Let us look at that September assault on “203,” of which the one in December was but a repetition, and glimpse what it meant to storm Port Arthur. Could all the bloody story of the siege be told, “203” would be forgotten, a detail lost in vista, swamped in gigantic operations, veiled in the mist of vast sacrifices. Yet the mind, puny as it is, must grasp an incident and cling tight, as a poet to the fringe of metaphor, for comprehension even distant.
Passing from the rear of the army to the front, you might realize something of the tricky skill used to move those pawns over that vast chessboard. To the eye of an eagle all would have been invisible. The sum of his sight would have been a tongue of land making faces at the sea, ridged with deep blotches from whose recesses thin pricks of smoke slipped to the crack and roar of great guns.
Yet lively work was seen. Close to the right rear was the first battery, a six-gun emplacement of field four point sevens. At one o’clock in the afternoon the telephone rang, the lieutenant in command called, and instantly the redoubt swarmed with figures that sprang like ants from the earth. Busy as ants, they answered the order from brigade headquarters for the signal shot to open the grand bombardment. They had come from their bomb-proofs, into which they would dodge again as soon as the shot was fired. There was much pride in the chief gunner as he took a cartridge from its bomb-proof shell chest, ran to his gun, threw open the cordite chamber, pulled out the breech block, rammed in the shell, snapped the block, and stepped back to signal the lanyard man; more pride than is usual in the Japanese gunner, a timid, simple being, dexterously handling his delicate instrument with as little vanity as he would handle a potato hoe.
Hurrying on the road to escape the shock, and looking back, the battery was invisible. The bewilderment of the eagle, if told that danger lurked there, would be overwhelming. A shell spat out, revealing the battery behind a mass of earth forming a natural redoubt. This was in a narrow valley with only a small range of foothills between it and the sea, a place later called “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Behind every mountain shoulder, and up every gorge, firing high angle over the eminence in front, was a battery nestled in its redoubt, with bomb-proofs for the men and bomb-proofs for the ammunition. It was hardly a valley, but a ravine, barren of grass, a torrential place through which, in spring, huge rains tore. Soon other rain--red rain, powdery and leaden--was to pour there.