It was to be expected. Not a man lives. The fire ceases. They all lie prone--some hid in the shell holes, some lost in the gullies, some face down bare on the open sand. Most of them lie lengthwise, their heads upward, shot apparently as they stumbled forward. On the second slope in one place the legs and trunk of a man are sprawled, armless, headless. An entire shell must have met him halfway. Occasionally the figures are huddled, piteously deprived of action, sending upward the silent, unanswerable appeal that death makes. But most of them have that curious upward slant, bodies rigid, as of determined men hugging the ground. Were they bulleted straight? Anyway, it is a glorious death--this of the infantry soldier storming Port Arthur, lifted on the crest of the world’s fiercest passion, puffed into vapor as the crest of a storm-tossed wave! Painless, too. A touch and all is over. But can they all be dead, all of those figures slanted curiously upward? There must have been remarkable sharpshooters above to pick every man off, for shells are notoriously extravagant of bravado and bluff. Ten minutes pass--fifteen--twenty--and only the giant shells wheezing through the sky to distant, unseen marks remind one that here is indeed a battlefield. Then suddenly those figures with the curious upward slant come to life. Another handful of war corn is fed from the human hopper below. The young officer waves his sword. The line-sergeant stolidly climbs. The deploying lines curl their microbe grip more firmly into the slope. There was a hitch in the machine. Now it moves, slow, inexorable. The piteously huddled figures remain. The comrades go on, with never a look down, never a look behind, half-stooped, rifle-butts dragging, laboring with the terrific climb. Ten paces from the fresh start, and that hail of bursting steel meets them again. They struggle on, perhaps a hundred feet, perhaps a hundred and fifty, then commence dropping one by one, by the dozen, fifteen at a time, two by two. They rest again. Again the time drags. Again the fresh start, with more piteously huddled figures. So it goes, the hopper below supplying every loss. At length the young officer pauses. Just for a moment he lingers and then digs his boots into the crater that one of those friendly shells tore out for him an hour before. Without waiting for his men, fifty yards beyond the nearest, he leaps to the parapet, reels for an instant on the skyline, then plunges out of sight. I never see him again. What must have been his fate inside there, alone, before his men came up? Was he shot down as he entered? Did he keep the Russians at bay till his supports came up? Dear, foolish boy, did you think that, single-handed, with that bit of toy steel, you could take Port Arthur?