Kinchau was now in the hands of the Japanese; but this was not sufficient for them, they must needs pursue the flying Russians; and they did so with such furious impetuosity that they literally drove them into the sea--that is to say, into the waters of Kinchau Bay, where the luckless Russians, to the number of five hundred, were either shot down or drowned, almost to a man, only ten of them surviving and being taken prisoners. I had a distant view of the whole affair from a knoll on the northern spur of the Nanshan Heights, where I had taken up a position which commanded a view, not only of practically the whole of the ground over which the stormers would have to pass, but also of the bay and our fleet, to which I should probably be required to signal from time to time as the fight progressed. Meanwhile, the mist had by this time lifted, revealing a flotilla of our torpedo-boats and destroyers feeling their way into the bay and keeping a bright lookout for possible mines. Well astern of them came the _Akagi_ and _Chokai_; and still farther out were the old _Hei-yen_ and the cruiser _Tsukushi_, cautiously creeping in, with leadsmen perpetually sounding on either beam. The bottom, about where they were required to be, was flat, and the tide was on the ebb, the great fear of the skippers of those two craft, therefore, was that they might touch the ground and hang there, left by the tide, exposed helplessly to the fire of the Russian guns. Thanks, however, to my labours of a few days earlier, they were all able to get close enough in to open upon the Russian works at extreme range, although, until the tide should rise, they could not bring a thoroughly effective fire upon the Russian batteries and so put them out of action. But if we had ships, so, too, had the Russians, in the shape of the gunboat _Bobr_ and five small steamers in Hand Bay, on the side of the isthmus opposite to Kinchau Bay, the Nanshan Heights being between them, so that each was hidden from the sight of the other. The _Bobr_ was likely to prove a very awkward customer for us; for she mounted one 9-inch and one 6-inch gun, which, although they were a long way from being up-to-date, were still quite good enough to out-range the Japanese field-guns and severely pepper our left, which occupied the ground at the head of Hand Bay. The steamers which accompanied her were, our spies discovered, fitted up expressly for the purpose of quickly ferrying troops across from one side of Hand Bay to the other, according as they might be wanted, instead of being obliged to march round the head of the bay in the face of our troops. Thus the Russians were in a position to either harass our left flank and rear, or to rush reinforcements across the head of the bay--a distance of about a mile-- as circumstances might require.