On the morning of August 30th, when we looked down upon Liao-yang we believed that this city of the plain would be the Sedan of Manchuria. A crescent of steel was drawn about it, and armed men were threatening on every side. Yet Liao-yang, unconscious of impending doom, lay silent and unmoved. We had climbed a mountain on the East and saw the plain--a great expanse of brown fields and grass with dark patches of wood. On the North ran the broad river, in whose embrace nestled the city. Grey walls, five miles in circumference, enclosed much cultivated land and many houses, above the dark roofs of which towered a pagoda dedicated to eight incarnations of Buddha. And beyond the walls was another and a newer city--European in aspect--an ugly straggling line of brick houses and stores, with a railway station, towards which a train moved leisurely from the North over a bridge across the river. In five months this was our first evidence of permanent Russian occupation. Upon the flats South of the town were lines of earthworks and two redoubts that looked like fortresses, and further South was a line of low hills--the entrenched position or Shou-shan. From the centre of this line rose a grey mass of rock broken and precipitous, and separated from it on the East by the main road to Hai-cheng was a low hill with three broad peaks that was to be the scene of one of the most bloody encounters in the war. The stillness that brooded over city and plain was charged with portent. A struggle--among the most terrific in a quarter of a century--was about to shake the mountains and devastate the plain as with some mighty convulsion of nature. Yet only to the eye of experience was any sign revealed. Save for a column of smoke near the base of the pagoda the town looked deserted. Over the plain wandered small bodies of men and horse, and on the river flats, where the Tang joins the Tai-tsu, was a force of infantry and artillery guarding the approach from the East. The hills were too far off to betray their occupants, yet we knew that on the crescent line of ridges was a great Russian army, and that on the plain and in the hills beyond were the legions of the Mikado.