Ho-o-zan, (the Phoenix Mountain) three miles from and looking into Port Arthur, Sept. 14th: Here we are with the Third Imperial Army waiting for Russia’s downfall in the Far East. With her fleet gone, Russia’s sea power has vanished. With Kuropatkin smashed it will be another year before she can have a great army in the field. So now there remains only impregnable Port Arthur to say that Russia but eight months ago held all Manchuria.

Ten of us are privileged to follow the fortunes of the army of investment. We alone of eighty-four war correspondents who entered the field are here to record the details of a siege that promises to go down in history with Plevna and Sebastopol. At the present time I may tell you only of how the army lives and works, and what sensations engulf one in the midst of this elemental contest at the apex of a world, where two civilizations are in life and death throes.

Impregnable is the word for the line of forts confronting us. Military authorities innumerable have predicted it would never be taken from a white soldiery, although Japan ten years ago did take it, in a single day of fierce assault, from the weakly armed and poorly trained Chinese. But through seven years Russia has been preparing for what she faces to-day—a great army of veteran troops from a warlike nation, equipped for scientific fighting and officered by men trained in the best schools in the world. She has repaired and rebuilt the old Chinese Wall till it lies across the back of the city, from sea to sea, a buttress of protection and menace, plentifully loopholed for rifles and hung at intervals, like huge fobs on a gigantic chain, with forts. Every natural elevation is commanded by a battery, and every weak depression built up for similar defense. Six miles from sea to sea, convex into the valley, and cutting off the apex of the Liaotung peninsula as a conical cake might be cut by a spoon, lies this bristling line. Looking at it, and what confronts it from above, this appears as grand a battlefield as the mind can conceive.

The mere names of some of the forts bring gleams of the situation. To our right, in the center, lie Anzushan and Etzeshan, the Chair and Table Mountains. Some giant might hang his legs over Anzushan and sup from Etzeshan, but were he built in proportion he would be nearly two thousand feet high, for they rise from the valley precipitously half that distance. It was here, the key to the center, that the Japanese pierced the line ten years ago, but they have tried no such move this time; a different foe confronts them now. Far beyond the Chair and Table Mountains, the key to the outer, we see Golden Mount, the key to the inner defenses, at once a sea and land fort. It shines glorious and confident in the sunlight, the model of a conventionally built fortification, rising square and solid from the hills, buttressed with sod and sand bags and parapeted on a bevel.

After all the outer seventeen forts have fallen and after that terrible Chinese Wall has been pierced, there still remains Golden Mount, the Tiger’s Tail and Liaotishan. Just below Golden Mount, to be seen only from a certain angle in the valley in front of us, lie the shattered remnant of the Russian fleet—three gray old battleships, four tarnished cruisers and a half dozen torpedo boats, smashed and done by Togo’s fleet, whose smoke curls irregularly over the sky line as it tugs warily there on perpetual watch, a watch uninterrupted for seven months, in which the monotony has been varied by three great naval battles.

To the right of Golden Mount and still below it lies the new town of Port Arthur built by the Russians. Hid behind a hill is the old town of frame houses. There is not a living thing to be seen on the streets, lying in plain view through a strong glass, as though in miniature on the palm of your hand. It is unharmed and spotless, seemingly in fresh paint. Four sticks piercing the sky line tell of the wireless telegraph station. To the right a huge crane can be seen sticking up to indicate the dock yards and a patch of blue, landlocked water, the west harbor. Nearest us the arsenal and railroad shops are plain. Then comes the railroad mockingly deserted in the sunlight. Then a high embankment shuts the view, but we know that under the embankment nestles a series of barracks. 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. It is a civilized game the Japanese are playing, one of strategy and force.

