On the morning of the 10th, the two armies lay among the hills South of the Sha-ho, our left wing resting on the railway and our right in the mountains near Ponchiho. Both armies were entrenched and on our front were few signs of activity. Our batteries were masked at the foot of the hills near the coal mine and in the Eastern heights across the plain, while our infantry was concealed in trenches on the level ground and on the slopes. Early in the day the enemy’s guns displayed great energy, their fire being directed against the ridges and villages that might shelter riflemen. The key to the Russian position was a hill about six thousand yards from the coal mine--a broad shouldered height crowned by a rocky escarpment that looked like a fort. Bastion Hill, as we named it, is flanked on the East by a range traversed by spurs on which the Japanese artillery and infantry had established themselves. Fronting it on the South rose a mount connected with the Eastern range by a saddle. Behind this lower eminence is a ravine and a dense grove. The Western slope of Bastion Hill descends into a plain through which flows a shallow stream almost washing the walls of a village hidden among trees to the North-west. The approach from the South is over the flat commanded from a deep gully running like a trench under the hill. On the North stretches another plain with a range of mountains beyond, where the enemy’s guns were posted. The scene might have tempted an artist and would have taxed his palette. Before us lay the valley shaded with russet and amber. The sun caught the sheaves of harvested millet and transmuted them into gold, and from beds of dappled brown rose groves of willow and fir whose green branches threw dark shadows over the homesteads. And beyond towered mountain and hill which Autumn had tinted with purple and amber. It was a scene of pastoral beauty into which the spirit of war had entered unbidden. The husbandmen were leaving their houses among the trees and hastening through the stubble, but not to garner their sheaves which stood ripe in the sunshine. They were fleeing with wife and child like Lot from the city of Gomorrah, “and the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace” as gun answered gun.