This the Japanese are to assault before noon. There is no timber, only a few bushes and rock the size of a bull’s head, hard things to wade through, but no defense. They must cross the open plain, 500 yards, in full range of those one hundred and ten cannon, smash the barbed wire, climb the terraced plateaus where they will be picked off like rabbits in a shooting gallery, assault the trenches and finally take the heights. To take one trench seems heroic achievement, four an impossibility. Impossible but for one thing--orders. The navy was ordered at the outset of the war “to exterminate” the Russian fleet, this Second Army went out to “take Port Arthur.” And they obey orders--these Japanese. So why contemplate that to attempt that Hill of Nanshan is folly, to take it madness? The Russians wait. All is silence--the awed hush preceding carnage, terror, death. Waiting they sing, not light tunes heard so bright and gay on the heights of Tokyo to-day; chansons of France, Italy’s peerless compositions, America’s solemn new-born hymn or Japan’s flute note weird and penetrating. From deep bass throats and barytones majestic rolls organ music of fierce, wild grandeur, as through some vast forest aisle the harmonies of winds and woods and waves unite in mighty pæans, celebrating to the august fastnesses glories yet fresh to man. Schools, traditions, customs civilized have not touched the fiber of that central gauntness, shining up through the spirit of the singers, like dreamland on a tragedian’s afterglow. Siberia with all its wildness, with all its immensity, where aback the mammoth wallowed; the Caucasus tossing aloft primeval ecstasy the long slant of the steppes, and Russia, bold, defiant, revengeful; all rolled in one, are in that note. The clothes of the men are heavy, ungainly, ill-made, nothing serviceable but the boots, which are well adapted for running away. The faces--sodden with ignorance and vice--reflect only stolid endurance; no initiative, no individuality. Only through the song shines the soul. The singing ceases. There is a dreadful hush. It is eleven o’clock. Off toward Kinchow, which is hid by a fringe of low fir trees, something is moving. Soon hunchbacked dabs can be seen bobbing across the furze, leaping over the stones, pausing, searching, then onward dashing. The firing begins. Two machine guns--only ten of the one hundred and ten are quick-firers--lead off. You can easily tell them. The sound is little, like the popping of a dozen beer bottles in quick succession. Then silence. The strip of cartridges is torn aside, another inserted, again a dozen pops. So it goes until the ten are brought into action and there is no intermission. Flicks of dust are kicked up by the shells, most falling short, a few passing on through the trees. One of the bobbing dabs falls, the rest press on. Now the gunners are getting the range; the shells pick off more hunchbacks.