Far down in the plain called the Mariner’s, or the Shuishiying Valley, a little to the left and back of the lone chimney, is a great fort known as the Two Dragons, a most difficult place to take because of its long approaches. It is the advance guard of the Russian line; only eight hundred yards from the Japanese trenches. Far out to the right, resting on the northern arm of Pigeon Bay, is a bald-headed peak some eight hundred feet high. This is Liaotishan, the extreme left of the Russian position. Behind the town are great peaks, the highest hereabouts, and on them, in the early morning, four brass cannons can be seen glittering. They are thought to be dummy cannon, for they have not yet spoken.

To the left of the town, with its Golden Mount, begin the really great forts, scenes of carnage destined for history’s brightest page, and about which have taken place the battles I am about to describe. The Eternal Dragon and the three batteries of the Cock’s Comb are the essential. Far behind this Eternal Dragon and the wall, a few hundred yards from the sea, is a wooded driveway, leading to a mountain called Wangtai, or “the watch tower.” Up this, of an afternoon, a carriage can sometimes be seen drawn by white horses. Prisoners tell us it is General Stoessel’s carriage and that he thus goes to his headquarters. Why is he not fired upon? Because he is out of close rifle range and the Japanese never waste a shell on a single man or on even a group.

Occasionally we can see men moving a heavy gun about, or walking in squads through the town. The Japanese wait to concentrate their fire; they never harass the enemy. On the contrary, the Russians, now when they should hoard every shell, waste hundreds each day. They will fling a six-inch screamer at a mule or an umbrella, and no part of the Japanese rear is safe, though distances are so great that the chances of being hit are one in a thousand.

All is quiet except that now and then a Russian shell whizzes. The sound can no longer be called the “boom of cannon,” so savage and rending is the detonation of these mighty modern charges. To hear one explode even half a mile off sets every fiber of the body in action, so angry is the report. Infantry popping can be heard, oftenest in the night, as the outposts come together, or the sentries chaff each other by showing dummy heads or arms. But over beyond that ragged line we know that twenty thousand men, driven into a corner—and what a corner it is!—are fighting like rats in a hole, that they are of the same blood that defeated Napoleon when on the defense a century ago, the same that half a century ago stubbornly contested Sebastopol, the same that a quarter of a century ago, at appalling loss of life, reduced the marvelous Plevna. They sit thus hunted, at bay, well ammunitioned and provisioned, determined to sell every ounce of blood dearly.

To take Port Arthur seems impossible. It takes men drunk with victory and strong in ancient might to dare the task. It is only looking at what the Japanese have already taken that makes one have faith in their ability to do what they are now trying; otherwise, looking across at that six-mile line, one would say as he might have said of the ridges lying behind us: human energy and prowess cannot force them; only madmen would attempt it. But the Japanese have already forced at least five positions, seemingly as difficult as Port Arthur. First, they took Nanshan, which was even worse than this, for the approaches were gradual for two miles, while here precipitous heights and deep ravines give shelter. Nanshan the Japanese took in a single desperate day; Kenzan, where they had to climb hand over hand, they scaled in a night; Witozan, where they broke in over parapets built on rocks seven hundred feet above the sea, they reduced at high noon; Anshirey, where the road climbs up a spiral for a mile, and is raked at every yard, they enfiladed and took in two days; and Taikushan, a saddle of malachite and granite straddling the main road to Port Arthur, they shelled out in thirty-six hours. 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. Women sing in low monotones at the primitive stone mills where blindfolded donkeys travel all day in a circle, grinding out the seed and flour. Lines of coolies wend through the footpaths, spring-kneed with huge weights on limber poles. Shells at the rate of four or five an hour drop into this great area, separated from the field of battle by a range of mountains, plowing up a hill, shattering a house, tearing a road, killing a donkey, wounding a coolie, but of no great damage. No one minds. The harvest goes on. The glorious, golden September continues. The women sing, the naked children play, the tiny donkeys labor.

