THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR.—PORT ARTHUR.* THE tale of books, good, bad,
and indifferent, on the recent war in the Far East is still mounting up, and tends utterly to overwhelm us. Foiled in a large measure by the Japanese Press Censor in his attempts to give us the naked truth in his telegrams home, the newspaper correspondent is now fairly entitled to his revenge, and the result is a perfect avalanche of narrative and criticism. Unfortunately, the supply is out of all proportion to the demand. Much of what we read with difficulty now would have been welcomed with avidity had it appeared in the columns of the daily Press a year ago. But to-day we catch ourselves turning away with positive relief from the purely military narrative, with which, in spite of our- selves, we are already sated, to the human element introduced to us in the sentimental journeys of Mr. Maurice Baring, Lord Brooke, and Sir Ian Hamilton, and blessing such writers most for those chapters in which they tell us of everything in the wide world but the fighting.
Four of the books which lie before us cover exactly the same ground. Mr. Norregaard, Mr. Richmond Smith, Mr. James, and Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett stood side by side in the little group of war correspondents who were so carefully posted by the Japanese authorities to see what it was intended that they should see of the fighting outside Port Arthur ; together they attended the picnics and conducted tours of every description ; together they wrote telegrams at the bidding of the Press Censor. Even now, when they are at last able to break their silence to some real purpose, they have spoken at once too late as journalists and too early as historians ; while we, for our part, cannot help feeling that we would rather reserve our energies for the study of the great complete history which will assuredly be the life-work of some master- hand.
Meanwhile, however, there is room for at least one account of the great siege, and of the desperate fighting that took place for six long months, almost without a break, outside Port Arthur. Siege warfare is indeed warfare in its grimmest and most forbidding aspect, and Russian military history from Ismail to Sebastopol has many such scenes to show. The siege of Port Arthur transcends even these in horror, while to the military student it presents many novel developments, —the searchlight, the machine-gan, the twenty-eight-centi- metre howitzer with its five-hundred-pound melinite shells, the dynamite which threw entire forts into the air and lent sach awful emphasis to the revival of the hand grenade. For a clear and often graphic account of all the events in the great drama we can confidently recommend our readers to any one of these four volumes. In the matter of form and of printing each does credit to its publisher, and is abundantly supplied with maps and illustrations. Mr. Norregaard's publishers have treated him well, though they have not provided him with an index ; and while he tells his story in fewer words, he goes more directly to the business hi hand, and gives us, over and above the actual narration of the operations, a great deal of exceedingly valuable information. The military reader will especially appreciate the pen-and-ink sketches in the text.
Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett is heartily to be congratulated on his first essay in military history. He stands at an advan- tage over the generality of war correspondents by having himself seen service in the field, and he has produced what is undoubtedly the most soldierly account of the great siege. His chapter, for instance, on the organisation of the hospital services is of real military value. At the same time, his literary powers compare favourably with those of the average soldier. He seems, too, to have managed to get a much closer view of the actual fighting than some of his confreres. He tells us that "the great assaults could not have been better witnessed had they been mounted at Drury Lane. You could occupy a stall (in one of the trenches) in as close proximity to the footlights as desired. If one did not care to pay for a stall by coming under a never-ceasing rifle and • (1) The Great Siege. By B.W. NOrregaard (Correspondent of the Daily Maio. With Maps, Plans, and Illustration. London : Methuen and Co. (lie. 6d. net.] —(2) The Siege and Fall of Port Arthur. By W. Richmond Smith (Reuter's Correspondent). With a Preface by Lieutenant-General Sir W. G. Nicholson, R.C.B. London : Eveleigh Nash. [10s. 6d. net.]—(3) The Siege of Port Arthur : Records of an Rye-Witness. Ry David H. James (Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph). With Maps, Plans, and Mustrations. London : T. Fisher Unwin. D.2s. 8d. net.]—(4) Port Arthur : the Siege and Capitulation. By Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. [21s. net.]— (5) With Togo. By H. C. Seppings Wright. With -Drawings and Photographs by the Author. London : Hurst and laiw.kett.. DOA 8d. net.] artillery fire, a seat could be occupied in the dress circle on the hills behind." Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett preferred the stalls, with the consequence that he has produced a number of careful descriptions bearing upon what was perhaps the most interesting question put to the test in this great war under modern conditions,—viz., as to the effect upon formations, and, above all, upon moral, of the newest perfected weapons of destruction. Those who accompanied Marshal Oyama in Manchuria were obliged to content them- selves too often with a distant view of clouds of smoke and of long lines of men spread out over an immense front, but opportunities offered from the trenches outside Port Arthur to stand over and over again side by side with an ever-present death. Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett is a reflective as well as a descriptive writer ; more particularly do we commend to our readers his judicial summing up of the case for and against General Stossel, and his concluding chapter, which deals with the causes and the moral of the victory of Japan. As to these, perhaps he gives us the gist of the whole matter when he tells us of Colonel Teruda, who led the 1st Regiment throughout the siege, and who in his earlier days had actually fought in chain armour and carried a battleaxe!
