Part 15
As a matter of fact, Kuroki was only waiting for Oku and Nodzu to join him in the great concentration upon Liaoyang under Oyama. This battle was planned to finish the Russians in the field, as Togo was to do at sea, and Nogi in the Fortress. Roughly, the Japanese now stretched across the peninsula from the mouth of the Liao to the mouth of the Yalu--a quarter of a million men with eyes on Liaoyang--Kuroki on the right, Nodzu in the centre, Oku on the left. Oyama polished his boots and spurs in Tokyo, preparing to take his rice and tea in the field as soon as it was heated to the proper temperature.
Late in June, Kuroki awoke and began to spread like a gentle flow of lava, filling the hither defiles of the great Shanalin range, making ready to take the stiff and dreadful passes which the Russians had fortified as the outer protection of Liaoyang. Right here it must be interpolated that Bingley had cut Kuroki for Nodzu’s fourth army a few days before, when the two forces had touched wings for a day. The “Horse-killer” was scarcely gone before Kuroki encountered one of the toughest and pluckiest foes of his stupendous campaign, General Kellar, who gave him terrific fights at Fenshui and Motien passes, and tried to take them back after they were lost. Again at Yansu, a month later, the doughty Kellar disputed the last mountain-trail to the city, and Kuroki had to kill him to get through.... The army was growing accustomed to the civilians, and these were days of service for the correspondents. It was given them now to see the great fighting-machine of Kuroki--that huge bulk of flying power--lose its pomp and gloss and adjust itself to the field. It faded into the brown of the mountains, took on a vulpine leanness and a nerveless, soulless complacence, like nothing else in the world. Food was king; fighting was the big-game sport; toil was toil, and death was not the least of benefits. It was now August, and Kuroki’s part in the Liaoyang preliminaries finished. A month later the battle was on.... In the gray morning light of the twenty-ninth of August, the sound of distant batteries boomed over the Shanalin peaks to the ears of the correspondents. Finacune leaped up with a cry:
“Liaoyang is on! And what are we doing away off here?”
“Smokin’ our pipes in the mountings,” Feeney answered huskily, reaching for a match, “‘an’ breathin’ the mornin’ cool.’”
“We’re lost,” Finacune declared bitterly. “I can hear the London experts howling, ‘Where’s Kuroki and his lost army?’”
“Lost, is it? Hush! Come near me, young man. We’re lost, but destined to appear in good time,” Feeney whispered. “I’ll bet you an oyster-stew to a dill-pickle that we are the flankers. We’re relegated off here to cross the river when the moon’s right, and to bore in at the railroad behind the city, while Oyama and Kuropatkin are locking horns in front.”
Old Feeney, wise in war, had hit upon the strategy before the others; although any expert familiar with the terrain would thus have planned the taking of the city. That night Kuroki camped on the south side of the Taitse; and on the morning of the second day following was across with seventy thousand men. This by the grace of a corps of insignificant-looking engineers, busy little brown chaps who worked a miracle of pontooning--conquered a deep and rushing river without wetting a foot in Kuroki’s command. There had been rains, too, and between the showers, far salvos of cannon rode in from the west on the damp, jerky winds.
There is no place so good as here to drop a conventional figure of the Liaoyang field. The strategy of the battle is simple as a play in straight foot-ball. Japanese and Russian linesmen are engaged in a furious struggle south and southeast of the city. Imagine Kuroki, the Japanese half-back, breaking loose with the ball and dashing around the right end (crossing the Taitse River) and boring in behind toward the Russian goal--the railroad. This threatens the Russian communications. If the Russian full-back, Orloff, cannot defend the goal, the whole Russian line will be jerked up and out of the city to prevent being cut off from St. Petersburg. This leaves the field and the city to the Japanese. Here is the simplest possible straight line sketch of the city, river, railroad, and the position of the fighters when the battle began; also, shown by the arrow, the sweep of Kuroki’s now-famous end-run. [See drawing on next page.]
The midnight which ended August found the intrepid flanker launched straight at the Russian railroad at the point called the Yentai Collieries, nine miles behind the city.
“We’re locked tight in the Russian holdings this minute,” Finacune whispered, as he rode beside the grim veteran.
“Where did you think we were--on some church steps?” Feeney asked.
It looked a dark and dangerous game to the dapper little man. The lure of action, so strong at Home, often turns cold at the point of realization. Finacune had the nerves which are the curse of civilization, and he felt the chill white hand of fear creeping along these sensitive ganglia just now in the dark.
“I haven’t a thing against Kuropatkin--only I hope he is a fool for a night,” he observed presently. “Somehow, I don’t feel cheerful about the fool part. He _must_ hear us tramping on his back door-steps this way. Why can’t he spare enough men from the city to come out here and sort of outflank the flanker?”