It is the plain in front, under the Cock’s Comb and the Golden Mount, guarded by the Two Dragons that has desolate quiet. 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. Little would one think, were it not for the firing, that so much as a company were idling along that plain. A machine gun rattles, a low, deep boom comes from the sea; the forts reply, a flash streaks the air, we see a puff of smoke, then a cloud of earth is thrown up; finally, after a long while, as we are about to turn away, the angry shriek of a shell comes over and we hear it burst a thousand yards below in the valley. Only our ears tell us that war is on. The Japanese are as invisible as the Russians. It will take days and weeks to spy out the labyrinthine ways of this great army as it toils among the hills, into the valley and up the ravines, mounting its guns, and digging its way up to the parapets, where its units will cling, like barnacles to a ship, until the monstrous hulk founders.

But getting down into the rear plain, traveling the road, taking a different one each day, passing among the villages and through the hills, one begins to realize that the country is honeycombed by grim activity. Back and forth, from the front to Cho-ray-che, a railroad station halfway from Port Arthur to Dalny, travel lines of transport. Each line has from one to five dozen light wagons drawn by single small shaggy horses, each guided by a small dust-visaged soldier.

“There is the strength of our army,” said an officer to me one day as a company of them passed, grimed, heated, menial. They are the flower of Japanese youth, clerks, professional men, students, exiled on rice and pickled plums, getting none of the glory of war. They are the unnamed and unknown but all-powerful commissary.

As the transport passes in, loaded with bags of rice, there comes out another line, this time of coolies, paired, and well burdened with human freight. They are bearing the wounded, in bamboo stretchers that do not jolt the piteously shattered frames, to the railroad station, whence they go by train to Dalny, thence by hospital ship to Japan. Every day comes this dribble of wounded, some days only a score, but after a battle the ways are thick with them—hundreds, thousands.

Occasionally, but very seldom, a battalion or a regiment of infantry will be seen moving in, with compact lines, knapsacks on back, bearing rifles with the barrel holes brass covered. The other night over by the western sea I suddenly came upon a troop of cavalry racing along the sands in the sunset. They rode their horses well, considering that the Japanese is not a horseman. Each had an extra mount. They frolicked like plainsmen till the coves rang. I had not seen so much gayety before in all the Japanese army. But what can cavalry do at a siege?

For the sublime we need not go to the firing line where men risk their lives and lose them. At the front of our mountain lies a deep rutted road, at the end of which, hid well among the hills, is the hole for a concrete gun-emplacement, redoubted with sandbags, the glacis slippery with shale. Along this road as the sun sinks we see what looks like a gigantic snake, its tail pulling an ugly head slowly backward, its dust-covered belly squirming laboriously. Descending we find a cable thick as a man’s thigh stretched between two long lines of men, each of whom has hold and is pulling that ugly head—a siege gun—nose and breech clap-boarded, and wallowing, without its carriage, on wooden rollers. We count the men—300. Men alone can do the work, for they alone can move in unison, quietly, at the word of command. There is no noise. The commands cannot be heard five hundred yards away. The three hundred bend their backs as one and the Pride of Osacca bunts her nose through the dust a rod nearer emplacement. They toil there a week to get that monster into position, pygmies moving a power that will rend the mountains, as tradition has it that Hendrick Hudson and his crew moved the ships’ cannon into the Catskills for the eternal generation of Knickerbocker thunder. To look upon that gun, helpless but disputatious in the hands of the three hundred, to realize that a week hence its bulk, into which one of these naked Manchurian children can easily creep, will toss five hundred weight of shell five miles through the air into one of those Russian forts where it will shatter the skill, labor, and life of an Empire—ah, that is sublime! Is it not also terrible?