Mr. Richmond Smith divides the great tragedy into three acts, each telling of a red butchery from which we turn saddened, and even sickened. Following on the preliminary field operations which drove the Russians back to their permanent works, Act I. is the daring attempt at open assault without siege preliminaries of any kind in August, 1904, which so nearly succeeded, and hence is distinctly justifiable as a military operation. Act II. is the assault of October 30th, which attempted to set at naught all the known rules of war in the desire to celebrate the Mikado's birthday within Port Arthur, an assault which failed miserably, as it deserved. Act III.—most awful of all—inspired by the urgent need for the presence of Nogi's army in the North, is the unsuccessful general assault of November 26th, with its aftermath of underground fighting in East Kikwan and elsewhere. Then as an epilogue comes the beginning of the end in the capture of 203-Metre Hill, after eight days of continuous fighting, on December 5th, " in which thousands were sacrificed, because it was abso- lutely essential that there should be an immediate victory to take away the sting of the last repulse and save the reputation of the army at home." The grim nature of the fighting, which steadily rose in horror and fury till it culminated in this last desperate victory, is made only too clear to us by all four writers, and we do not wish to dwell upon horrors. In particular, the sight that met their eyes upon the fatal 203-Metre Hill, pounded out of its original shape by the big howitzer shells, the ground literally strewn, not with the bodies of the fifteen thousand dead, but " with the odds and ends " of what had once been gallant soldiers, now " simply blotted out of existence by dynamite, grenades, and high explosive shells, it is almost beyond the power even of these experienced writers to describe. Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett might, indeed, have spared us the gruesome photographs with which he illustrates this part of his narra- tive, though they certainly lend force to his remark that 203-Metre Hill on the morning after its capture would have been a more convincing spot for a Peace Conference than the House in the Wood. Mr. Richmond Smith suggests a doubt whether, if such awful missile-weapons have established themselves for good in spite of the Geneva Convention, " any civilised troops will be found willing to engage in war at all "; while Mr. NOtTegaard asks how long a heroism which no European troops could hope to emulate can continue to go hand in hand with the high civilisation of modern Japan.
