The North Pacific

AT THE CZAR'S COMMAND

Ivan Ivanovitch lived on the outskirts of a small village about one hundred miles north-east of Moscow. Like his father and grandfather and many generations before, he was a moujik, a peasant, with this difference: they had been serfs; Ivan was freeborn. His father now owned the hut in which he lived with his family of wife and three children – two girls, besides Ivan; he also owned a small patch of land, and an acre or two of tillable soil had been allotted to him when the serfs were emancipated, with a condition of slow payment to the Government, a few roubles at a time.

Up to the autumn of 1903 Ivan worked in the fields, bare-headed and blue-bloused, beside his father. The girls worked, too, for the father was lame and needed all the help he could get. He had leaned upon Ivan more and more as the years went by and his son grew from boyhood to sturdy young manhood. Every evening the family knelt before the crucifix on the wall of the living-room, and prayed for themselves, their country, and their "Little Father," the Czar, who spent all his time in far-off St. Petersburg, they were sure, in thinking of his "children," the people of the great Empire, and loving them and planning for their good. In return they almost worshipped him, as they did the figure on the crucifix.

"Soon you will have to serve as a soldier, Ivan," said his father one day. The older man had a great tawny beard and mane of hair like a lion's; Ivan resembled him more and more.

"That is true, my father."

"You are nearly of age."

"True, my father."

"But," put in his mother anxiously, "surely our boy will not have to fight?"

"Nay, Matouschka," said Ivan tenderly but manfully, "if the Czar commands, my life is his!"

Two months later he reported at the barracks at Moscow, and was duly enrolled in the 11th Regiment of Infantry, Third Division, First Reserves, of the Imperial Army.

At first the novelty was amusing, and Ivan enjoyed the companionship of his comrades in the ranks, the smart uniform and big fur cap, the music of the band, when they paraded in the great square and the crowds gathered to see. But the drill, drill, drill became tedious, and it was with rather a sense of relief that in the latter part of the following January he heard that the regiment was to leave Moscow for the Far East.

There was no time to say good-bye to his parents, nor could he have paid his fare to and from the village had permission been given. So Ivan took out his little brass cross, his "ikon," which, like every other Russian soldier, he carried in his bosom, and murmured a prayer for father and sisters and the little mother. Then he buckled on his belt, adjusted his clumsy cap, shouldered his musket and was ready.

"Where are we going, comrade?" he asked of his next neighbour in the ranks, as they marched to the railway station.

"I do not know. They say there is to be war."

"War – against whom?"

"The Japanese."

"Japanese? Who are they? Are they savages or white like us?"

"I can't tell you, Ivan. We shall know when we see them."

"Why do we fight against them? Where do they live?"

But his comrade could only shrug his shoulders. He had not the least idea of the answer to either question; nor had any man in the company, only a half-dozen of whom could read or write.

"It is the Czar's command."

Silently they plodded on, the snow whirling about them as they marched. Here and there a knot of people cheered them. This was pleasant. Ivan felt that he was really a soldier. When a lump came into his throat at the thought of the little hut in the lonely white waste far to the north, he gulped it down and broke into a hoarse laugh which brought down a reprimand from the nearest officer.

The troops were packed into a long transport train like cattle. When the cars stopped or started suddenly they fell against each other. Some swore and even struck out, but most were as mild and phlegmatic as the cows and sheep whose places they had taken. Ivan was of this sort.

"Never mind," he said to a man who trod upon his foot; "it is nothing. My foot is iron"; and when he was thrown against a neighbour: "Ah, what a blockhead I am! Will you not hit me, to pay the score?"

Most of the soldiers said nothing. As verst after verst of desolate snowy landscape was left behind they stood or squatted in the cars, silent, uncomplaining. Why should they find fault with cold and hunger and fatigue? It was the Czar's command. The Little Father in his palace was caring for them. It was theirs not to complain, but to obey.

There were many delays on the ill-constructed, overcrowded Siberian Railway, the black cord that stretched across a continent to Port Arthur and Vladivostok, seven thousand miles away. But whether it was seventy miles or seven thousand the rank and file of the army hardly knew or cared. Cold, hungry, stiff from constrained position, they bore all privations with calmness and even a sort of jovial good-humour. At night every soldier fumbled under his furs and heavy winter coat for his ikon, and his bearded lips murmured the sacred Name.