“That’s just his idea,” Feeney replied, “but don’t forget that Oyama will keep him so dam’ busy below that it will be hard for him to match us man for man and still hold on. However, remember he’s got the position, and he won’t need to match the Japanese--quite.”
As a matter of fact, Kuropatkin’s far-flung antennæ had followed Kuroki well. The Russian chief, knowing the strength of his front position on the city, had determined to slip back and crush Kuroki with an overwhelming force, leaving only two corps of Siberians, under Zurubaieff, to hold off Nodzu and Oku from the inner defenses of Liaoyang. General Orloff, who was in command at the Yentai Collieries, where Kuroki’s flanking point was aimed, was under orders to attack the Japanese in flank at the moment Kuropatkin’s main force appeared to hit the Japanese in full. There was the constant roar of big guns in Orloff’s ears in that dawning of September first--a rainy dawn. Also his own troops were moving along the railroad. Another thing, there had been a vodka-train broken into the night before by his own men.
Orloff thought he saw Kuropatkin coming, and set out prematurely. Kuroki was concealed in the fields of ripe millet, and turned to the work of slaughter with much enthusiasm, wondering at the weakness of the enemy. This slaughter of Orloff, which lost the battle for the Russians, Feeney and Finacune saw.
“There’s eighteen burnt matches in your coat pocket, my young friend,” said Feeney, “and your pipe would light better if you put some smokin’ in it--in the bowl, y’know. For what do you save the burnt matches?”
Finacune grinned shyly. “Wait till the fire starts--I’ll be warmer. I’m always like this at first--like the little boy who tried to cure bees with rheumatism.”
“Something’s wrong with the Russians,” Feeney declared in low excitement. “We should all be dead by this time--if they are going to whip Kuroki. Oh, war--war is a devil of a thing!” he added flippantly. “We’re crushing the farmers’ grain.”
“Shut up, you fire-eater. Haven’t you any reverence? I’m preparing myself for death.”
That instant they heard a low command from an unseen Japanese officer, and a long drawn trumpet-cry. The Japanese leaped up from the grain. All was a tangle. Feeney, grabbing Finacune’s arm, seized the moment to break from Major Inuki and the others, and rushed forward to the open with the infantry.
“Come on,” he said excitedly. “We’re foot-loose! Come on, my little angel brother, and play tag with these children!... ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers!’”
Never a wild rose of boyhood smelled half so sweet to Finacune as the ancient soil of Asia that moment, but he was whipped forward by certain emotions, to say nothing of Feeney and the avalanche of Japanese. They reached the edge of the grain and met the first gust of Orloff’s rifle steel. Down they went for the volleys, and that moment perceived a most amazing trick of a shell. A little knot of ten Japanese were running forward just before them when there was a sudden whistling shriek. The ten were lost for a second in a chariot of fire. When it cleared only one Japanese remained standing.
“That Russian gunner bowled a pretty spare,” grimly observed Feeney. “Come, get up, lad. The volleys are over.”
“Not this Finacune. I’m not short-sighted. I’m going to hold fast to this sweet piece of mainland just now. Besides----”
The little man burst into a nervous laugh and glanced at his foot. Then he stiffened into a sitting posture. Feeney looked him over. His hat was gone, scalp bleeding, his shirt-sleeve burst open as if it had been wet brown paper, and the sole of his left shoe torn away clean.
“Queer about that shrapnel,” he mumbled. “I’m interested in shrapnel anyway. I haven’t got any more toe-nails on that foot than a bee.”
Meanwhile, Kuroki was crushing the Orloff member with a force destined to wreck the whole Russian nervous-system. Out of the grain he poured torrents of infantry which smote the Russian column in a score of places at once.
“Did you ever put your ear to the ground during a battle, Feeney?” the other asked wistfully. “It sounds aw’fly funny--funnier than sea-shells. Let’s try.”
Feeney did not answer. He was watching the disorder which swept over the Russian lines. It had changed into a deluge tossing back toward the Collieries. There was a fury even in the clouds of powder smoke that seemingly had nothing to do with the winds. They darted, stretched, and tore apart from the whipped-line with some devilish volition of their own.
“There’ll be excitement presently,” the veteran remarked.
The other had risen and was clutching his arm, his bare foot lifted from the ground. He was properly stimulated by the action, but kept up a more or less incessant chattering, his brain working as if driven by cocaine.
“Ex--excitement! This is a sedative, I believe. Let’s lie down, you bald-headed fatalist----”
“Don’t dare to. Look at your foot. Dangerous below. Ricochets hug the turf.... Livin’ God! they’re going to throw out cavalry upon us! They’re going to heave cavalry against Kuroki’s point! Bloom up, little man. Here’s where the most nerveless of the white races smite the most nervous of the yellow--and on horses!”
“I’m bloomin’ on one foot,” said Finacune.
