The plain lay overripe with harvests, but not a living thing was on its surface. The autumn sun hung indolent and golden. Blackened villages were deserted. Among the chain of forts, bristling with cannon, there lay one with its nearest side completely honeycombed. All the other forts were silent and bare on their near sides. That honeycomb was made by the gridironing of Japanese trenches. Between it and the line of mountains, parallel to the Russians on the north, the ground was ridged with mounds of fresh earth, as if some gigantic mole had zigzagged across the plain. From neither army was there the slightest evidence of life, except that between the two lay that telltale fresh earth, as though a huge animal had been busy in the night. Yet, behind the northern parallel range, the distance of a rifle-shot from the Russians in Port Arthur, ominously silent, monstrously at work in preparation, was the Japanese army--siege-mortars cocking their twenty tons of steel on solid masonry as a Mauser pistol cocks on a man’s fist; monster naval guns, rakish devils, buried in the earth, with frightful noses menacing the blue; howitzers perched on peaks; lines of transport laden with rice and biscuit; hospitals brilliant as the sunlight and quiet as its stillness; regiments of men receiving instructions--how to escape beri-beri, how to keep nightdews from the rifle-barrels, how to bind a fractured leg, how to scupper an adversary in a hand-to-hand fight--but on the field of battle, on the opposite sides of which the opposing hosts were held like hounds in leash, there was nothing human--only silence, beauty, sublimity.