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WAYS AND MEANS 167
with bullets and shells flying about them, and with
the Russian surprise parties continually making
bayonet attacks or blowing them to pieces with
hand grenades ;
and always, all the time, the sight
of the wounded being carried away, and the dead,
sewn up in rice-bags, being taken to their last
resting-place. No, they did not like it, and they
did not understand it, and the majority of the
officers shared their feelings.
“ I had to show them this,” said General Nogi
to me at a luncheon party at his headquarters,
pointing to an old Russian pickaxe, worn down
at both points nearly to the eye, “in order to make
them see by what means the Russians had been
able to beat us, and to make them understand
that there was only one way of getting even
dig, dig, dig, as the Russians had digged, and,”
he added smiling,
“
I think I made them see it,
and swallow it too, though it seemed a rather
bitter pill for them.”
It would have been better for the Japanese
now, and still more so later, if they had fully
realized this lesson and carried their saps right
up to and into the positions they desired to take.
But here, again, they were too sanguine and in
too great a hurry. Of course, the nearer the
saps were carried up to the enemy’s positions, the
more difficult the work became and the greater
the losses. The men got Irritated. They wished
to push on and have done with it. The forts
seemed so near, only an easy stone’s throw away
why not cover this small intervening space at a
run and storm the positions, as they had done
time and again ;
lose the men they must lose in
an honest assault, where each could make a fight
for it, and where even death would be glorious ;
instead of dribbling the men out, day after day.
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