Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/95

 ds were thrown aside and men rolled down the slope, tripping those who came behind. From the trenches above poured a rain of lead, the seemingly unbroken line of flashes showing the fierceness of the fusillade. And ever the din of human voices seemed to rise above the roll of musketry.

"Banzai ! Banzai ! San-ju-shi Eentai ! Banzai." It was the thirty-fourth regiment, waving its regimental banner, that was surging irresistably into the trenches, regardless of the gaps the enemy's rifles made.

Where did they come from, these- on-rushing farms which went onward and upward and would not be stayed? To the stolid Siberians on the crest they must have seemed like demons who would not die. But they died.

Even as I looked the thirty-fourth regiment was being led by a soldier who had sprung out from among his comrades. It was Tanaka, the fisherman. The officers -were all dead on the grassy incline. Waving the flag he had snatched from where it fell to the ground with its slain bearer, its broken pole thrown aside, Tanaka scrambled on into the enemy's trenches, and a shrieking, cheering^ howling horde of demons surged in behind him.

The Siberians fought, giving thrust for thrust, blow for blow, bite for bite, and scratch for scratch, dying, even as did the assailants, with their teeth sunk in the throats of their foe, until those that remained scurried to the trench above, whence death had been raining on friend and foe as the maddened horde struggled in the broken trench.

On over the groaning forms, bayoneting the prostrate, the thirty-fourth regi- ment surged in the wake of the fisherman, to renew death's carnival in that narrow sullv on the hill crest.

What they did that night showed horribly in the morn. Then the sun rose on trenches glutted to the parapets and glacis and approaches that were carpeted with mangled dead. It was a terrible place.

But the hill was carried, as were the others. The regiment had lost two-thirds of its numbers, but it was proud — especially of Tanaka San. How he survived sur- prises me. As the scavengers of the army, the burial parties and the bearer com- panies came to the hill followed by the flocks of carrion crows and the pariah dogs, and the field guns were moved to the plain beyond to batter the way into the city of Liaoyang, I met the remnant of the regiment marching out of the hill. I will not forget that scene.

The pathway was through a lane of dead, but the regiment was singing a gay marching song. Before it a betto led a riderless horse and carried a broken sword ; he was the major's servant. Behind the led horse was a litter of branches, raised high on the shoulders of four soldiers, and on it sat Tanaka San, nursing a new bandaged arm and wearing a blood-soaked bandage about his head.

He sang, as did those who carried him. The bearers of another litter also sang, although they carried the dead body of the major, the mud-stained corpse hidden under the ragged regimental flag. ' Tired, hungered, but glad, the regiment trudged wearily, yet with a certain jauntiness, behind the litter of the regiment's hero and its dead commander, the wounded, with their unsoiled lint new-bound, staggering in the wake of the column.

I joined them, for I wanted to tell Tanaka San how pleased Haru San would be when she heard of how Green Hill was taken.

In the field dressing station I found the fisherman, and together we drafted a letter to a geisha at the Honorable Teahouse of the August Stork.

Two months later the kurumaya set me down at the open shoji of the Tea house of the Stork. Haru San and her sister geisha knelt low on the mats to welcome me, as Toyo San untied my boots and the neisans — the elder sisters — ^iDrought me slippers. How beautiful the lake seemed now; how gay the passing junks. What a place this to sit and smoke and dream.