Headquarters, Third Imperial Army, Before Port Arthur, Sept. 30th:—We went yesterday to the foremost firing line, where all the venom of war is concentrated in a score of yards among a dozen men. There we saw how the besiegers of Port Arthur are besieging it, how they live, what manner of men they are, and some of the facts of modern warfare which those who want to know about the humanity of science had better not read. Before we went an officer led us to a bombproof on the Japanese side of the great valley across which we were to go to gain the captured fort.

“Look!” said he, turning over his hyposcope, “the way is about a mile and a half. The real danger is in the fort itself, but if you are very careful to crawl with your heads low you are safe. If you decide to go you must relieve our authorities from all responsibility for your lives.”

Across the valley a puff of white spat out a tongue of flame; a shell crashed into the escarpment below us. From across the valley came the intermittent puffing of outposts. A mis-shot bullet lapped up a patch of dust twenty paces to our right.

“Well, gentlemen, will you go? It’s a quiet morning. We had better start soon if at all, for the sun is in their eyes now; soon it will be against us and then they can pick us off like flies.”

Villiers was with me. “What do you say?” he asked. “It’s time to measure risks. Think what you’ll get out of it. A correspondent dead is of no use to his paper, and people remember him as a fool who got shot in some reckless venture. Remember, you’re going into bullet fire for the first time. You’ve had shell fire only, up to now, and shell fire is to bullets what a bluebottle fly is to a tiger mosquito. Forbes used to have a supreme contempt for shell fire and a supreme respect for bullets. A shell buzzes and blows—a bullet flits in quietly, spits through an artery, the heart, the head—and it’s all over. Their rifles fire point blank at 200 yards and up where you want to go the lines are but forty yards apart. They can pick off a ten-cent piece at that distance. Remember, if your head shows so much as an inch above that parapet, you’re only good to sniff at when the wind blows from you, for these people have no extra stretcher for your useless carcass.” Villiers can say these things. Somewhere in his London studio is his order of St. George which the Czar gave him for audacity at Plevna. Also some seven other governments have decorated him for fit war behavior, so he is an expert on battlefields.

“But,” said I, “think of what there is up there: the bloody angle, scene of the death of 3,000 men, heaps of unburied slain, trenches made of corpses, sentries firing, the living sleeping, eating, working among their dead comrades, the enemy on three sides, with this single line of supply and retreat down which only four men can march abreast. This captured fort is to the siege of Port Arthur what Nanshan is to the campaign—its decisive battle. It is the wedge Japan is driving into the heart of Russia and we’ll be on its tip. When the nations hear the truth about this fort—the assault that captured it, the odds against which it was fortified and held for six weeks—it will be the marvel of the age. Think! Would you miss standing on the apex of the world?”

“I was a youngster myself once and I’m not old now,” replied Villiers. “They fake these things in London almost as well as I can do them in the field, so why risk my bones? But I’m as good as a Japanese officer or an American reporter. Up to now we’ve been chaperoned scribblers; here we become war correspondents. It smells of the old days: Forbes, Cameron, Pierce, McGahan, Jackson, Burleigh—and that crowd of gay devils. Lead on.” Perhaps you will be more interested in Villiers to know that he is supposed to be the original of Kipling’s character, Dick the Artist, in “The Light that Failed.”

So we went into the chipmunk’s burrow, up through the cornfields, frowned on by a hundred thousand guns, menaced by two armies, until we nestled in the ragged hole Japan has torn in Russia’s impregnable last stand. Laterally down the line of our advance, but high over our heads, shells often rammed their harsh bewilderment and we could hear them strike, sometimes rods, sometimes miles away. 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. Hardly a minute but one passed over our heads.

The situation looks well in print. Yet we were in little danger. Our wits kept—we were safe. For this let us profoundly thank the engineer who built that siege parallel—a cunning masterful Yankee of the East, whose name as a military engineer must be handed down to future generations of technical students. He had taken advantage of every rise in the ground and of every depression. Of corn stubble he made a drapery, of hillocks a screen, of ravines an ambuscade, until Nature so aided him that she and not the Japanese infantry was the assaulting force against those heights beyond.

