Hungry, Sleepy, In Utter Darkness, We Clung To
This Slippery Mound In Its Ocean Of Whispering Millet Like Sailors
Wrecked In Mid-Sea Upon A Rock, And Waited For The Day.
After two
hours a gray mist came grudgingly, trees and rocks grew out of it,
trenches appeared at our feet, and what had before looked like a lake
of water became a mud village.
Then, like shadows, the foreign attaches, whom we fondly hoped might
turn out to be Russian Cossacks coming to take us prisoners and carry
us off to breakfast, rode up in silence and were halted at the base
of the hill. It seemed now, the audience being assembled, the
orchestra might begin. But no hot-throated cannon broke the
chilling, dripping, silence, no upheaval of the air spoke of Canet
guns, no whirling shrapnel screamed and burst. Instead, the fog
rolled back showing us miles of waving corn, the wet rails of the
Siberian Railroad glistening in the rain, and, masking the horizon,
the same mountains from which the day before the smoke rings had
ascended. They now were dark, brooding, their tops hooded in clouds.
Somewhere in front of us hidden in the Kiao liang, hidden in the tiny
villages, crouching on the banks of streams, concealed in trenches
that were themselves concealed, Oku's army, the army to which we were
supposed to belong, was buried from our sight. And in the mountains
on our right lay the Fourth Army, and twenty miles still farther to
the right, Kuroki was closing in upon Liao-Yang.
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