Kuropatkin, apprised of Orloff’s error, was thundering his divisions up the railroad at double-time toward the Collieries, but, despairing to reach the blundering Orloff in time, had ordered his cavalry railway-guards to charge the enemy.... They came on now with mediæval grandeur, a dream of chivalry, breaking through gaps of Orloff’s disordered infantry--to turn the point of the Japanese flanker. Splendid squadrons!... A curse dropped from Feeney’s gray lips.
“They’re going to murder the cavalry to put red blood into that rotten foot-outfit,” he said.
Finacune’s face was colorless. He did not answer. The sound of bullets in the air was like the winging of a plague of locusts. Often the two huddled together, allowing a gasping battalion to leap past them toward the front. Kuroki was breaking his command into fragments and rolling them forward like swells of the sea. His front-rankers dropped to their knees to fire; then dashed forward a little way to repeat--all with inhuman precision. Feeney’s field-glass brought out their work. In a mile-long dust-cloud, the Russian cavalry thundered forward like a tornado.
The Cossacks swept into Kuroki’s zone of fire. Feeney heard his companion breathe fast, and turned his head. The _Word_ man was staring into the heart of the Cossack charge, his fears forgotten, fascinated unto madness. The earth roared with hoofs, and the air was rent with guns. On came the cavalry until it reached Kuroki’s point and halted it; but upon the Cossacks now from the countless Japanese skirmish-lines were hurled waves of flying metal--waves that dashed over the Russian horsemen as the sundered seas rushed together upon Pharaoh’s hosts.
“It’s like a biograph,” came from Finacune.
Kuroki was checked; his van ridden down. The Russian horse, cumbered with its dead, and taking an enfilading fire from half the Japanese command, was now ordered to retire. Only the skeletons of the glorious squadrons obeyed. Kuroki was stopped indeed--stopped to thrust an impediment aside. He rose from his knees, fastened a new point to his plow, and bored in toward the railway upon the strewn and trampled grain-fields. Already the hospital corps was gathering in the endless sheaves of wounded.
“One can tell the dead by the way they lie,” Finacune said vaguely. “They lie crosswise and spoil the symmetry.”
Orloff was steadied a trifle by the cavalry sacrifice, and turned an erratic but deadly fire upon the Japanese.... At this instant Major Inuki pounced upon the two correspondents and carried them back toward headquarters. He made very many monkey-sounds; was quite unintelligible from excitement; in fact, at the thought of these two being suffered to see so much alone. If their heads had been cameras, straightway would they have been smashed....
Practically they had seen it all. Kuroki’s work for that September day was done. Shortly after the retirement of the cavalry, he received a dispatch from Oyama saying that Kuropatkin had ordered a general retreat. Kuroki’s end-run had won the battle for Oyama; Orloff had lost it for Kuropatkin. The latter, perceiving the havoc at the Collieries when he came up with his big force, decided not to attack the victorious flanker. Instead, he set out for Mukden, and commanded Zurubaieff, the rear-guard, to pull up out of the city, cross the Taitse, and burn his bridges behind him.
* * * * *
“He’s quite a little ornament-merchant, this Kuroki,” Finacune observed that afternoon, holding a very sore foot in his hands.
“He’d put out hell--he’s too cold to burn,” replied Feeney.
EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER
BINGLEY BREAKS AWAY FROM THE CAMP OF THE CIVILIANS TO WATCH “THE LEAN-LOCKED RANKS GO ROARING DOWN TO DIE”
While Feeney and Finacune were flanking with Kuroki, the “Horse-killer” was with Nodzu, whose business it was to charge the Russian centre before Liaoyang. Bingley had not shifted commands without a good reason. He had made up his mind to get to an uncensored cable after the battle was over, and Nodzu was nearer the outlet of the war-zone. Moreover, it was said that the civilian contingent with Nodzu was not subjected to the smothering system, quite to the same extent as that with the flanker, Kuroki.
Nodzu, himself, did not appeal to Bingley. He seemed like a nice, polite little person of the sort the “Horse-killer” had observed serving behind curio-counters in Tokyo. His voice was light, and his beard wasn’t iron-gray. Bingley remarked that a marooned painter would have a hard time gathering a pastelle-brush from Nodzu’s beard, and he noted with contempt that the general spoke drawing-room Japanese to his staff. The generals whom Bingley respected, roared. They not only split infinitives, but they forked them with flame.
All three officers under Field-Marshal Oyama--Kuroki flanking on the right, Nodzu bearing in on the Russian centre, and Oku pushing up the railroad on the left--had to fight their way to the positions from which the three finally took the city. Many lesser towns and some very difficult passes were picked up on the way. For instance, Oku, the left blade of the crescent, who was being watched by the chief male figure in this narrative (as Bingley was watching Nodzu), changed the flags at Kaiping, Tashekao, and Newchwang on the way, Chinese towns of filth and fatness; and shoved before him in an indignant turkey-trot Generals Stackelberg and Zurubaieff.
