At one o’clock the bombardment seemed to have reached a climax of intensity. The parapets of the four forts were alive with bursting shrapnel. A hundred a minute were exploding on each (at fifteen gold dollars apiece). The air above them was black with the glycerine gases of the mortar shells, and the wind blowing toward the sea held huge quantities of dust. Timber splinters were in the air and rocks were flying. Not a fort replied, and from the entire eight-and-one-half-mile front of the Russian line there were few answers. Once about every ten minutes a wheezy battery off on the Liaotishan Peninsula sent a shell promiscuously into our vast field, apparently to show that the defense was yet at least gasping for breath. In the front parallels the infantry seemed on the move. There was a shifting of rifles, and in three of them, from end to end, a man could be seen running. The night before I had been up there to find all of the soldiers changing their linen and sponging themselves off as best they could with old towels and soiled handkerchiefs. They were purifying themselves for death. A superstition as old as Japan says that a man who dies dirty finds no place among the Shinto shades. Now they were waiting calmly, each with an overcoat and spade across his back. Why the spade? Will it be necessary to hastily intrench for the night far up the slope? Each had an “iron” ration in his pocket, and a pint of cold tea in his flask. Two hundred rounds of ammunition in his three leather pouches go to help the bayoneted rifle that he slings by its strap, its butt dragging as he goes up the hill. What a job it is, this, of living in a pocket handkerchief, on compressed air, giving and receiving death, for three cents a day! At one-fifteen our fire changes. The four forts are left to their silence and devastation, and the fat balls travel westward to the Pine Tree and the Two Dragons. For a moment the slopes stand out, ghastly with smoke, pitted like strawberries, each pit a shell hole deep enough to give a man shelter. Before anyone knows it the assault is on. The four get it at once. From the bottom of each, out of the approach sapped there in the night, a handful of men is fed, as corn might drop, grain by grain, ground from a hopper. They get a few rods up when another handful is fed, then another, until the whole face of the hill is swarming with tiny figures, their blue turned in the distance to black, the space between each at no place less than two yards, at none more than two rods. Not in battalion phalanx, as the picture books show, shells dismembering, arms thrown aloft, faces wild with battle’s glory, terror, agony, but steadily, sanely seeking every cover, deploying with skirmish formation, they go on and up, into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell. Not a life is thrown away, not a precious head wasted.