The same scientific skill with which the gun is handled is seen throughout the army. Even after a battle, in the disorder of regiments, the search for the wounded, the burial of the dead, there is no confusion. All moves quietly and quickly. No officer swears, for the simple reason that the Japanese language hasn’t the words. Only the interpreters, who know English, swear. They, however, can be excused; they handle the correspondents, to whom they can’t speak, as the soldiers do to the Russians, with lead. You read of “the confusion and bustle of an army” and “the terrors of war.” There is no confusion, no terror here. No shrieks, no shouts, no hurrying. Once, as a regiment, after losing half its men, scaled the top parapet of one of those lower forts across the way, it gave out three rapid “Banzais.” Just that triple cry in the early dawn, from troops drunk with victory and mad with fatigue, is about the only evidence I have that the army possesses nerves. It rings in my ears yet and will always ring there—a wild shriek of samurai exultation floating out of the mist of the valley above the voice of rifle and cannon. “The officers lost control for a few minutes, but not for long,” explained a certain general to me later, apologetically. He didn’t countenance such enthusiasm. War is business here—the most superb game of chess ever played upon the chequered board of the world.

One thing that relieves the situation of much of the evident hurry that once made war picturesque is the absence of the orderly. The mounted officer, riding for life, dispatch in breast-pocket or saddle bag, from the general to his brigadiers and his colonels, is food for reminiscence. The telephone rang his knell. This is the first time in history that the field telephone has come successfully into extensive active use. General Nogi can sit in his headquarters, four miles from Port Arthur, and speak with every battery and every regiment lying within sight of the doomed forts. Little bands of uniformed men, carrying bamboo poles and light wire frames on transport carts, and armed with saws and shovels, have intersected the peninsula with lines of instantaneous communication. It is the twentieth century. Yet, as I walked over the hills near the headquarters of the commander of artillery yesterday, I saw, hanging from one of the bamboo poles and all along a wire leading from it to the artillery commander’s tent, strips of white cotton cloth called “goheis.” You can see the same before all the Shinto shrines in Japan. They are offerings of supplication to the spirits of the fathers. Some simple linesman, garbed in khaki and wearing an electric belt, not content with telephonic training, would thus guard his general. “Oh, ye who have watched over Japan, in peril and in safety, from the age of Jimmu, even to the present day,” he cries, “now, in a foreign land, faithfully guard this, our talisman and signal!”

I have said there are no sounds in the Japanese army. But there are—a few. At night, from far back on the rear plain, comes the monosyllabic sound of singing, several companies in unison, interspersed with light laughter—nothing hilarious, nothing loud, only an overflow of happy spirit into the night—never in the daytime, always at night. The song is a long one by Fukishima, a Major-General now in the north with Marshal Oyama, with a refrain: “Nippon Caarte, Nippon Caarte; Rosen Marke-te.” (Russia defeated is, Japan victorious.) The laughter comes from the game they play, something like our fox and geese, an innocent sport with nothing rough about it. Of late the Osacca band has been here, playing for the generals at luncheon and for the convalescents in the field hospitals, but very quiet music—The Geisha, some Misereres, waltzes from Wang, and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s tunes. They avoid the military, the dramatic, and the inspiriting. The music is taken to soothe, just as their surgeons use opium when necessary. How different from the Russian, of whom each regiment has a band busy every day with the pomp and circumstance of conflict! One day, a week before we came here, the Russians made a sortie into the plain, parading for several hundred yards in front of the Two Dragons. That was before the lines were as closely drawn as they are now and the Japanese looked with amusement on the show-off. At the head marched two bands, brassing a brilliant march. Then came the colors flashing in the sun. The officers were dashingly decorated, and the troops wore colored caps. It was a rare treat for the Japanese, for they had never seen anything such as that in their own army. Like a boy bewildered at the gay plumage of a bird he might not otherwise catch, the simple and curious Japanese let the foe vaingloriously march back into the town. So here they sit, playing children’s games, to the chamber music of women, as gentle as girls—but you should see them fight!

