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THE SIEGE OF PORT ARTHUR
At my last visit all this was changed. Away
were the dashing officers, away, alas, those with
the soft eyes. The former I saw again six months
after, some stretched out, stiff and cold, on the
bleak hill-sides of Port Arthur, others as prisoners
of war or in hospital ;
the latter I did not see
till the entry of the victorious Japanese army into
Port Arthur. It was difficult to recognize in the
demure, soberly dressed damsels with the Red
Cross badges round their arms the bright butter-
flies of a year ago. The whole gay throng had
disappeared, and instead the streets were full of
loud-voiced, light-hearted Chinese coolies and
square-jawed, business-looking Japanese soldiers.
From two different sides long columns were
coming into the town,—from the port an inter-
minable succession of clumsy Chinese carts,
heavily laden with commissariat stuff, and detach-
ment after detachment of fresh troops for the
front ;
from the railway station a never-ceasing
stream of sick and wounded for the hospitals,
carried on stretchers by stalwart Chinese
coolies.
As Dalny was built with the idea that it should
be the principal trading centre in the Russian Far
Eastern possessions, so Port Arthur was to be the
principal military and naval station in the newly-
acquired realm. But it must be remembered that
the fortress of Port Arthur, as it stood on the day
of the outbreak of the war, and even as it was
four months later, when the Japanese besieging
army were standing outside its gates, was only in
embryo. In the Russian scheme of defence the
fortress of Port Arthur formed only an integral,
though certainly a most vital, part. Their idea
was to make the whole Kuang-tung peninsula an
immense fortified military camp, and the official
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