“Impossible?” That is an English word. The Japanese do not understand it. “You are expected to do the impossible things,” read the first imperial order their troops received. They have done impossible things. So have the Russians done impossible things. The ordeal has raised the story of the siege of Port Arthur into an epic. Without the perspective of Troy, it has some of Troy’s grandeur. The glory, to us, is that we have touched shoulders with an age that has produced men as willing as any ever have been to fight nobly and die heroically.
The Shack occupied for three months (800 yards from the firing line) by General Oshima, Commander of the Ninth Division.]
Adjutant Hori, Secretary to General Oshima shown standing amid a quantity of plunder from one of the captured Forts.]
Skill and bravery had their value, of course, but to take Port Arthur a man was needed--a man like Grant, who could fight it out on one line all summer and all winter. This man was Nogi; with a face parchment-crinkled, brown like chocolate, with beard gray, shaded back to brown where it met the skin, so that he seemed a monotone in sepia, with eyes small and wide apart, perfect teeth, tiny, regular nose, and a beautiful dome of a head flaring out from the temples in tender and eloquent curves. He stands five feet ten, unusually tall for a Japanese, showing the loose power of a master in his joints and in that mighty jowl shaded by the gray-brown beard. He has had to weather fierce storms of public indignation in Japan for two reasons--because he did not take Port Arthur as scheduled; and because he sacrificed so many lives. Turn over the pages of our history and read the story of Grant’s campaign from the Wilderness, through Cold Harbor and Spottsylvania, to Petersburg and Richmond, and you will read the story of Nogi’s campaign against Port Arthur. In northern Virginia the mighty battle-ax cut down the keen Damascene sword. On the Liaotung Thor’s hammer smashed the straying fasces of an overripe empire. The North cried out that the man who felt himself an agent of Destiny in conquering northern Virginia was a butcher; just so Japan cried “butcher” against the iron man who reduced Port Arthur.