Yet only a quarter of the battle is won. Another rest. Another assault. Again and again they go up. Nine times they hammer away, muskets to jowl, heads down like bulls in the ring, with one thought; nay! not a thought, an instinct--to win or die. The officers are picked off by sharpshooters, as flies are flicked from a molasses jug. Two colonels are killed, the list of done captains swells. Then, through the haze, commanding the first division, looms a prince of the blood, the general whose peeress-mother is but this afternoon smiling serene on Tokyo heights. He below Kinchow, smoke-stained, grimed with death, hears the artillery report that ammunition is about gone, but one round left and Nanshan still Russian. Defeat stares Prince-General in the face. Retreat, disgrace seems right ahead. And orders were to “take Port Arthur.” Smiling, he tells the gunners to wait. “Charge again,” he says. So up they go, for the tenth and last time. At the top more civilized warfare. Spottsylvania Court House was no more savage. Japanese bayonets clash with Russian sabers. Bayonets struck from hands they grasp knives carried suicidally in belts. Thus, hand to hand, they grapple, sweat, bleed, shout, expire. The veneer of centuries sloughed, as a snake his cast-off skin, they spit and chew, claw and grip as their forefathers beyond the memory of man. The Prince-General waits, ready to fire his last round, and retreat, hopeless. It has been a desperate fight--yes, reckless, unparalleled. If lost he loses nobly. “Are you through, General?” his aide asks. “I have just begun my part of the fighting,” he answers. His name is Fushimi--remember it. As he speaks a weak cry goes up--weak because even victory cannot rouse spirits so terribly taxed. It was a bloody sun going down in Korea Bay that night, but it saw its rising counterpart flaunting above Nanshan, while the Russians were making use of the best part of their apparel, sprinting towards the Tiger’s Tail. The cost! The fleeing ones left five hundred corpses in the four trenches. The others paid seven times that price--killed and wounded--to turn across the page of the world’s warfare that word Nanshan, in company with two others, perhaps above them--Balaklava and Missionary Ridge. Now who pays for this war? Chapter Four THE JAPANESE KITCHENER Headquarters, Third Imperial Army, Before Port Arthur, Oct. 12th: “Goddama’s here!” “Who?” “General Goddam--what’s his name?” “Kodama?” “That’s it. Who is he? They couldn’t do more for the Emperor--special train, guard mounted, and all that. He came while I was in the staff tent--a mite of a fellow in a huge coat.” Thus Villiers two weeks ago announced the advent to the army of the Chief of the General Staff. Who is he? The soldiers know, for they have a verse in their interminable war song: “On with Nippon, down with Russia Is the badge of our belief; The Son of Heaven sends us saké, And Kodama sends us beef!”