The transport camps are sheltered by mountains so high and steep that Russian shells cannot be fired at an angle to drop in behind them. Through one of these nooks I came one morning, unable to find the main road, and pushed among the horses. As I emerged at the farther end a soldier rushed at me with a bayonet and slashed at my legs. The bayonet was sheathed and I had a stout stick, so no damage was done. I soon explained who I was. He sullenly let me pass and his comrades began chaffing him. Some officers across the ravine also laughed. I thought they were laughing at me. Almost any human nature laughs at the foreigner. That was the first evidence of violence and the first evidence of rudeness I had seen in the Japanese soldier. I passed the day off in the regiment and, as night fell, came back through the horses, where I went without comment. Round a corner, out of sight of the camp I suddenly came upon the same soldier apparently waiting to see me. I grasped my stick tightly, but he was weaponless, and advanced smiling, cigarette box in hand. He wanted to apologize and be friends. His comrades had been laughing at him, not at me, and had taunted him till he felt so ashamed of himself that unless I smoked with him and returned for some tea he would never stand right with them again. We had the tea and the whole mess joined in. That was a private soldier—a hostler. The courtesy of the officers is embarrassing, it is so continuous and exacting. Everywhere, from general to private, it is real and delightful, especially toward an American. I have heard many say that it is only a crust, that underneath the Japanese is a devil and a dastard. But a very nice crust. Let us enjoy it; as to the pie underneath, let the Russians testify.

For the essence of courtesy and thoughtfulness there is General Nogi. James Ricalton and I went to call on him two days ago. He spent half an hour with us at his headquarters in the village of Luchufong, which is Chinese for Willow Tree Apartment. It is one of the prettiest villages in the great plain, on the edge of a brook, fringing the zone of fire. Everything shows seclusion and quiet, though there is located the brain that directs these gigantic operations, the girth of which Nogi alone comprehends. “Do you understand the situation?” I asked weeks ago of Frederic Villiers, the veteran English war artist, survivor of seventeen campaigns, present ten years ago at the other fall of Port Arthur, and dean of the war correspondents.

“No,” said he, “I was at Plevna with the Russians, but that was jackstraws to this game of go. I know nothing of go. Ask the military attachÉs.” In turn I asked the different military attachÉs—the German, French, English, Chilean, Spanish, Swedish, and finally the young lieutenant here for the United States. They all understood all about Port Arthur, but the trouble was, no two knew it the same. So I went back to Villiers. “Nogi is the only man that knows,” said he; “Nogi alone can tell you how the batteries are placed, how the divisions and regiments are to be deployed and played, what forts are the keys, what Russian batteries the weakest, the reserve force, the commissary and hospital supplies.”

So, naturally, coming to meet such a man we must have some awe, some curiosity and some respect for the master strategist, commander of the army which drove the Russians down the peninsula and which holds it now in a death trap. We expected to meet a man of iron, for Nogi is the General whose eldest son, a lieutenant in the Second Army, was killed at Nanshan; who has under his command a second son, a lieutenant, and who wrote home after the first disaster: “Hold the funeral rites until Hoten and I return, when you can bury three at once.”

The General received us in his garden. He was at a small table, under a willow, working with a magnifying glass over a map. He wore an undress blue uniform with the three stars and three stripes of a full general on the sleeve—no other decoration, though once before I had seen him wearing the first class order of the Rising Sun. His parchment-crinkled face, brown like chocolate with a summer’s torrid suns, beamed kindly on us. His smile and manner were fatherly. It was impossible to think that any complicated problem troubled his mind. A resemblance in facial contour to General Sherman arrested us. Lying near, in his hammock, was a French novel. He reads both French and English, but does not trust himself to speak in either. Miki Yamaguchi, Professor of languages in the Nobles School, Tokyo, for seven years resident in America, and graduate of the Wabash college, was the interpreter.

“Look after your bodies,” the General said after greeting us. “I was out to the firing line the other day and came back with a touch of dysentery, so take warning. I do not want any of you to be sick. At the first sign of danger consult our surgeons. We have good surgeons.”

“We are of little account, General,” said Ricalton, “but it is a very serious thing for a man on whom the world’s eyes are centered to have dysentery.”