At length the rugged shores of Lake Baikal were reached, in Farther Siberia. Here there was another halt, for the railway itself came to an end, and the troops were ordered out of the train at early dawn.

"How can we go on?" asked Ivan stupidly. Before him a white plain stretched away to the horizon line. To the right were mountains; to the left, mountains. The ice-bound surface of the lake was swept by a bitter gale, which heaped up huge drifts and flung them away again, like a child at play. Behind the regiment of fur-capped soldiers, huddled on the frozen shore, was home; before them, what seemed an Arctic sea. The snow fell heavily, and drifted around their feet. "How can we go on?" asked Ivan; and a subaltern, breathing through his icy moustache, replied: "I do not know, private, but we must advance. It is the Czar's command."

When Russia, determined to establish a port on the open sea, though it were thousands of miles from her capital, built the great Trans-Siberian Railway, she progressed rapidly with her fragile, light-rail, single-track road until she came to Lake Baikal. Here Nature had placed what might well be deemed an impossible obstruction: a huge inland lake four hundred miles in length, eighteen hundred feet deep, bordered with mountains, whose sheer granite cliffs rose from the water to a height of fifteen hundred feet, and in their turn were overshadowed by snow-capped peaks. The lake at this point is forty miles wide. No bridge could span its storm-swept surface, no tunnel could be driven beneath its sombre depths. How was the obstacle to be surmounted? A weaker nation would have given up the task, as the French tired of working at the Panama Canal; Russia, ponderous, tireless, determined, almost irresistible, moved on. In the science of Physics, the momentum of a moving body is thus analysed and expressed: M = m × v. In other words, it equals the mass of the body multiplied by its velocity. If either factor be increased, the momentum becomes correspondingly greater. When Russia moves, the velocity is slight, but the mass is enormous. When the soldier, in the time-worn anecdote, tried to stop with his foot the slowly rolling spent cannon-ball, it snapped his leg like a pipe-stem. The nation that opposes Russia must itself be of iron mould, or it will snap. Lake Baikal was a trifle, a mere incident to the civil engineers who laid out the Trans-Siberian Railway.

In the summer-time huge steam ferry-boats plied from shore to shore, transferring passengers and freight from the western to the eastern or Trans-Baikal section. From November to April the lake is frozen over, but during at least half of that time enormous ice-breakers, like the heaviest ocean-going tug-boats, crashed through the ice and kept open a canal from side to side.

These were temporary expedients. The engineers meanwhile had not been idle. They attacked the cliffs bordering the southern end of the lake, and began cutting a path through the solid rock for advancing Russia. Twenty-seven tunnels were to be bored, and have since been completed. While Ivan waited by the shore a dull boom came now and then to his ear, from the blasting. It was the relentless, unfaltering tread of Russia's iron heel.

But other means had to be provided, in that terrible winter of 1903, for the passage of troops and supplies, for although the great mass of soldiers did not understand, their leaders and the counsellors of state in St. Petersburg knew there was urgent need. A railroad was begun upon the ice itself, and before March was in actual operation. A thousand feet of water gloomed beneath the thin ice bridge. Once or twice there was an accident – a locomotive went through, or a few cars, and, incidentally, a few human beings. This was nothing. "Forward, my men! It is the Czar's command!"

The ice railway not yet being complete, there was but one way to cross Lake Baikal – by horse-power or on foot. High officials and favoured travellers secured sledges; the main body of infantry, including Ivan's regiment, having hastily swallowed a breakfast of army rations, set out on the march across the forty miles of ice plain, at "fatigue step." The bands were forbidden to play, lest the rhythmic tread of the soldiers, instinctively keeping time to the music, should bring too great and concentrated strain upon the ice.

Before they were half a league from shore the wind pounced upon its new playthings; it blew upon their sides, their backs, and their faces. It pelted them with ice-drops, with whirling masses of snow. They leaned forward and plodded on, unmurmuring. It roared like a cataract, and howled like wolf-packs; the air was so filled with drift that each man simply followed his file-leader, with no idea of the direction of the march, the van being guided by telegraph-poles set in the ice at short intervals of space. Hands and feet became numb; beards were fringed with icicles; the men in the disordered ranks slipped and stumbled against one another. With the mercury 23° below zero, and a northerly gale, hurled down the entire four hundred miles of unbroken expanse of the lake, the cold was frightful.

