judge the distance too. This, of course, was at the beginning of the attack; later on, matters became a good deal more favourable for the defenders and correspondingly adverse to the attacking force.
I was interestedly watching the development of the attack upon the heights, when a galloper dashed up to me with a message from the General requesting me to signal our ships in the offing to concentrate their fire upon the Nanshan ridge; and so smart were our men, and so keen a lookout were they maintaining aboard our ships, that within three minutes of the receipt by me of the order, their 10-inch, 5-inch, and 6-inch shells were dropping all along the ridge, busily searching it for the Russian batteries, the positions of which, unfortunately, could not be seen from the western side.
For the next half-hour I was kept incessantly employed in signalling our fleet, directing their fire; but the shoal water of Kinchau Bay was all against us, and although our ships drew in so close that they touched the ground several times, they were still too far off to actually silence the Russian batteries, although they contrived to give them a very severe punishing and, to some extent, distract their attention from the stormers. Unfortunately, they could only muster six heavy guns between them, and these, at the extreme range at which they were obliged to fire, were not nearly enough, though they certainly helped.
When at length I was once more free to turn my attention to what was happening on the eastern side of the heights, I saw that our foremost line of skirmishers had reached a spot about a mile distant from the first Russian defences, consisting of a perfect maze of wire entanglements, and were signalling back to the main body. Almost immediately a detachment of Cossacks appeared, advancing at a gallop toward the signallers, from the direction of Linshiatun, a village on the shore of Sunk Bay, and as the horsemen appeared every Japanese soldier vanished, as if by magic, having flung himself down upon the ground and taken cover. On swept the Cossacks, yelling, lashing their horses with their whips, and brandishing their long lances. Suddenly, down went a horse and rider, the next instant a Cossack flung up his arms and collapsed inert upon his horse’s neck, then another reeled and fell, then two or three went down almost at the same instant, then half a dozen. And the curious thing about it was that there was nothing, no sudden spurt of flame, no smoke wreath, no crack of a rifle, to account for these casualties. That is to say, I could neither see nor hear anything; but the fact was that those Cossacks were going down before the calm, deliberate rifle-fire of the concealed Japanese infantry-men. Then a flash from one of the field-guns of our 3rd Division caught my eye, and before the sharp bark of it reached my ear, a white tuft of cotton-wool-like smoke suddenly appeared in the air above the galloping Cossacks, and more of them went down. Another flash, and another, and another, more tufts of cotton-wool leaping into view, tremendous disorder and confusion among the Cossacks, men and horses falling right and left, and then the survivors suddenly wheeled outward and galloped back at headlong speed, leaving behind them a mangled heap of men and horses, the greater number dead, but here and there a prostrate, kicking horse might be seen, or a wounded Cossack crawling slowly and painfully away from the scene of carnage.
The flight of the Cossacks was the signal for the resumption of the advance by the Japanese, whose skirmishers reappeared, still in very open formation, a man here and a man there showing for a few seconds as, in a crouching attitude, he rose to his feet, scurried forward a few yards, and then again took cover, while the fire of the Russian guns swept the ground over which he was passing. As yet, however, there appeared to be very few casualties among our men; here and there I noticed a prostrate form lying motionless, while others crept up and scuttled past him; he had been found by a shrapnel shell, and his share of the work was done; but even shrapnel cannot do much harm if the formation is kept sufficiently open. And as man after man pushed forward, others crept out, following, until the whole of the ground between our lines and the base of the heights was dotted with Japanese infantry-men creeping ever closer up to the first line of the Russian defence, the terrible maze of barbed wire entanglements.
