The same scientific skill with which the gun is handled is seen throughout the army. Even after a battle, in the disorder of regiments, the search for the wounded, the burial of the dead, there is no confusion. All moves quietly and quickly. No officer swears, for the simple reason that the Japanese language hasn’t the words. Only the interpreters, who know English, swear. They, however, can be excused; they handle the correspondents, to whom they can’t speak, as the soldiers do to the Russians, with lead. You read of “the confusion and bustle of an army” and “the terrors of war.” There is no confusion, no terror here. No shrieks, no shouts, no hurrying. Once, as a regiment, after losing half its men, scaled the top parapet of one of those lower forts across the way, it gave out three rapid “Banzais.” Just that triple cry in the early dawn, from troops drunk with victory and mad with fatigue, is about the only evidence I have that the army possesses nerves. It rings in my ears yet and will always ring there--a wild shriek of samurai exultation floating out of the mist of the valley above the voice of rifle and cannon. “The officers lost control for a few minutes, but not for long,” explained a certain general to me later, apologetically. He didn’t countenance such enthusiasm. War is business here--the most superb game of chess ever played upon the chequered board of the world. One thing that relieves the situation of much of the evident hurry that once made war picturesque is the absence of the orderly. The mounted officer, riding for life, dispatch in breast-pocket or saddle bag, from the general to his brigadiers and his colonels, is food for reminiscence. The telephone rang his knell. This is the first time in history that the field telephone has come successfully into extensive active use. General Nogi can sit in his headquarters, four miles from Port Arthur, and speak with every battery and every regiment lying within sight of the doomed forts. Little bands of uniformed men, carrying bamboo poles and light wire frames on transport carts, and armed with saws and shovels, have intersected the peninsula with lines of instantaneous communication. It is the twentieth century. Yet, as I walked over the hills near the headquarters of the commander of artillery yesterday, I saw, hanging from one of the bamboo poles and all along a wire leading from it to the artillery commander’s tent, strips of white cotton cloth called “goheis.” You can see the same before all the Shinto shrines in Japan. They are offerings of supplication to the spirits of the fathers. Some simple linesman, garbed in khaki and wearing an electric belt, not content with telephonic training, would thus guard his general. “Oh, ye who have watched over Japan, in peril and in safety, from the age of Jimmu, even to the present day,” he cries, “now, in a foreign land, faithfully guard this, our talisman and signal!”