Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun

These pitfalls were arranged in regular lines, interrupted at intervals by patches of mined ground, while outside these again there ran a practically continuous girdle of barbed wire entanglements, the wire being charged with an electric current powerful enough to instantly destroy any one who should be unfortunate enough to come into contact with it. Liao-yang defences were, in fact, a repetition of the defences of the Nanshan Heights—where the Japanese suffered such appalling losses—except that they were of an even more elaborate and deadly character.

The attack upon Liao-yang was indeed in many respects a repetition of the attack upon Kinchau; for, as in the case of Kinchau, there was a formidable hill position—that of Shushan—to be first stormed and taken. This task was entrusted to the Second Japanese Army, under the leadership of General Oku; and they accomplished it on 1st September, after three nights and two days of desperate fighting, in the course of which the heroic Japanese suffered frightful losses. On the same day, the Russians began to withdraw from Liao-yang under a heavy fire from the Japanese artillery. On the following day the Japanese captured the Yentai mines; and a few hours later, General Nodzu, at the head of the Fourth Japanese Army, entered the town of Liao-yang unopposed.

Meanwhile, what was the state of affairs on land before Port Arthur?

As has already been said, the great general assault upon the land defences, which began on 19th August 1904, resulted in disastrous failure with frightful losses for the Japanese. Yet that failure, terrible as it was, was not by any means complete; its blackness was irradiated by a gleam of light here and there which sufficed to keep alive that spirit of hope and indomitable resolution which no misfortune could ever quite quench in the breast of the Japanese, and which was undoubtedly the determining factor in the campaign. To particularise. On 14th August the 1st Japanese Division was ordered to capture the five redoubts on the crest of the ridge west of the railway, known as the Swishiying redoubts. These redoubts were taken on the following day, and their capture paved the way for the general assault, four days later. This began with the furious bombardment of the height known as 174 Metre Hill, which was stormed and taken at the point of the bayonet, later in the day, by the 1st Division, which immediately pushed south-east, with the object of gaining possession of Namaokayama, or 180 Metre Hill. This hill was protected by, among other devices, an intricate barbed wire entanglement charged with a high-tension electric current, the penetration of which proved to be a task of almost insuperable difficulty; nevertheless, it was eventually accomplished. On the morning of 22nd August, by a splendid act of heroism and self-sacrifice on the part of fifty Japanese, West Panlung fort was captured, and this cleared the way for the capture of the East fort. But the superhuman efforts made by the Japanese in capturing these positions completely exhausted them, with the result that the assault ended in failure, since the majority of the defences remained in the hands of the Russians.

On 23rd August, the battleship Sevastopol—which, it will be remembered, was one of the ships which contrived to make good her escape from the Japanese fleet after the battle of the Yellow Sea— having been patched-up, as far as the resources of Port Arthur dockyard would allow, got under way and, steaming round to Takhe Bay, proceeded to shell the Japanese lines in the neighbourhood of Ta-ku-Shan and the Panlung redoubts. It was a rather daring thing to do, for there was not a ship in the harbour capable of supporting her, while the Japanese blockading squadron in the offing was close enough in to be clearly visible from the heights. Included in that squadron were the new armoured cruisers Nisshin and Kasuga, purchased from the Argentine just before the declaration of war; and no sooner was it seen that the Sevastopol had actually ventured outside the harbour, than these two powerful craft steamed in and opened fire upon her, and also upon the Laolutze forts, which were supporting her. The approach of the Japanese cruisers was the signal for a hurried retirement on the part of the Russian battleship, and she lost no time in effecting her retreat to the harbour. But while entering, she struck a contact mine, which exploded beneath her bows, inflicting such serious damage that it was only with very great difficulty she succeeded in returning to her berth, with her bow almost completely submerged. This was the last straw, so far as the Sevastopol was concerned, and she was practically put out of action for the remainder of the war.

