In the assault of August 19th to 26th, the few men who reached the parapets had received in their faces storms of what the Chinese call “stinkpots”; that is, balls of fresh dung. This assault wholly failed. The dead were left to rot, and the wounded were shot as they lay, the stench of the corpses being used as a weapon of offense against the Japanese, who were trying to maintain the advantage they had gained at the foot of the slope. The demonstration of September 19th, which also failed, was met with hand-grenades of guncotton. In the third assault on October 29th, halfway up the Cock’s Comb, the advance stumbled over a mine, and the entire lower shoulder of the mountain was blown into the air, taking with it some twenty-five men, heads awry, legs and arms twisted, trunks shattered. Nevertheless, new volunteers advanced through the crater thus formed, up the glacis of the redoubt, until they reached a new and dangerous obstruction. This was a moat so cunningly concealed under the very edge of the parapets that an observer below could gain no hint of its existence even with the most powerful field-glasses. The ditch was so deep that once in, a man could not get out even by climbing over another man’s shoulders. To fall in was certain death, for in every turn of the concealed moat was a masonry projection called by the cunning men who devise such traps, a caponiere. These caponieres were built of stone and covered with earth. They were tiny forts, concealing and protecting four or five Russian riflemen and a machine-gun. Consequently, under perfect protection and with their foe in limited area, trapped like woodchucks in a hole, unable to escape, the Russians merely had to deal out whistling steel at their leisure. The Japanese did not falter. The first men who leaped into that moat knew that they were leaping to certain death, but they knew, too, that the men in the caponieres could be overwhelmed by the force of the numbers to come after. The two caponieres were captured at once.
Under the parapets of this fort, dominated by all the artillery of the two armies, occurred some of the grimmest fighting that history records. It was at midnight of the second day of final occupation. The black mountains lay behind, the black forts in front, the blacker plain below. A Japanese lieutenant, Oda, asked for a volunteer _Keissheitai_, or certain-death party. Thirty _Keissheitai_ men came forward. Oda put himself at their head and ventured along the bed of the moat toward the rearmost caponiere, with the idea of capturing it. The fort is very long--about one and a half times the length of an ocean liner--so he found room and time for adventure. There was no moon, and the moat was too close to the Russians for them to depress their searchlights sufficiently to illuminate it. In the blackness, halfway down the moat, Oda and his men met a Russian lieutenant prowling with a squad of men behind him, bent on the recapture of the two caponieres which the Japanese had seized. They had it out, not with bullets, but bayonet to bayonet, fist to fist, and even teeth and nails. Oda and the Russian, in locked embrace, reeled back and forth, falling, rising, scratching, first one on top and then the other, each losing sight and control of his men, all of whom were engaged in individual combats just as savage.