A great fear fell upon the survivors and drew them together. It was a slow and painful muster. Shot through the legs, Sato crawled to Tanaka, whose foot had been shattered by a shell. With one arm hanging limp, Yamada tore a sleeve from his shirt and pressed it against a hole in his side. Nakamura had a bullet in his brain, and lay on his back sobbing out his life through frothing lips, about which the flies made dark, deep lines. A shot had entered Matsumoto’s right shoulder, passed through the muscles of his back, come out at the waist and lodged in his cartridge pouch. His foot slipped in a pool of blood, and he fell upon a Russian, kneeling with rifle clasped in his arms. The figure lolled over and rested at the feet of a soldier, with rigid arms stretched to Heaven, whose face was a crawling mask of buzzing flies. Kimura was mopping the blood from his brow, and had ripped up his trousers to dress a wound in his thigh. At last the muster was complete, and the little group of Japanese began to attend to one another’s injuries. The Russians were less seriously hurt and assembled more quickly. Sato had taken off his putties and was binding them round his leg, when he saw the eight bearded men. Instinctively he looked round for a rifle, but Tanaka laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t you see that they too are wounded?” Sato went on winding the putties and took no more heed of the enemy. The minutes dragged on: the golden mist vanished from the millet fields in the valley, and a thin line of crimson stretched along the horizon. An awful silence brooded over the hill--broken only by the sputtering of foam from the open mouth of dying Nakamura. Having dressed their wounds, the men began to look about them, and presently the eyes of the two groups met. A few hours before they were seeking each other’s lives. They remembered the mad rush, the blistering heat of rifle, the thrust of bayonet, the wild shout, and the crimson wall that rose out of the earth and crushed them into darkness and oblivion. Long and earnestly they gazed, each striving to read the other’s thoughts. Many stories they had heard of atrocities--of murder and mutilation and horrors of which men speak in whispers. The Russians were eight and the Japanese only five, for Nakamura did not count, being as a dead man. Would they fight: would they wait until the night and steal upon them unaware: did they see how sorely stricken were their enemies: would they avenge the slaughter of their brothers? To these inward questionings they sought answer in the faces turned toward them. “They look very fierce with their great beards, but their eyes are gentle.” It was Tanaka who spoke--he who had checked the impulse of his comrade.