Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/970

 opponents. The 29th was an uneventful day, on which both sides prepared for the next phase.

The Russians' semicircle, now contracted, rested on the Taitszeho above and below the town, and their forces were massed most closely on either side of the “Mandarin” road that the 1st Army had followed. Opposite, this portion of the line was the Guard and the 4th Army. Oku was astride the railway, Kuroki extending towards his proposed crossing-points just beyond Kuropatkin's extreme left (the latter was behind the river). On the 30th the attack was renewed. The Guard, the 4th Army and the 2nd Army were completely repulsed.

On the night of the 30th the first Japanese troops crossed the Taitszeho near Lien-Tao-Wun, and during the 31st three brigades were deployed north of Kwan-tun, facing west. The Russian left wing observed the movement all day, and within its limited local resources made dispositions to meet it. Kuropatkin's opportunity was now come. The remainder of the 2nd division was following the 12th, leaving a nine-mile gap between Kuroki and Nozu, as well as the river. It was not, into this gap, which had no military significance, but upon the isolated divisions of the 1st Army that the Russian general proposed to launch his counter stroke. Reorganizing his southern defences on a shorter front, so as to regain possession of the reserves that he had so liberally given away to his subordinates, he began to collect large bodies of troops opposite Kuroki, while Stakelberg and Zarubayev, before withdrawing silently into the

lines or rather the fortress of Liao-Yang, again repulsed Oku's determined attacks on the south side. But it was not in confidence of victory that Kuropatkin began the execution of the new plan—rather as a desperate expedient to avoid being cut off by the 1st Army, whose strength he greatly overestimated.

On the morning of the 1st of September—the anniversary of Sedan, as the Japanese officers told their men—Oyama, whose intentions the active Kuroki had somewhat outrun, delivered a last attack with the 2nd and 4th Armies, and the Guard on the south front, in the hope of keeping the main body of the Russians occupied and so assisting Kuroki, but the assailants encountered no resistance, Zarubayev having already retired into the fortress. North of the Taitszeho the crisis was approaching. Kuroki's left, near the river, vigorously attacked a hill called Manjuyama which formed part of the line of defence of the XVII. Corps from Europe. But the right of the 1st Army (12th division) was threatened by the gathering storm of the counter-stroke from the side of Yentai Mines, and had it not been that the resolute Okasaki continued the attack on Manjuyama alone, the Japanese offensive would have come to a standstill. Manjuyama, thanks to the courage of the army commander and of a single brigadier, was at last carried after nightfall, and the dislodged Russians made two counter-attacks in the dark before they would acknowledge themselves beaten. Next morning, when Kuroki, who had conceived the mistaken idea of a general retreat of the Russians on Mukden, was preparing