It was somewhere about the 20th of this same month that some of our scouting officers went deep through the picket line of the enemy and gave a great surprise to some of their non-commissioned officers. The Japanese accomplished their object with success, and on their way back they came across three or four of the enemy’s scouts. They chased the Russians about and tried to capture them, but the Russians fired at the Japanese officers in a desperate effort to make good their escape. Only one of them was left behind and captured, and our officers came back in triumph with their captive. As usual, we cross-examined the Russian, who was an infantry corporal. He bowed frequently and begged that his life might be spared, promising to tell us everything he knew. What a wretch! We wished we could give him one small dose of Japanese patriotism, which considers “duty heavier than a mountain and death lighter than a feather.”[43] We hear that a Japanese soldier, who had the misfortune of being captured by the Russians at Port Arthur, rebuked and reviled, with his face flushed with anger, the Russian general before whom he was driven. On the contrary, this Russian told us every military secret he knew, in order to keep his body and soul together. When he was led on to the line of observation and told to tell us the arrangement of the Russian soldiers, he pointed out and explained it with no scruple whatever, saying to the right there was the Twenty-sixth Regiment of Infantry sharpshooters, the Twenty-eighth Regiment of the same in the middle, and what regiment on the left hand, and so on. The correspondence between his answers and the reports from scouts testified to the correctness of each. He told us all the truth he knew and we were greatly helped by him. But all the same we despise him as a coward unworthy of a true soldier’s society. Let me take this opportunity of telling you about our examination of a Russian soldier captured the night after our attack on Kenzan, under a huge rock, where he was hiding himself. Our dialogue was something like this:— “What did you expect from our attack?” “We were afraid, and thought that the Japanese attack would be very fierce.” “Do your commanders take good care of you?” “When we first arrived in Port Arthur they were kind and considerate to us, but recently they have not been so. For the last three months or so we have received only one third of our pay. Our rations also have been reduced one half; all the rest goes into their private pockets.” “Have those who were defeated at Nanshan gone back to Port Arthur?” “They were not allowed to enter the great fortress; they were ordered to work on the entrenchments and live off the country, on the ground that there was no spare food to give them.” “Do you know that many of your countrymen have been sent to Japan as captives?” “Yes, I know. Just the other day a friend of mine went to Japan as a captive.”