Bingley felt the floods of hate stir and heat within him on the morning of August twenty-fourth, when over the hills from the right, which was eastward, sounded the Beginning--Kuroki in cannonade. Feeney and Finacune had had the luck to beat him to real action. The next day Oku took up the bombardment on the left. It was not until the following morn that Nodzu leaped to his guns, and the hot winds brought to the nostrils of the “Horse-killer” the pungent breath of powder. The correspondents were held back in the smoke as usual. Five months in the field, and they had not yet caught up with the war. Again, on the second day of Nodzu’s action, the correspondents were left behind under a guard who was extremely courteous. This was more than white flesh could bear. The civilians implored, demanded. It was remarkable that Bingley did not mix strongly in this rebellion. He was planning carefully, desperately, to be in at the end, and showed the courage to wait. He realized that the battle was far from ended yet; even though Kuroki was mixing hand-to-hand in the east, Oku in the west closing in over barriers of blood, and Nodzu in the centre engaged daily with a ten-mile front of duelists--a bare-handed, hot-throated fiend, chucking his dead behind him for elbow-room. Bingley studied maps and strategy--not from Nodzu’s standpoint alone, but from the whole. What would he do if he were Field-Marshal Oyama? The theatre of war was dark on the morning of August twenty-ninth, but in mid-afternoon Nodzu began firing--firing at nothing! He stood still and belched thunder, as if it were something to be rid of; ripping open the very kernels of sound, and making the summer afternoon no fit place for butterflies. Bingley’s eyes were very bright. This tallied with one of his hypotheses. It was a demonstration, under the cover of which his old friend Kuroki was to start a flanking movement. That night the smileless young giant worked long in his tent. Stretched full-length upon his blankets, a lantern by his side, he wrote hard in his note-books and drew maps of the flying flanker, whom Feeney and Finacune were now following. He showed these maps, all dated to the hour, in London afterward, with the remark that he had divined the strategy of Liaoyang before the battle.