We walked twenty meters apart, for, should we by any chance lift our heads together and be sighted in a party, the Russians could drop a bit of shrapnel over us. Otherwise we might be off for a morning stroll down a country lane. We crouched as we walked, for the trench was built for Japanese, who average a few inches less in height than a foreigner. The distance as the crow flies was little over half a mile; we went nearly a mile and a half. At one side ran a telephone wire, staked down at intervals with broken, rusty rifles. At every angle a sentry saluted, stepping forth grimly from a dugout. Halfway up we passed a stretcher bearing a body, the face covered with coarse matting, sewn roughly—a corpse of the night before. Farther on came a soldier with his arm in a wet, crimson sling. Half an hour before, feeling secure after days in the ominous place, he had passed into a ravine he thought safe, but out of the path chosen by the clever engineer. He was in the Russian fire zone and presently a shell fragment smashed his arm. From a dozen to fifteen are lost that way every day.

Across the valley we halt at the foot of a hill and then turn into the fort. Chloride of lime is sprinkled here over the human effluvia that nowhere else can be deposited, but a bone sticks out of the trench wall. I look closely. It is a human femur. From it projects a heavy coil of rubber-insulated cable. The officer explains that this formed the electric communications with the barbed wire entanglements through which we are passing, and that on the day of the fight it was charged so that when the Japanese pioneers tried to cut the wire with pincers they were prostrated with the shock and had to wait for glove-handled tools. Beside it is a long strip of bamboo, torn and shattered. This was carried to the attack by two soldiers who with it tossed into the fort a short strip of bamboo stuffed with gun cotton. This, exploding, tore a hole through which the men could charge. It was a more effective bombardment than the shells. As we turned the corner we came upon the men and at last we saw the besiegers of Port Arthur, where they were living, 200 yards from the Russian trenches, in the famous redoubt where enough men have been killed to cover the place four deep with corpses.

The officer took up a pick lying in the trench. “Look!” said he, “the point was sharp as a grindstone could make it to begin with, but in some places, you know, the rock is hard and—” he would apologize. He was very sorry we should find the picks in such bad condition. He was always apologizing. He apologized for the length of the way, the heat of the sun, the annoyance of the shells. But the boys in khaki smiled on. Word passed as to who we were and they greeted us dumbly, spread out their pitiful small blankets, pulled from obscure coats and corners their precious sweetmeats, advanced the cigarettes that mean more than beef to a soldier, offered us their still more precious tea. All over them was written their joy in being recognized, in having someone share their hardships.

Death on the battlefield is the height of this soldier’s ambition. But not uncleanliness on the battlefield, and all the time we sat there I was aware of a pervasive, sickening odor, something strange, something frightfully offensive.

“What can it be?” I said as it bore in upon me and I felt suddenly nauseated.

“Well, in the hurry of building these trenches, in the night, under fire, a few dead bodies—only a few—were rolled into the escarpment. We very much regretted it——.” The officer apologized profusely, but they had been under fire ever since and the trenches could not be torn down. So they stood—human walls. “But I can assure you there is no smell now. The first week, in the hot sun—Ah! then I should not have liked to bring you here.” As I leaned against the wall something crushed, like the snap of a pencil, under my back. I leaped, in alarm, to my feet. As I turned around a blue coat, which I had pushed back in my fatigue, fell over the skeleton of a hand, and at my feet dropped the joint of a forefinger. Villiers pulled me to my knees.

“Look over there,” he said and pointed beyond the trench. I saw fresh earth heaped up. “It is the brow of the Russian works,” he said, “but look in between—that pit of uniforms.” A mound of soiled, tattered clothes, higher than a man could stand, and longer than a company street, lay before us, not fifty feet away. At the base, facing me, detached from the rest, a hideous skull leered. “Unburied dead,” Villiers said, “hugging the ground, sent back into the earth from whence they came.”