A week later our cruisers and destroyers effected a coup which, there is every reason to believe, must have materially hastened the fall of the fortress. This consisted in the capture, off Round Island, of a great fleet of Chinese junks, bound from Wei-hai-wei to Port Arthur, conveying to the beleaguered city vast quantities of food, clothing, ammunition, explosives, and supplies of every imaginable description. The junks were taken into Dalny, where their cargoes were declared to be contraband of war, and confiscated by the Japanese.

These several successes, comparatively unimportant though they were, coupled with the practical destruction of the Port Arthur and Vladivostock fleets, put new heart into the Japanese for a time; but with the arrival and passage of the month of September, during which no appreciable progress was made in the operations before Port Arthur, even the unexampled patience and superb stoicism thus far displayed by the Japanese as a people showed signs of the wear and tear to which they had so long been subjected, and murmurings at General Nogi’s apparent non-success began to make themselves heard. The casualty lists seemed to grow ever longer with the passage of the days, without any visible result, except that Nogi contrived to retain possession of the few unimportant positions which he had gained, and a black cloud of pessimism seemed to be settling down upon the Island Empire.

Meanwhile, however, in its silent, secret, undemonstrative way, the Japanese army had been making preparations of an important character, among which were included the construction of concrete emplacements for eighteen 11-inch howitzers, from which great things were expected. They fired a 500-pound projectile charged with high explosive, and had a range which enabled them to command the entire area of the fortress, including the harbour.

On the 1st October the first six of these howitzers opened fire, in the presence of General Baron Kodama, who had crossed to Port Arthur from Japan to administer, perhaps, a fillip to the officers and the army generally. North Kikwan fort was the first recipient of the new guns’ delicate attentions, one hundred shells being poured into it. Huge clouds of dust and smoke at once arose from the fort; but it was enormously strong, and no very important results were apparent. On the following day and for a few days afterwards the howitzers lobbed shells upon the fleet, and the Pobieda, Poltava, Retvisan, and Peresviet were all struck, and their crews driven out of them, after which they were moved to the East harbour, where they were hidden from the sight of our gunners by the intervening high ground.

Meanwhile the Japanese engineers were resolutely and industriously pushing their saps ever closer up to the Russian forts, in the progress of which task the most furious and sanguinary hand-to-hand fighting with bayonet and bomb was of daily, nay hourly, occurrence. The slaughter was appalling, few of the combatants on either side surviving such encounters.

Yet, although the advantages were all on the side of the defenders, the patience and heroism of the Japanese steadily told, and on 4th October they attacked a work at Yenchang, near Takhe Bay, and destroyed the two machine-guns with which it was armed. This success was followed up by the capture, on 16th October, of an immensely strong Russian position on Hashimakayana Hill. Ten days later, the Japanese troops stormed and took, after hours of sanguinary fighting, the two important positions of Erhlung and Sungshushan, on the northern and north-western salients of the old Chinese Wall; and these successes were considered to have cleared the ground for the general assault which had been ordered from headquarters in Japan.

For four days—27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th October—the Russian works were subjected to such a terrific bombardment as, up to then, mortal eyes had certainly never beheld. It reached its height about eight o’clock on the morning of the 30th, and continued until about one o’clock in the afternoon, during which the din was terrific and indescribable. Shell and shrapnel fell upon the Russian works at the rate of one hundred per minute, the forts resembled volcanoes in eruption, from the continuous explosions of the shells which fell upon them, and the entire landscape became veiled in a thick haze of smoke. At one o’clock the preparation was thought to be complete; and ten minutes later the great assault began—to end in complete and disastrous failure! The Russian forts, supposed to have been silenced by those four days of terrific bombardment, were as formidable as ever; and as the stormers dashed forward they were met by so furious a rifle and artillery fire that they were literally annihilated. The second grand assault upon Port Arthur had failed, as completely and tragically as the first!

To have incurred such tremendous losses for such insignificant results was a terribly depressing experience for Japan; but the benumbing effect of the blow began to pass away when, in the first week of November, the news arrived of General Oku’s splendid success upon the Shaho; and with renewed hope, and that indomitable patience and courage which is so marked a feature of Japanese character, the troops before Port Arthur set to work to repair