The General smiled. “I am quite well now,” he said; “but how old are you?” he asked, looking at Ricalton’s gray hairs. They compared ages. Ricalton proved to be three years the older.

“The command of the army, then, belongs to me,” said Ricalton. “I’m your senior.”

“Ah,” said the General, “but then I should have to do your work and I fear I could not do it as well as you do.”

That night a huge hamper came to Ricalton’s tent in charge of the headquarters orderly. It contained three huge bunches of Malaga grapes, half a dozen Bartlett pears, a peck of fine snow apples, and bore a card reading: “The General sends his compliments to his senior in command.”

“He is a great man,” said Ricalton, “who can so notice, in the midst of colossal labors, a passing old photographer.”

But, as Nogi goes, so go the other generals, and so goes the army. Villiers and I went yesterday to call on a certain Lieutenant-General who commands the most important third of the forces. His division has borne the brunt of the fighting, and he doesn’t live as Nogi does, on the edge of the zone of fire, but close under the guns within a mile of the Russian forts, so close that in his lookout two of his staff officers were recently killed. His home is a dugout in the side of a mountain. It is large enough for him to lie down in and turn over. He had a heavy white blanket, a rubber pillow to be inflated with lung power, a fan, an officer’s trunk that carries sixty pounds, and a small lantern of oiled silk—this was his furniture, his complete outfit. On a peg hung his sword, and outside, on the ground, lay his boots. Some member of his staff had fixed up an iron bedstead and a water bowl, but they were lying off at the side of the dugout, untouched. He came to meet us in a thin pair of rubber slippers, his uniform a bit worn, the string on his breast, where the order of the Rising Sun is usually worn, barren, his eyes kindly, his manner fatherly and his hospitality generous; he spread a lunch bountiful as Nogi’s.

“I know the Russians,” said Villiers that night. “I was with them all through the Russo-Turkish War. I remember Skoboleff, their great cavalry leader, a magnificent type of man, a soldier to the ground, but fiery, emotional, vivacious, vain, fond of orders, jewels, wine and women, looking on war as a lark, dashing and brilliant, the scourge of Europe! He was not this type of man—a scientific chap, sober, full of business to the chin, no lugs to him, and as unemotional as a fish. Kuropatkin was Skoboleff’s Chief of Staff and you see what these fellows have done with him. The day of cynical dash and reckless valor has gone by in war, my boy. We are living in an age of modesty and gentleness, of science and concentration; Japan is the master.”

We lay under the searchlights, which were turning the night valley into a noontide halo, as Villiers spoke. Every light came from the Russian side, which lay wary and restless beyond us. From the Japanese side came no light, no sound. All was secrecy and silence. Yet we knew those hills were alive with toiling brown figures, that a ten-mile line of rifle pits was guarded at every rod by a sleepless soldier watching for the Rising Sun and that the tents of those Generals blinked unceasingly with the steady glow of the oiled silk lanterns, quivering cabalistically with ideographs.

As I looked upon swaying and heavy searchlights, I could think only of the Indian cobra and his mortal enemy, the mongoose. Silently, rolled in a ball, alert for a fatal spring, the little mongoose watches, and the hooded cobra swings ponderously, more nervous with each move. All other enemies he can crush; none other he fears; his body is murderous, his fangs deadly, his stealthy glide noiseless and sure. How well he knows his power! Despot of the jungle, why should he fear? And yet, since the world dawned his tribe has done well to avoid the mongoose.

Steadily swings the cobra; viciously he lunges. Now look! In the folds of the cobra’s neck those incisive teeth, those death-dealing claws! With the fury of whirlwinds lashes the cobra. With eternal calm cling the teeth and claws. Hour after hour goes the unequal struggle. The huge coils relax, the great head falls. Then the beady eyes twinkle. The mongoose slips off in the darkness; prone lies the cobra. Who sheds tears?