Yet, that "all" might be summed up in a very few words--just incessant flashes of fire, great volumes of smoke, and, interspersed with the smoke, patches of flying debris. Very little else. No great masses of troops advancing in serried lines, column after column, with colours proudly flying, and burnished bayonets glistening in the sun; none of the old-fashioned pomp and circumstance of war when the opposing armies marched toward each other with bands playing, discharged their muskets when they were near enough to see the whites of their opponents' eyes, and then charged with fixed bayonets, fighting it out hand to hand. That sort of battle went out of fashion with the introduction of the breech-loading rifle and the machine-gun; and now, with between fifty and sixty thousand men in action, there were periods when not a solitary human being could be seen. And when any did appear, which was only at intervals, they were but few in number--just a man here and a man there dotted about sparsely over a large area of ground, visible for perhaps half a dozen seconds, and then lost again, hidden behind cover of some sort. It was getting well on toward noon when a message reached me from the General to the effect that two batteries of Russian quick-fire field-guns had been discovered on the summit of Nan-kwang-ling--a hill some eight hundred feet high, about a mile to the westward of the Nanshan Heights--and requesting me to signal our ships in the bay to give their whole attention to those two batteries. Unfortunately for us, the tide in the bay was now on the ebb, and the _Hei-yen_ and _Tsukushi_ were obliged to haul off to avoid grounding; but the _Akagi_ and _Chokai_ responded nobly to the call, creeping in until they actually felt the ground, and enveloping Nan-kwang-ling knoll in flame and smoke.