Ivan turned his head stiffly to mumble something to his neighbour in the ranks. He was no longer there. The subaltern who had answered him on the shore was also missing. Like scores of others he had wandered off the line of march, to fall and die unseen.

Ivan bent his head to a fierce blast, muttering "Courage, comrades!" No one replied to him as he staggered uncertainly onward. "Courage, comrades!" shouted Ivan again. His voice was lost in the ceaseless roar of the gale. Ivan peered out from under the mask of ice which had formed across his eyes, from his shaggy brows to his moustache. No one was near him. He was alone with the storm.

It seemed an easy thing to lie down in the snow and go to sleep. It would be a joy merely to drop the heavy musket. Nobody knew where he was; the lake would swallow him up, and who would be the wiser? Ivan halted a moment, pondering in his dull way. Suddenly he remembered. That would be disobedience of orders. His officer had said, "It is the Czar's command!" What madness, to think of disobeying the Little Father at St. Petersburg! The peasant-soldier gripped his breast, where the ikon lay, and, taking his course as well as he could from the direction of the wind, staggered on.

Whether it was five minutes or an hour he could not tell; but now he saw dim figures around him, plodding silently onward. Whether they were comrades of his own regiment he neither knew nor cared. He was once more, after that moment of individuality, a part of the Russian army, and moved mechanically forward with it.

The men huddled together like sheep, as they marched. When one of their number staggered aside and disappeared they closed the gap; when one fell, they stepped stiffly over him.

"Halt!"

Each man stopped by stumbling abruptly against the one before him. They asked no questions. They remained standing, as they had moved, by sheer inertia, letting the butts of their muskets rest on the ice.

The column had halted by a rest-house, marking half-way across the lake. A few officials of highest rank, a newspaper man or two, half a dozen merchant travellers with special passes, refreshed themselves with soup and steaming tea. A steady stream of open sleighs passed slowly by the silent, immovable column. The troops were fed where they stood, without shelter from the fierce blast and whirling snow.

Soon the order came down the line, "Forward!"

Once more the fearful march across the ice was resumed. At long intervals there were more halts, when tea was served; but the cold increased. The men now began to suffer less. Some of them hoarsely roared out a snatch of song; these soon dropped or wandered away. When the winter storm of Siberia first assaults it is brutal in its blows, its piercing thrusts, its agonising rack-torment of cold. Gradually it becomes less rude and more dangerous. Its wild shriek of rage becomes a crooning cradle-song; it strokes away the anguish from the knotted joints of hand and foot and limb. It no longer repels, it invites.

When the long column of staggering, ice-covered forms reached the eastern shore of the lake its numbers had lessened by five hundred, who would never face the unknown enemies of the Far East. Ivan was among the survivors. His huge frame, his iron constitution, his allegiance to the Czar, had carried him through.

He found his company half a verst ahead, and as night fell he joined a group of grim figures around a blazing camp-fire. Tea was made and served out, with regular army rations. The men's drawn faces relaxed. They warmed their half-frozen limbs. Rough jokes passed. The terrors of the lake-crossing were forgotten. "On to Harbin!" they roared out in chorus, as their colonel passed. "Long live the Czar!"

CHAPTER X.

THE FIRST BLOW

On the evening of February 8th a fleet of dark-hulled ships moved silently westward across the Yellow Sea. In the harbour of Port Arthur lay the pride of the Russian navy, most of the ships riding peacefully at anchor in the outer roads. They comprised the battle-ships Petropavlovsk (flagship), Perseviet, Czarevitch, Retvizan, and Sebastopol, and the cruisers Novik, Boyarin, Bayan, Diana, Pallada, Askold, and Aurora. Of the officers, many were on shore, enjoying the hospitalities of the port and drinking the health of the Czar. The crews were below decks, or smoking idly and talking, in the low gutturals of their language, of home and friends far away. Secure in their sense of their mighty domain and the power that reached from the Baltic to the Pacific, they sang snatches of rude forecastle songs, or joked and laughed at the prospects of a war with the Japanese, "those little monkeys," who dared dispute even in mild diplomacy with the Great Empire. And as they laughed, and the smoke curled upward from their bearded lips, and the little waves of the peaceful harbour lapped softly against the huge floating forts, the black hulls from the east crept nearer, through the darkness.

