Along that bloody angle and through all the eight-mile front for many months lay on duty the soldier of the Emperor, the boy who won the victory. He crouched under the parapet, rifle to cheek, its steel nose through a loophole, his finger on the trigger. The tensity of his muscles and his eyes glancing down the barrel in deadly aim, made him look like a great cat pausing for a spring. One leg was drawn up and his cap was pulled viciously over his eyes. The sun beat upon him as he lay, venomous with pent-up passion, cut in silhouette against the trench, a shade darker than the shale. A minute before he had offered tea and cigarettes; now he dealt out hot lead. He might be a university student, or a merchant, or a professional man. Wherever he came from he was the pride of his neighborhood. Physically he was superb--perfect eyes and teeth, digestion hardy and fit as clockwork; this must have been so or he would not have been allowed to enlist. Moreover, he was a veteran of four months’ severe campaigning, seven pitched battles, and two months’ hard siege. Here he stood, far out on the firing line, clashed between two civilizations, hurled into the pallor of conflict, tossed by the greed of nations. Yes. Down there in the ditches lived the real besieger of Port Arthur. Not science, nor generalship, nor race bravery reduced Port Arthur; it was done by men who could live and die with the simple heroism of cavemen and vikings. Chapter Eighteen THE NEW SIEGE WARFARE One morning in August General Nogi stood before his battalion commanders at Port Arthur with a pick in his hand. Its nose and heel had been worn away until the shank of rusted iron resembled an earth-dappled cucumber. Fondling it, the General said: “Take a lesson from this Russian pick. Your men must dig. They are too eager to ask, ‘Why intrench to-night when we are going forward in the morning?’” Nogi here went to the heart of his problem. It had cost him 25,000 men to learn that the military engineer must precede siege assaults, as his brother, the civil engineer, precedes rapid transit in New York. The lesson, taught by Julius Cæsar to the legions in Gaul nineteen hundred years ago, Nogi and his heroes re-learned before Port Arthur in 1904. The advance in that cycle of time has been not in digging, but in ways of digging. The Japanese had to cross a valley a mile wide and six miles long, dominated at all points by every degree of hostile fire. This did not appall them. They accepted the problem, grappled with it, and mastered it.