Then the officer apologized. Yes, there was no chance to bury the dead. Under constant fire for six weeks, between hostile lines, they slowly rotted away until only bones and rags remained—Russian and Japanese inextricably together on the scene of the last desperate Russian stand, where was concentrated all the machine gun fire of both sides.

Wounded and dying had been mixed with dead. No succor was possible. A general must count his men as fighting units and he could not afford to pay a dozen good lives for one injured. We turned to go—stomach and heart sick, but the boys in khaki smiled. They were used to it. Just then the postman passed. He had a handful of cards, scrawled over with loving messages.

As we saw how complete the service was—mail delivered under the shadow of guns, and as a man goes on to the firing line to offer up his life—we suddenly came to the telephone which made us think how near we were to all we held dear. That line was connected with headquarters, headquarters with Tokyo, Tokyo with New York and London. I suddenly saw myself ringing up the editor to catch an edition.

“Hello! just arrived at the Eternal Dragon. Quiet this morning. Russian sortie last night. Repulsed. One Japanese, eighteen Russians lost—three wounded between the lines calling for water——”

“Hold on, what’s that?”

“Wait a minute till I stop this infernal racket.” Down with the receiver. To the Colonel: “Can’t you stop that battery a minute? I’m at the ’phone.”

“All right, editor. Wounded man says—Hold on a minute. It’s that blasted volley firing. All right. I was saying, a wounded—Hell, here comes a shell!”

We turned another corner and came upon the commander of the regiment—a lieutenant-colonel, stern-faced, with that eternal smile, a countenance nationally characteristic. He welcomed us to his shelter between two walls—which the Russians had built and which our shells destroyed. His staff—a captain and a major—sat crosslegged on one side. We sat on a red-blanketed bench on the other. Crosslegged, on his red blanket, he was no better fitted than his men. At his side on a nail hung his sword and cap. Behind him suspended from two wires was the regimental flag, in a plush case. It is 30 years old, has been in 18 battles, and is all but gone from bullet fire. To the regiment it is a sacred emblem. This is the illustrious Seventh Regiment which captured the Eternal Dragon, after losing all but ten per cent. of its number and which now, after a month with the reserves when its ranks were replenished, is back for a week on sentry duty. So intense is the service there, one week in four is all a single regiment can stand. We were served with tea in daintily lacquered cups and then the lieutenant-colonel passed sakÉ and tea, asking permission to drink our health.

“Where is the Colonel?” I asked the officer. Then he apologized again. He was sorry he couldn’t oblige me, but unfortunately the Colonel had been killed about twenty yards from where I then sat. His body had been cremated within three paces of my present seat. Just beyond the tent I could see his grave, should I look. I leaned out and in a niche of the wall saw a plain white stick ideographed in black. At the base was a bottle of flowers and a Chinese pumpkin. It contained the ration a soldier calls “iron,” and some sweetmeats beside a can of water. Then we knew what some living soldier had done. The ghost might come wandering back in the night and be hungry. It should not suffer. We went on to more tea with the new live Colonel and some sweetmeats which we utilized differently than the ghost had evidently utilized his. “How was he killed?” I asked. Then we heard the story of the capture of the Eternal Dragon.