Nine years had elapsed since the Japanese had invaded Korea and Manchuria. In 1895, victor over the Chinese, firmly established with his troops on the main land, with his fleet riding in the harbour of Port Arthur, which his army had taken by storm, the Mikado had been compelled by the powerful combination of Russia, France, and Germany to give up the material fruits of his victory, and Japan, too exhausted to fight for her rights, withdrew sullenly to her island Empire.

Three years later Russia obtained from China a twenty-five years' lease of Port Arthur, which she claimed she needed "for the due protection of her navy in the waters of North China." Her next move was to secure right to build the Manchurian Railway, connecting her two Pacific ports, Vladivostock and Port Arthur, with her western capital. She had at last reached the open sea. Vladivostock, at the south-eastern extremity of her own possessions in the north, was blocked by ice and shut off from the ocean every winter; Port Arthur offered a safe and open roadstead for her navy and mercantile marine throughout the year.

During the years that followed Russia strained every nerve to establish her customs, her power, and her people in Manchuria. Japan saw the danger to herself, but was powerless to prevent it. Recruiting from the expenditures of the Chinese war, she prepared for the greater struggle that was inevitable. She built up one of the most formidable navies the world had seen; she trained her officers and crews by the most modern methods; she reorganised her army and laboured to perfect it as a fighting machine. By wise laws and enlightened counsels she fostered her resources until her treasury was plethoric with gold. At last, early in 1903, she calmly reminded Russia that the stipulated term of her occupation of Manchuria, save at Port Arthur, had expired; that her excuse for remaining there no longer existed; that her pledges of removal must be kept.

Russia winced under the word "must"; the keyword of her own domestic polity, when applied by the nobles to the masses, it now had a strange and unwelcome sound. She redoubled her efforts to pour troops into the province, provisioned and fortified Port Arthur for a year's siege, established a "railroad guard" of sixty thousand men, – and blandly promised to retire in the following October.

Japan was no less alert. One by one the divisions of her great army were mobilised. They were drilled unceasingly, by competent officers from Western schools. They invented new and terrible explosives and engines of war, and prepared their battle-ships and torpedo-boats for active service. October passed, and the forces of Russia in Manchuria had been largely augmented instead of diminished. More diplomatic messages, couched in courteous terms, passed between the two capitals, and greater numbers of armed men flocked to the eastern and western shores of the Japan Sea.

Again and again St. Petersburg gained a modicum of time through silence or evasive answer; while the rails of the long railroad groaned under the heavy trains that day and night bore troops, supplies, and ammunition eastward. At last the limit was reached. On the 6th of February, at 4 P.M., Kurino, the Japanese minister at St. Petersburg, presented himself at the Foreign Office at that city and informed Count Lamsdorff that his government, in view of the delays in connexion with the Russian answer to Japan's latest demand, and the futility of the negotiations up to that time, considered it useless to continue diplomatic relations and "would take such steps as it deemed proper for the protection of Japan's interests." In obedience to instructions, therefore, he asked, most gently and politely (after the fashion of his countrymen), for his passports.

On one of the Japanese torpedo-boats silently approaching Port Arthur, just forty-eight hours after M. Kurino had made his farewell bow at the court of the Czar, was Oto Owari. No one who had seen him on the Osprey, meekly serving his commander with sliced cucumbers and broiled chicken, would have recognised the trim, alert little figure in the blue uniform, his visor drawn low over his sparkling eyes, his whole bearing erect, manly and marked with intense resolve as he conned his vessel through the channel toward the doomed fleet of the enemy.

