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Updated: June 8, 2025
This success gave the Japanese control of Dalny, which formed for them a new base. General Nogi soon after landed with a strong force and took command of the operation against Port Arthur. The northern army met with similar success, General Kuroki fighting his way to the vicinity of Liao-yang, where he soon had the support of General Nozdu, who had landed an army in May.
About five miles to the north of us was the town of Liao-yang; to the east in the distance was a range of pale blue hills, and immediately in front of us to the south, and scarcely a mile off, was the big hill of Sho-shantze. It was five o'clock in the afternoon, and we had been on the move since two o'clock in the morning.
Only ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by impact on the ground, a Japanese military attaché remarked: "There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!" He was right. He knew his business as a military attaché.
Not only had the Japanese not occupied Liao-Yang on the evening of the 27th of August, but later, as everybody knows, they had to fight six days to get into it. And Kuroki, so far from being fifty miles north toward Mukden as Okabe said he was, was twenty miles to the east on our right preparing for the closing in movement which was just about to begin.
One of the houses I knew well; in its square open yard, in which the rude furniture of toil lay strewn about, I had halted more than once for my midday meal, when riding from Liao-yang to the South. I had been entertained there by the owner of the house, a brawny husbandman and his fat brown children, and they had given me eggs and Indian corn.
By continuing the advance of the Korean army into Manchuria and landing another force between it and the Port Arthur army the three corps could be concentrated and the vicious separation of the lines of operations turned to good account. They could be combined in such a way as to threaten an enveloping counter-attack on Liao-yang before the Russian offensive concentration could be completed.
For not only did it entail a vast loss of time and life at Port Arthur itself, but when the sortie of the Russian fleet in June brought home to them their error, the offensive movement on Liao-yang had to be delayed, and the opportunity passed for a decisive counter-stroke at the enemy's concentration ashore.
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. All of this we guessed, what we were told was very different, what we saw was nothing. In all, four hundred thousand men were not farther from us than four to thirty miles and we saw nothing.
The Russians, he said, had retreated from Liao-Yang and were in open flight. Unless General Kuroki, who, he said, was fifty miles north of us, could cut them off they would reach Mukden in ten days, and until then there would be no more fighting. The Japanese troops, he said, were in Liao-Yang, it had been abandoned without a fight. This he told us on the evening of the 27th of August.
The rest, with a bitter experience of Japanese promises, had doubted there would be a battle, and had prepared themselves with newspapers. And so, while eight miles away the preliminary battle to Liao-Yang was making history, we were lying on the grass reading two months' old news of the St. Louis Convention. The sight greatly disturbed our teachers.
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