Now for a month, under a torrid sun, unmarred by a day of rain or scarce a fleck of cloud, hundreds of dead have lain rotting in that compact space. A flag of truce to bury them was out of the question. The Japanese had far the worst of it, as their lines, drawn in a lunette, partly surrounded the charnel house below which they lay, steeped in its noisome drains. Moreover, in hastily throwing up their trenches the night of the battle, corpses, loosely covered; had been used to improvise the walls, so bodies and stones together formed a shelter which in life the men thus commandeered could not have made. Well the Russians knew of the disease the sun was breeding, and refused a truce, for the dead played well into their hands. Stench could be a weapon more effective than bullets or strategy. So, day after day they held the Japanese there, as a dog’s nose is rubbed in his own mess. Watch on sentry posts was cut from four hours to two, and at the worst portion of the line to one hour. The pickets swathed their thin brown faces in towels and the commissary supplied smelling salts. An officer who served on that picket line twelve days told me that the sun alone was enough to defeat an ordinary man in four hours. Added to that the slightest zephyr bore a fetid breath more foul than the lowest of a city’s sewers. During the first day groans could be heard occasionally from the contested ground. Wounded--no one could guess how many--lay there dying. To have attempted succor would have been suicide. The pickets did all they could. They threw rations of biscuits beyond the trenches, scattering them along the ground, blindly, of course, but carefully as a farmer strews a field. A company divided itself; one part sacrificed its water bottles, slinging across their shoulders beer bottles, instead of the handy and handsome aluminum ones furnished by the army. Then the aluminum bottles, that would stand the shock of striking, which might shatter a beer bottle, were tossed over to the starving, thirsty wretches. The second morning there came some desultory groans from the farther side. The groans suddenly ceased. Successive rifle pops told that the Russian sharpshooters had picked off the wounded. Picket duty in the trenches became more deadly. The army had settled, with quiet determination, into a siege. One night, as the moon rose over another division of the army, two thousand yards to the west, there appeared above the trenches a cap. A bullet pierced it instantly, but it was only a feint cap on the end of a stick. The picket nearest saw it was a Japanese cap, and called his challenge, “Who goes there?” “Tomodachi!” (a friend) came the response. “Show your arm.”