The Russians on three sides held us in a vise. The bottom of the crater was paved with empty cartridge shells and bullets flattened on the rocks. Constantly more knots were being ripped by the saw above. Except for that rasp--a rasp that bore in with crescendic violence on the nerves--the silence was profound. Life was everywhere--intelligence at the keenest pitch, ingenuity the most diabolical, agility the most intense, sacrifice heroic, daring, sublime--but not a sound, not a motion. Everywhere the silence kept--the unendurable silence of the Eternal Dragon. Its insatiable maw thrust up there in the ghastly sunlight, drenched in blood, yet cried for more. [Illustration: HUMAN BARNACLES Clinging to the bases of the forts, like barnacles to a ship, these sturdy Japanese existed in miserable quarters throughout the summer, fall and half the winter.] Sick with the thought that through this bloody angle, bought at so dear a cost, held at so terrible a price, there must yet be fought the supreme fight that will eventually reduce the citadel I turned to go. At the top of the downward trench I paused, kneeling, where three soldiers stood with rifles waiting to relieve the sentry on duty. Down through the plain swept the ten-mile front of the two armies--the might of Russia and the might of Japan, locked in a struggle so desperate there was no sound but the asthmatic wheeze of the ripsaw buzzing above. It was very close to the other world--yet the resources of two empires centered there, the heartthrobs of great people, raging like the wind in from two seas, swept it all into a typhoon of gore and grief. I felt my hand clasped by a palm moist and gentle with feeling, friendly with comradeship. The eyes I looked into were not those of a beast of prey. They were quite pleasant eyes, even lovable. The face was touched with soil. I could see it came from the rice paddies, yet it had sympathy, and pity, and much capacity for happiness. Was there not also capacity for suffering? The low word came and he went off, food for powder. Will he be one of the twenty? The sun was quite as devilish as ever in the Dragon’s maw as he stepped into it. As I scrambled into safety I saw him propped against the wall, his rifle against a chink, his cheek to the breech, “sniping.” It was a salute and an appeal that he pressed into my hand, a reproach and a challenge. I was a white man, he a yellow, and he was killing white. What difference was there between us? Could I not also have found friends two hundred yards farther on? Still the ripsaw buzzed the knots. Again the machine gun rattled, without poetry, business-like and deadly.