Meanwhile, the whole of the Japanese field artillery, as well as that of our ships, was concentrating its fire upon the crest of the heights, covering the advance of the stormers; and now my attention was once more diverted from that advance by the necessity for me to signal directions to the fleet. And now it was that the full value of my previous labours began to be manifested; for I had but to signal the ships to direct their fire upon such and such a point—wherever, in fact, a Russian battery was proving especially troublesome—and all that the gun-layers had to do was to refer to the maps with which I had supplied them, and they were at once informed of the exact range of that point, with the result that a hail of shells instantly began to fall upon that particular battery with the most deadly precision. Thus, after a little while, every battery on the heights became in turn the focus of a terrific crossfire from the ships and the field batteries, the effect of which soon became manifest in the silencing of several of the Russian guns, either by dismounting, or, as we afterwards discovered, by the complete destruction of the men working them.
With the guns of our fleet playing such havoc among the ten forts which crowned the heights, it now became possible for our field artillery to turn its attention upon the trenches, tier after tier of which lined the eastern slope of the heights, up which our stormers would have to pass. Those trenches were quite formidable works, roofed over with timber and earth to protect the occupants from artillery fire, and loopholed for rifle-fire; yet, thanks again to my labours of the previous day in determining the exact range of them, our guns were able to search them from end to end, blowing the parapets to dust and matchwood, and hurling the wreckage among the gunners who were working the Russian quick-firers and machine-guns, many of whom were thus killed or wounded. The carnage must have been—indeed was, as we later saw for ourselves—frightful, yet the Russians maintained a most gallant defence, and clung to their trenches with unflinching determination. A lucky shell from one of our field-guns fell upon and exploded one of the many Russian mines which were scattered pretty thickly over the hillside, and the explosion blew a big gap in one of the lines of wire entanglements, a circumstance which without doubt resulted subsequently in the saving of many lives.
Hour after hour the artillery duel proceeded, our gunners doing their utmost to cover the slow advance of the stormers, while the Russian artillery systematically swept with a crossfire every inch of the ground which our men would have to traverse. The crash of the artillery was continuous and most distracting, and the effect was intensified by the incessant scream of the shells and the sharp thud as they burst, interspersed with the everlasting hammering of the machine-guns and quick-firers; Nanshan was ablaze with the fire of the Russian guns and the bursting of our shells, and the entire hill was enwrapped in fantastically whirling wreaths of smoke which were every moment rent violently asunder by the explosion of bursting shells.
Thus far I had occupied my position undisturbed, but about mid-morning certain Russian sharpshooters chanced to detect me and my assistant in the act of signalling to our ships, and they at once favoured me with their undivided attentions, to such purpose that I was compelled to beat a hasty retreat. The change of position which I was compelled to make was, however, advantageous rather than otherwise, for I found a perfectly safe spot behind two tall boulders standing close together, which, while effectually shielding me from the Russian bullets, still enabled me to see all that was happening.
Yet, that “all” might be summed up in a very few words—just incessant flashes of fire, great volumes of smoke, and, interspersed with the smoke, patches of flying debris. Very little else. No great masses of troops advancing in serried lines, column after column, with colours proudly flying, and burnished bayonets glistening in the sun; none of the old-fashioned pomp and circumstance of war when the opposing armies marched toward each other with bands playing, discharged their muskets when they were near enough to see the whites of their opponents’ eyes, and then charged with fixed bayonets, fighting it out hand to hand. That sort of battle went out of fashion with the introduction of the breech-loading rifle and the machine-gun; and now, with between fifty and sixty thousand men in action, there were periods when not a solitary human being could be seen. And when any did appear, which was only at intervals, they were but few in number—just a man here and a man there dotted about sparsely over a large area of ground, visible for perhaps half a dozen seconds, and then lost again, hidden behind cover of some sort.
It was getting well on toward noon when a message reached me from the General to the effect that two batteries of Russian quick-fire field-guns had been discovered on the summit of Nan-kwang-ling—a hill some eight hundred feet high, about a mile to the westward of the Nanshan Heights—and requesting me to signal our ships in the bay to give their whole attention to those two batteries. Unfortunately for us, the tide in the bay was now on the ebb, and the
I had scarcely finished signalling to the ships when a stir on the plain immediately below me indicated that
