The siege of Port Arthur presents many phases--military, political, ethnical, scientific, spectacular, and dramatic--in short, all the great vital phases of human life. About the siege of Sebastopol the libraries hold thirty volumes--about Plevna twenty. Port Arthur surpasses both. Politically, vaster interests were at stake. In a military sense the operations were more extensive; so we cannot hope to cover the ground delved into by hundreds of writers about former sieges.
We can but pick the grand salient features that seared themselves into the memory of the few who lived through it. Of these the chief is the proof that human tenacity and valor are as great to-day as at any time in the world’s history. The great guns at Port Arthur were marvelous. They impressed one with that power seen in a jungle of elephants, yet they were sensitive and delicate as a little girl. The battling under searchlights was as grand a spectacle as the imagination can devise. The ingenuity and precision of the movements outlined by generals bred in all the duplicity and culture of the schools, and reared through every vicissitude of camp and march, were astounding. The ingenious, quiet deviltry of the engineer puzzled the brain. But all would have been useless without the private soldier. The boy in khaki--he did the trick.
And after all the story of Port Arthur has been thrashed out, its questions settled, that soldier of Nippon, with a calm, plain face, stamped with the soil, rises supreme, saluting his equally glorified yokel brother from the Trans-Baikal.
Shells make a lot of noise and led the hotel correspondents many miles away to see blood on the face of the moon, but at Port Arthur their damage was out of all proportion to their cost. Only one out of four hundred of the Russian shells was effective in the Japanese camp. It is not likely that more than twice that ratio--namely, one out of two hundred--would cover the proper statistics of Japanese effectiveness. Of course, the Japanese had the great advantage of a plain target.
Bullets did the harm. There were about forty million discharged during the five months of the siege, and forty million bits of steel flying with cutting velocity are bound to hit some hearts in Japan and other hearts in Russia. The weight of the total number of men killed at Port Arthur on both sides, if compared with the weight of the steel sent from the large and small guns of both armies, will show that the death of every soldier cost his weight in metal.