“It was a hot August afternoon,” said the officer, our interpreter, “and the general of this division, a very determined man, resolved that the time had come to pierce the Russian center. So he chose the Seventh Regiment for the honor. It is the regiment to which the young Captain, wounded, and rescued by the Russian prisoner, of whom you were talking this morning, belonged. The Colonel made his plan of attack to have his command advance in three battalions, one on each flank and one in the front, the flanks to be the real attack, the front to be a feint. He, himself, commanded the feint, and, as usual, stayed in the rear. He sent his pioneer corps ahead to cut the barbed wire entanglements. They came back with the report of electric charge. They went forward again with insulated pincers and the regiment followed. All the way to the base of the hill, where we now are, they were almost unmolested, when they had expected to meet a fierce shell fire. This made them confident. But the Russian general, as we afterward learned, had ordered his men to reserve their fire till we got within close range, and then to give it to us with machine guns. So the two side battalions got safely well up to the slope, only to meet a terrible rain of steel from the top. The aim was so sure and the firing so heavy that nearly two-thirds of the command was mowed down at once. And the surprise we found was in their construction of the fort. Where we supposed our shells had opened gaps in it, we found it intact and our assaulting party unable to gain foothold, for the Russians had placed boiler plates under two feet of earth and the shells had had little or no effect on it.

“When the Colonel learned all this he got mad, and instantly ordered the third Battalion to assault the front in force. He led the charge. A few of the men got in and fought hand to hand with the Russians. By that time another regiment had arrived with reinforcements, charged through the breach and overwhelmed the Russians, driving them out of the place. Though we are dominated by six of their batteries and have been assaulted by them eighteen times in attempts to recapture, we have ever since held it. The Colonel’s body was found under a heap of slain. In it were twenty-four bullet holes. His sword was broken at the hilt. His cap was missing and we searched for it a long time without success, until one day our lookout spied it between the lines. Certain death seemed the price for a man to try to get it, but as soon as the Colonel’s servant, a soldier, learned where it was, he volunteered and succeeded one dark night in regaining it, so the cremation could take place properly. If you wish now, follow the Captain into the fort and you will see the foremost trenches. Keep your heads low.”

Then we saw the kitten become a tiger. We passed from the hospitable soldier, with his sweetheart’s letters, his welcoming smile, his innocent and friendly telephone, his harmless tea and cakes, to the firing line, to death, and to worse than death.

It was hands and knees into the fort and the front trenches. This is the tip of the bloody angle, with the enemy on three sides. Bullets passed over us continually. Shells were bursting far away. Twice we passed half ruined chambers built of timber below ground—Russian food and ammunition shelter. It was high noon. At length we lay, panting, under a pile of sapling poplars; above us were sand bags six deep.

“We are perfectly safe here,” said the officer, and we looked out.

“Except from ricochet bullets,” added Villiers. “The zone of fire of those chaps yonder is away from us and as long as they exchange we’re all right. Shells can’t reach us, even shrapnel would be nullified by this covering, but when those bullets strike a stone no one can tell how they will come. They can shoot around a corner from a flat stone as easily as in the open through a loop-hole.”

I heard nothing. Standing up, secure, my eyes came upon him suddenly—the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who does the trick—at work. He was crouched under the parapet in front, rifle to cheek, its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. 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 death the most terrible and swift dwelt all about us. Through chinks in the wall a row of sand bags on a mound of earth could be seen. They marked the Russian trenches behind which the enemy lay as silent and deadly as the boys on our side. Not a minute passed without its bullet. Forty meters was the distance, the officer said, the closest place in the whole ten-mile front of the two armies. By day, when the Russians stay quiet, sentries stand three yards apart, by night, shoulder to shoulder. They are changed every thirty minutes so intense is the strain. A regiment can stay in the fort only seven days because the Russians are above and on three sides, and they must keep them out, while they stew in their own juice and their comrades rot beyond the wall. When a sortie is made neither side asks for quarter nor expects it. The Russians know that unless they regain their trenches they will not live, for to be wounded and fall in the bloody angle means slow death where no aid can come; to meet the Japanese line means instant death. The Japanese know their chances, if wounded, are the same, and if they reach the Russian lines they accept only two things—victory or death. So it is that here through long weeks the siege has concentrated its bitterest essence, living has come to be a burden and death a joy.

