So we went into the chipmunk’s burrow, up through the cornfields, frowned on by a hundred thousand guns, menaced by two armies, until we nestled in the ragged hole Japan has torn in Russia’s impregnable last stand. Laterally down the line of our advance, but high over our heads, shells often rammed their harsh bewilderment and we could hear them strike, sometimes rods, sometimes miles away. How like a live thing a shell snarls--as some wild beast, in ferocious glee thrusting the cruel fangs in earth and rock, rending livid flesh with its savage claws, and its fetid breath with poison powder scorching the autumn wind! ’Most always it fizzes and funks in shameful waste. Bullets are the nasty things; a who-whit, a dry spat, a thin hole drilled in a frightful way, as snakes sling their venom in sly and easy scorn. When we got halfway up, and into the angle, so that Russian trenches were on three sides, a number sped about us. Hardly a minute but one passed over our heads. The situation looks well in print. Yet we were in little danger. Our wits kept--we were safe. For this let us profoundly thank the engineer who built that siege parallel--a cunning masterful Yankee of the East, whose name as a military engineer must be handed down to future generations of technical students. He had taken advantage of every rise in the ground and of every depression. Of corn stubble he made a drapery, of hillocks a screen, of ravines an ambuscade, until Nature so aided him that she and not the Japanese infantry was the assaulting force against those heights beyond. We walked twenty meters apart, for, should we by any chance lift our heads together and be sighted in a party, the Russians could drop a bit of shrapnel over us. Otherwise we might be off for a morning stroll down a country lane. We crouched as we walked, for the trench was built for Japanese, who average a few inches less in height than a foreigner. The distance as the crow flies was little over half a mile; we went nearly a mile and a half. At one side ran a telephone wire, staked down at intervals with broken, rusty rifles. At every angle a sentry saluted, stepping forth grimly from a dugout. Halfway up we passed a stretcher bearing a body, the face covered with coarse matting, sewn roughly--a corpse of the night before. Farther on came a soldier with his arm in a wet, crimson sling. Half an hour before, feeling secure after days in the ominous place, he had passed into a ravine he thought safe, but out of the path chosen by the clever engineer. He was in the Russian fire zone and presently a shell fragment smashed his arm. From a dozen to fifteen are lost that way every day.