But getting down into the rear plain, traveling the road, taking a different one each day, passing among the villages and through the hills, one begins to realize that the country is honeycombed by grim activity. Back and forth, from the front to Cho-ray-che, a railroad station halfway from Port Arthur to Dalny, travel lines of transport. Each line has from one to five dozen light wagons drawn by single small shaggy horses, each guided by a small dust-visaged soldier.
“There is the strength of our army,” said an officer to me one day as a company of them passed, grimed, heated, menial. They are the flower of Japanese youth, clerks, professional men, students, exiled on rice and pickled plums, getting none of the glory of war. They are the unnamed and unknown but all-powerful commissary.
As the transport passes in, loaded with bags of rice, there comes out another line, this time of coolies, paired, and well burdened with human freight. They are bearing the wounded, in bamboo stretchers that do not jolt the piteously shattered frames, to the railroad station, whence they go by train to Dalny, thence by hospital ship to Japan. Every day comes this dribble of wounded, some days only a score, but after a battle the ways are thick with them--hundreds, thousands.
Occasionally, but very seldom, a battalion or a regiment of infantry will be seen moving in, with compact lines, knapsacks on back, bearing rifles with the barrel holes brass covered. The other night over by the western sea I suddenly came upon a troop of cavalry racing along the sands in the sunset. They rode their horses well, considering that the Japanese is not a horseman. Each had an extra mount. They frolicked like plainsmen till the coves rang. I had not seen so much gayety before in all the Japanese army. But what can cavalry do at a siege?
For the sublime we need not go to the firing line where men risk their lives and lose them. At the front of our mountain lies a deep rutted road, at the end of which, hid well among the hills, is the hole for a concrete gun-emplacement, redoubted with sandbags, the glacis slippery with shale. Along this road as the sun sinks we see what looks like a gigantic snake, its tail pulling an ugly head slowly backward, its dust-covered belly squirming laboriously. Descending we find a cable thick as a man’s thigh stretched between two long lines of men, each of whom has hold and is pulling that ugly head--a siege gun--nose and breech clap-boarded, and wallowing, without its carriage, on wooden rollers. We count the men--300. Men alone can do the work, for they alone can move in unison, quietly, at the word of command. There is no noise. The commands cannot be heard five hundred yards away. The three hundred bend their backs as one and the Pride of Osacca bunts her nose through the dust a rod nearer emplacement. They toil there a week to get that monster into position, pygmies moving a power that will rend the mountains, as tradition has it that Hendrick Hudson and his crew moved the ships’ cannon into the Catskills for the eternal generation of Knickerbocker thunder. To look upon that gun, helpless but disputatious in the hands of the three hundred, to realize that a week hence its bulk, into which one of these naked Manchurian children can easily creep, will toss five hundred weight of shell five miles through the air into one of those Russian forts where it will shatter the skill, labor, and life of an Empire--ah, that is sublime! Is it not also terrible?