Villiers was with me. “What do you say?” he asked. “It’s time to measure risks. Think what you’ll get out of it. A correspondent dead is of no use to his paper, and people remember him as a fool who got shot in some reckless venture. Remember, you’re going into bullet fire for the first time. You’ve had shell fire only, up to now, and shell fire is to bullets what a bluebottle fly is to a tiger mosquito. Forbes used to have a supreme contempt for shell fire and a supreme respect for bullets. A shell buzzes and blows--a bullet flits in quietly, spits through an artery, the heart, the head--and it’s all over. Their rifles fire point blank at 200 yards and up where you want to go the lines are but forty yards apart. They can pick off a ten-cent piece at that distance. Remember, if your head shows so much as an inch above that parapet, you’re only good to sniff at when the wind blows from you, for these people have no extra stretcher for your useless carcass.” Villiers can say these things. Somewhere in his London studio is his order of St. George which the Czar gave him for audacity at Plevna. Also some seven other governments have decorated him for fit war behavior, so he is an expert on battlefields. “But,” said I, “think of what there is up there: the bloody angle, scene of the death of 3,000 men, heaps of unburied slain, trenches made of corpses, sentries firing, the living sleeping, eating, working among their dead comrades, the enemy on three sides, with this single line of supply and retreat down which only four men can march abreast. This captured fort is to the siege of Port Arthur what Nanshan is to the campaign--its decisive battle. It is the wedge Japan is driving into the heart of Russia and we’ll be on its tip. When the nations hear the truth about this fort--the assault that captured it, the odds against which it was fortified and held for six weeks--it will be the marvel of the age. Think! Would you miss standing on the apex of the world?” “I was a youngster myself once and I’m not old now,” replied Villiers. “They fake these things in London almost as well as I can do them in the field, so why risk my bones? But I’m as good as a Japanese officer or an American reporter. Up to now we’ve been chaperoned scribblers; here we become war correspondents. It smells of the old days: Forbes, Cameron, Pierce, McGahan, Jackson, Burleigh--and that crowd of gay devils. Lead on.” Perhaps you will be more interested in Villiers to know that he is supposed to be the original of Kipling’s character, Dick the Artist, in “The Light that Failed.”