When the American ship arrived at Shanghai, Oto had at once procured his own discharge and that of Oshima, which was an informal matter, they not being enlisted men but merely cabin servants. Rexdale was glad to let them go. The little Japs were too mysterious and secretive personages to render their presence welcome on a war-ship where the commander should know all that is going on, above-board and below. Dave more than half suspected that his stewards were of more importance in their own country than their menial office would indicate; and while he could not exactly regard them in the light of spies – Japan being friendly to the United States – he felt more comfortable when they had taken their little grips and marched ashore to mingle with the heterogeneous population of the Chinese port.

The torpedo-boats increased their speed as they neared the outer basin of the harbour of Port Arthur. Oto steered his small black craft directly toward a huge battle-ship with three smoke-stacks.

"It is the Retvizan," he whispered to the officer next in command. "I know where to strike her. Wait for the order."

The Russian ships had their nets out. They believed the Japanese fleet two hundred miles away.

"Now!" hissed Oto sharply; and in a moment a long, black, cigar-shaped missile leaped from the bows of his ship toward the Russian leviathan. It dashed, foaming, through the water, sheared its way through the steel meshes of the torpedo net, and struck the hull of the doomed Retvizan exactly where Oto had planned his attack. There was a dull roar, echoed by another and another a short distance away. Wild cries and shrieks of anguish rose from the Russian fleet. Two mighty battle-ships, the Retvizan and the Czarevitch, slowly heeled over, mortally wounded. The cruiser Pallada began to settle. She, too, was pierced below the water-line. Thus the Japanese declared war.

The harbour now seemed full of torpedo-boats. Flash-lights from the forts on the Golden Horn and the Tiger's Tail disclosed the swarm of invaders. The hills resounded with the sudden roar of artillery, and every machine-gun in the Russian fleet that could be trained on the audacious enemy poured its hail of steel shot upon them. Outside the harbour, within easy range, lay the heavier vessels of the Japanese, which opened fire on the forts and the town from their great turret-guns. In the midst of the uproar and confusion the torpedo-boats which had inflicted such terrible damage retired to the shelter of the outer battle-ships and cruisers, unhurt. The Retvizan limped over to the entrance of the harbour and rested on the rocks. The Czarevitch was towed out of further danger. The storm of Japanese shot and shell diminished and at length ceased altogether, as the attacking fleet withdrew. The assault had occupied less than an hour; at one o'clock all was silent again, save where the wounded were being cared for, on the ill-fated Retvizan and her sister ships, and the crews of every vessel in the harbour talked hoarsely as they stood to their guns, with decks cleared for further action. The first sea-battle – if such it can be called – of the twentieth century was over. Japan had struck, and struck fiercely. Russia was stunned by the blow. Although she did not then realise it, her sea-power in the Pacific was at an end, for years to come.

"Sayonara, Retvizan!" said Commander Oto Owari grimly, as he headed his ship for the open sea.

The midnight attack was but the first outburst of the storm. Before noon the Mikado's fleet returned, as the United States ships came back at the battle of Manila, and once more the huge twelve-inch rifles thundered and the shore forts replied. The still uninjured vessels of the Russians came bravely out to meet the foe, but reeled under the terrible fire that was concentrated upon them. For an hour the bolts fell thick and fast. Then the Japanese drew back, and the Russians, dazed, bewildered, thunderstruck at the swiftness and might of the assault, again counted their losses.

"By order of Viceroy Alexieff," reported the commanding officer to St. Petersburg, "I beg to report that at about eleven o'clock in the morning a Japanese squadron, consisting of about fifteen battle-ships and cruisers, approached Port Arthur and opened fire…

" … At about midday the Japanese squadron ceased its fire and left, proceeding south.

"Our losses are two naval officers and fifty-one men killed… During the engagement the battle-ship Poltava and the cruisers Diana, Askold, and Novik were damaged on the water-line."

Three battle-ships and four cruisers put out of action in a single day! But more was to follow.

In the harbour of Chemulpo, across the neck of the Yellow Sea, lay the Russian cruisers Variag and Korietz, in company with several war-ships of other nations, including the U. S. gunboat Vicksburg. On the evening before the assault on Port Arthur the commanders of these two cruisers were notified by the Rear-Admiral Uriu, commanding a Japanese squadron, which lay just outside, that on the following day they would be attacked at their moorings if they did not quit the port by noon. Other foreign ships in the harbour were warned to withdraw from the line of fire.