Then came the thud of a bullet. It was a different thud from any we had had up to that time, and though I had never before heard a bullet strike flesh, I could not mistake the sound. It goes into the earth wholesome and angry, but into flesh ripping and sick with a splash like a hoof beat of mud in the face.

I turned to look. I saw the nearest sentry sinking to his knees. His rifle had dropped and was leaning against the wall, butt down. He sank together all in a heap and his head hung limp, his chin against his breast.

“Poor chap,” said Villiers, “he was looking at us and got in front of the loop hole. I suppose we are so great a novelty in his strained existence that he could not resist the temptation to neglect his duty for a minute.”

We crawled back and out silently and quickly, bade a hurried good-by to the Colonel, hastened past the smiling, oblivious men—they are used to it—and over a mile and a half of chipmunk burrow. The General was waiting tiffin for us in his tent. There was a jar containing strawberry jam like grandmother used to make. With a flash it brought back all the comforts of home. An empty shell in the center of the table held some field daisies and wild chrysanthemums. All the fragrance of the fields and the beauties of nature came with them. At my mess plate lay an American newspaper, just delivered by this incomprehensible field post. With it civilization, its myriad passions and joys, floated in. As the cigars were passed I opened the paper. I found an interview with Dr. Nicholas Senn, of Chicago, in which he said:

“All the talk of inhumanity which some correspondents are sending out from the Orient is foolish. Statements of soldiers being wounded in the mouth and reports of all similar acts of atrocity can be set down as being without foundation. Russia has the best Red Cross Society in the world and the Russians are an extremely humane people. Likewise, this war is going to be a humane war. As for the Japanese, the worst that can be said of them is that they are a proud people.” I read this aloud. It was translated and the officers, Lieutenant-General Oshima and his staff, listened. None of them replied. Finally Villiers said:

“The question is not: Are the Japanese or the Russians a humane people, or not a humane people? It is: Are individual men, under conditions the most terrible the imagination can devise, Christians or savages? Both Japanese and Russians socially are delightful people. I’ve lived with the armies of both nations and their soldiers are delightful and humane. But that is not the question.

“Now, is it possible for soldiers living as we saw them to-day—in their own filth, unable to succor the wounded, preyed on by stenches from the dead, until battle in which they neither ask nor give quarter is a welcome relief—can the word ‘humane’ be uttered in speaking of lives such as theirs? Or can it be uttered of the Russians—driven into a trap, half-starved, night and day in the trenches, confronted by overwhelming numbers, with certainty of no relief, yet defending a lost hope with lives easier lost than lived? Would you be ‘humane’ under such conditions? I am sure I would not.

“No. The truth about war cannot be told. It is too horrible. The public will not listen. A white bandage about the forehead with a strawberry mark on the center is the picture they want of the wounded. They won’t let you tell the truth and show bowels ripped out, brains spilled, eyes gouged away, faces blanched with horror. The only painter fellow who ever told the truth about war was Verestchagin, poor chap, drowned over there in the harbor. He in paint and Zola in words told the truth and they were howled down and ostracized all their lives, simply because the theorists, like this surgeon, fed up with themselves, nursed in the belief that science is all powerful, will always assure the public that modern war is humane.

“Scientific warfare! Let me tell you the facts about science. Archibald Forbes predicted twenty years ago that the time would come when armies would no longer be able to take their wounded from the field of battle. That day has come. We are living in it. Wounded have existed—how, God alone knows—on that field out there, without help, for twelve days, while shell and bullets rained above them, and if a comrade had dared to come to their assistance his would have been a useless suicide. The searchlight, the enginery of scientific trenches, machine guns, rifles point blank at 200 yards with a range of 2,000—these things have helped to make warfare more terrible now than ever before in history.

“Red Cross societies and scientific text-books—they sound well and look pretty, but as for ‘humane warfare’—was there ever put into words a mightier sarcasm!”

This was translated. The officers—Lieutenant-General Oshima and three of his staff—listened, gravely. No one said anything. Finally, we walked home silently as the sun went down.