Loading a 4.7 gun of the ordinary field artillery during the assault of September 20.]
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.