Baking hot weather, and Liaoyang ahead! Nogi was thundering behind at the fortress of Port Arthur; Togo was a red demon in smoky crashing seas; blood of the Bear already smeared the Sun flag, and the blood-flower was in bloom in Manchuria.
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.
He glanced at his watch, at last, and at his field outfit, which was all packed and in order. Then he slept until dawn. No one slept after that, since Nodzu was up with the first light, like a boy with a new cannon on the morning of the Fourth. Bingley was missed at breakfast. His Korean coolies knew nothing, except that they had been ordered to take care of the Bingley property and wait for orders. The “Horse-killer” had made a clean departure with a good mount and nothing but his saddle-bags. Still, no one fathomed his audacity. Confidently, it was expected that he would be returned in short order by some of the Japanese commanders who happened to read the civilian insignia flaring upon his sleeve. As a matter of fact, Bingley quickly would have been overhauled had he not brooded so long and so well upon the time. The middle Japanese army was too busy that morning to think of one daring civilian.
Bingley’s plan was this: To watch what he could of the battle, unfettered, making his way gradually westward behind Oku until the end, or until such time as he mastered the color and saw the end; then to ride alone down the railroad, nearly to Fengmarong; there to leave his horse, cross the Liao River, and travel on foot down to Wangcheng. He planned to catch the Chinese Eastern at Wangcheng and make the day’s journey to Shanhaikwan beyond the Wall, where the Japanese could not censor his message. In a word, Bingley’s plan was to stake all on reaching a free cable before any other man, and to put on that cable the first and greatest story of the greatest battle of the war.
That was a day in which Bingley truly lived. A mile behind Nodzu’s reserve, he spurred his horse down into a tight darkened ravine, and tethered the beast long to crop the pale grass blades thinly scattered throughout the sunless crevasse. Marking well the topography of the place, so that he could find it again in anything but darkness, Bingley moved back toward the valleys of action. Nodzu was hammering the impregnable Russian position before the city from the hills, and charging down at intervals great masses of infantry to hold the main Russian force in their intrenchments before the city, and thus to prevent the Russian general from sending back a large enough portion of his army to crush or outflank the Japanese flanker.
Noon found Bingley still at large and across a big valley, now almost empty of troops. He was forced to cross one more ridge to command the battle-picture. This required a further hour, and he sat down to rest upon the shoulder of a lofty, thickly timbered hill which overlooked the city for which the nations met--a huge, sprawled Chinese town, lost for moments at a time in the smoke-fog. The river behind was obscured entirely; still, the placing of the whole battle array was cleared to him in a moment. All his mapping and brooding had helped him marvelously to this quick grasp of the field. He wished that he could cable the picture of the city, the river, the railroad, the hills, just as he saw them now--so that London might also see through Bingley eyes. As for the rest--Nodzu’s great thundering guns and his phantom armies moving below in the white powder-reek--he could write that....
“But I’ve got to get a strip of real action--I’ve got to see the little beasts go,” he muttered at length. “It’s a long chance, but I’ve got to get a touch of the blood-end--to do it right. It is as necessary as the lay of the land.”
And down he went, forgetting fear and passing time, even during certain moments, forgetting the outer world that would cry, “Bingley! Bingley!” when he was through.... Deeper and deeper he sank into the white mist of smoke which five minutes before had been torn by flame and riven with rifle crashes.
It was a moment of lull between Nodzu’s infantry charges. A land current of air cleared the low distance. The southern line of intrenched Russian infantry looked less than a mile away. Behind them, the land was pitted and upheaved with defenses to the very wall of the city, having the look, as Bingley observed, as the wind swiftly cleared away the smoke, of the skin of a small-pox convalescent. There was no sign of life in the Russian works, but his quick eye marked that shrapnel was emplaced on the higher mounds.... Had he lived a thousand years for the single purpose of viewing a battle--hundreds of acres of embattled thousands straining in unbridled devilment; a valley soaked and strewn with life essences, yet swarming with more raw material for murder--he could not have judged his advent better. It was the thirtieth of August--the day that Nodzu and Oku began their un-Christly sacrifices to hold Kuropatkin in the city and in front, while Kuroki flanked.
Suddenly--it was like a tornado, prairie fire, and stampede rolled into one--Nodzu of the pastelle-brush beard called up his swarm from thicket, hummock, gulley, ditch, from the very earth, and launched it forward against the first blank ridge of the Russians. This brown cyclone tore over Bingley of the _Thames_ and across the ruffled valley. The “Horse-killer” sat in awe. There was not yet a shot. The Russian trenches had the look of desertion.