was taken it availed but little, for it was but one of three great batteries which formed the series known as East Keekwan, which was itself but a portion of the eastern line of permanent defenses.

To see how the rest of the great Northeast Keekwan (Cock’s Comb) Battery was taken is to see how Port Arthur was taken, for all the forts were reduced in the same way. 203-Meter Hill, the Two Dragons, the Eternal Dragon, Quail Hill, Wangtai, and the Pine Tree fell as did the Cock’s Comb. The only difference lay in incident.

It must be remembered that the fight was never over with the taking of the outer parapet. Inside the forts, beyond the parapets, well protected by moats and caponieres, was a sheltering earthwork called the contrascarp, crossing which, storming parties met a close and unerring fire from men concealed beyond, in ways formed of timber balks and sandbags, and called traverses. Below these traverses were galleries where the garrison lived; and below the galleries were the bombproofs protecting the ammunition. Under the traverses, covering the galleries and bombproofs, was heavy masonry from two to three feet thick.

To undertake the capture of the whole chain of fortifications by such sacrifices as those which gained a single one of the Keekwan forts might have entailed the extermination of the whole besieging army and of all the reinforcements which could have been sent to its support. But with one fortress in the chain in Japanese hands there was another way—sapping.

Through November the Japanese engineers were busy digging underground from the advantageous hold they had on the north battery. They started straight down through the solid rock. Only a few men could work at a time, and these could dig only while the trench protecting them, which was a few yards in advance, was held by their comrades, vigorously firing, to keep down the Russian garrison, now not more than a hundred feet away. Moreover, sometimes when the Japanese sappers were half concealed in the earth, sometimes when they were wholly underground, companies of desperate Russians would suddenly break forth on them, spurred by Stoessel’s promise of the Cross of St. George and a money prize to whoever should break up any Japanese work. Thus at night, hounded by shells, sleuthed by searchlights, and harassed by heroes from across the way, the hole was dug. Forty feet down it had to go to get below the level of the galleries and bombproofs, then another twenty feet forward to find a spot under the vitals of the fortification.

Stupendous as the task was, the tunnels were finished at last, and on December 18th a quarter of a ton of dynamite was placed in two such mines, and the galleries and bombproofs of the north battery were blown into the air, with the demolished bodies of some forty-five men of the garrison.

And even this was only the beginning of the end. Already the Japanese had accomplished a herculean task. They had sweated, endured, writhed in agony, died, and they had taken only one battery. Ahead of them still rose, tier on tier, forts and batteries, moats and walls, until the soul grew sick to think that Port Arthur must be bought with sacrifice so vast. But the Japanese did not turn back, did not weep, showed no despair. They came to work, to meals, as cheerfully as ever they had done in the rice paddies. And this, notwithstanding that winter was on them, that the keen, equinoctial gales blew in from both seas, that the thermometer fell to zero and below. They were surrounded by charnel houses of their own making, and protected only by miserable, hasty dugouts shielded from cold and wind by a few broken boughs, light shelter-tents, and hastily packed earth. Death was preferred to a wound, for the wounded had small hope of succor; yet life was cherished and fostered.

Meanwhile the Russians were busy. They devised a new scheme of defense. Kerosene was taken through a subterranean gallery of the Two Dragons into a moat and there poured on piles of straw. Then they waited.

At the fifth grand assault, when the north battery of the East Cock’s Comb was taken, the Two Dragons were simultaneously attacked. A company of Japanese headed for the moat. The kerosene and straw were set on fire and the men who leaped into the moat, expecting to find caponieres as they had found them in the Cock’s Comb, were caught by flame. Many perished miserably. Some valiantly fought the flames, but few survived. These few—that is, the few who do the work in warfare—the few who accomplish that for which the thousands die—made possible the Japanese advance. Through, over, and beyond these few, the Japanese finally entered Port Arthur.

Science is well, up to a certain point. Then 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. At a moderate distance he tosses balls of guncotton; he closes with stones and stinkpots; he parleys with the bayonet, and finishes with teeth and fists.

By chance, one morning in September, as the dawn came in, there was revealed in a captured bombproof one little instance of the hideousness of the conflict. The arm of a Japanese boy in khaki hung limply across the back of a huge blond fellow in baggy trousers. From the hand of the boy had fallen a pistol, which had caught in the blouse of the big one; it had not fallen too soon, for just below the muzzle the blouse was matted thick with the life stream that had welled out in response to the death call. The big teeth were clinched deep and tight into the little jugular. On the boy’s slant-eyed face, good-natured, yet stamped with the strange pathos of a people close to the soil, was written a mute appeal for mercy. To that appeal there was no answer. The boy’s dead face stared into the unresponsive block timber of the bombproof.

In the bloody angle of the Eternal Dragon, the most fiercely contested zone at Port Arthur, you might have seen these boys any day of those three frightful midsummer months, when the slim wedge was being driven inch by inch into the Russian right center. Everything was covered with the white powder of dried mud. All was wrecked. The path lay through a series of shell holes, connected rudely with pick and spade. Up to that point the ground had been neatly cut, but here it became rough and crude. No inch of dirt had been unnecessarily touched, because the enemy lay within forty yards on three sides. The dÉbris of battle was all about—torn Russian caps, conical and heavy, mingled with the light brown of Japanese uniforms, cartridge pouches half filled, shattered rifles, demolished sabres, a gun carriage smashed till the wheel spokes splintered the breech, rocks pounded by bullets as by a hammer, and, over the wall, seen as you stole by the chinks, khaki bags, loose over rotting bones.

All through the night when this bloody angle was first taken and after it had been protected with trenches from recapture, Oshima, the general commanding the division, sat in his tent without sleep. He was shaken by sobs, for he had been compelled to order that the entrenchments be made of the bodies of the dead and wounded. Only rock was there and to hold the place a quick shelter was essential. The half-dead men whose bodies were used by comrades to stop the steel hail smiled in approval at the work; they knew it was done for the best, but Oshima could not sleep; he wept bitterly all night.

Along that bloody angle and through all the eight-mile front for many months lay on duty the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who won the victory. He crouched under the parapet, rifle to cheek, its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. The tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down the barrel in deadly aim, made him look like a great cat pausing for a spring. One leg was drawn up and his cap was pulled viciously over his eyes. The sun beat upon him as he lay, venomous with pent-up passion, cut in silhouette against the trench, a shade darker than the shale. A minute before he had offered tea and cigarettes; now he dealt out hot lead. He might be a university student, or a merchant, or a professional man. Wherever he came from he was the pride of his neighborhood. Physically he was superb—perfect eyes and teeth, digestion hardy and fit as clockwork; this must have been so or he would not have been allowed to enlist. Moreover, he was a veteran of four months’ severe campaigning, seven pitched battles, and two months’ hard siege. Here he stood, far out on the firing line, clashed between two civilizations, hurled into the pallor of conflict, tossed by the greed of nations. Yes. Down there in the ditches lived the real besieger of Port Arthur. Not science, nor generalship, nor race bravery reduced Port Arthur; it was done by men who could live and die with the simple heroism of cavemen and vikings.