In the introduction which he contributes to Mr. James's volume General Nicholson, like the true sapper that he is, advances some very excellent arguments in support of his contention that the retention of Port Arthur by the Russians was not the grave strategical blunder that the Times Military Correspondent and others hold it to have been. We do not intend seriously to broach this burning question within the limits of a review ; but there is food for reflec- tion in the undoubted fact of which General Nicholson reminds us, that the hundred and fifty thousand Japanese troops who in consequence of the existence of Port Arthur were retained by only fifty thousand Russians in the Liaotung Peninsula might well have turned Liaoyang into a Sedan, as
they undoubtedly turned Mukden into a Leipzig. Mr. James and Mr. Smith hold that this "first-class impregnable fortress," over which phrase the brilliant writer in the Times has made such sport, was "disgracefully surrendered" long before there was any necessity for such a step, by the General whom the greatest military Sovereign in Europe hastened somewhat rashly to honour. Mr. Norregaard is less emphatic on the point; the surrender, he considers, was "scarcely justifiable," but "to some degree excusable." He shows how rapidly discouragement and collapse followed the taking of 203-Metre Hill, but concurs in attributing this col- lapse mainly to the death of the heroic Kondrachenko. "The siege of Port Arthur," he writes, "is a grim tragedy, but the most tragic part is that it was not allowed to end as a tragedy." Mr. James further reminds us that at the outbreak of hostilities the defences of Port Arthur were in so unpre- pared a condition, and the garrison itself so weak (a bare three thousand men, according to General Stossell, that Oku's second army could have easily rushed the place in a few days, as Nanshan was rushed, had Oku pressed on immediately after that engagement. But he tells us that the Japanese were prevented from providing the " fortress incubus" school with so complete a confirmation of their theories, first by the action of the Vladivostok cruisers in sinking all the original consignment of heavy guns in the ' Hitachi Maru,' and next by that very southward movement under Stackelberg which the sceptic of the Times has so ruthlessly derided. And it is obvious that the normal conditions of naval mobility ought properly to have brought the Baltic Fleet to Port Arthur long before the Pacific Squadron was ruined, while no patriotic Russian could have anticipated the miserable appearance that it made when it did actually arrive in the Tsushima Straits. The magnet which held Nogi's army to Port Arthur was not the fortress only ; it was far more the Russian squadron which it sheltered, and, this once destroyed, the fortress surrendered. Are our own naval fortresses more secure against a hostile raid in the early days of mobilisation ?
We mean no disparagement of Mr. Seppings Wright's eminently readable account of his experiences with the blockading fleet when we say that he provides us with a much-needed comic relief to the hideous story of the fighting on land. Not that there were not naval tragedies too. The fortitude with which one of them, the sinking of the precious Yashima,' was concealed from the whole world is perhaps the greatest of all testimonies to the heroic resolution of the Japanese Navy. But Mr. Wright's breezy appreciations of his messmates of the Japanese Navy, his capital photographs, and his racy sketches seem to persuade us that with the sailors of Japan, as with sailors all the world over, there is danger and daring enough, but never one dark cloud in the sky. He does not appear to feel, like Sir Ian Hamilton, that our allies are an alien, and, what is more, an inscrutable, race. But then, unlike Sir Ian, Mr. Wright was an adept with the chop-sticks and liked his rice amazingly well. He writes that the changed diet cured him of indigestion, a complaint which is unknown in Japan, and so confirms General Nicholson's interesting reflection that the extraordinary absence of enteric among the Japanese soldiers may be very possibly attributable to their vegetarian diet, and to those copious draughts of hot water of which General Hamilton partook, indeed, but not with enthusiasm.
What Mr. Seppings Wright has to tell us he tells right well. He is particularly happy in his delineation of national characteristics. He gives us many illustrations, for instance, of the Japanese love of Nature. A tiny garden in the ward-room of every ship, an amazing enthusiasm amongst the sailors for the making of artificial flowers and for the painting of fans, are companions to Sir Ian's tale of a whole army that stood still to listen to the nightingale ; while our British Admiralty might certainly do worse than seek for the inspiration which gave Eastern Cloud,' Morning Mist,' Sudden Shower,' Spring Rain,' as names to Japanese torpedo-boat destroyers. Here, again, is the letter of a Japanese daughter to her gallant father in Togo's fleet :—" Dear papa, I love you so, but if you stop much longer I shall forget your face. Look at the moon, so that your face may be reflected in it, and I can look too, and see you." East, no doubt, is East, and West is West, but there
are many incidents which show that there was an eminently human side even to the desperate, fighters in the Liaotung Peninsula, and so give the lie to the poet's dictum that "never the twain shall meet."
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