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"The Nanshan position offered unusual advantages for defence, and had been diligently prepared for permanent occupation during many weeks. Ten forts of semi-permanent character had been built, and their armament showed that, on this occasion, the Russian artillery was vastly superior, both in calibre and in range, to the Japanese guns.
Liao-yang defences were, in fact, a repetition of the defences of the Nanshan Heights where the Japanese suffered such appalling losses except that they were of an even more elaborate and deadly character.
The crash of the artillery was continuous and most distracting, and the effect was intensified by the incessant scream of the shells and the sharp thud as they burst, interspersed with the everlasting hammering of the machine-guns and quick-firers; Nanshan was ablaze with the fire of the Russian guns and the bursting of our shells, and the entire hill was enwrapped in fantastically whirling wreaths of smoke which were every moment rent violently asunder by the explosion of bursting shells.
It was getting well on toward noon when a message reached me from the General to the effect that two batteries of Russian quick-fire field-guns had been discovered on the summit of Nan-kwang-ling a hill some eight hundred feet high, about a mile to the westward of the Nanshan Heights and requesting me to signal our ships in the bay to give their whole attention to those two batteries.
Situated as I was at a distance of more than two miles from headquarters, upon an outlying spur of the Nanshan Heights, and quite alone, save for the companionship of a solitary assistant signaller, with only occasional curt orders from the General in reference to the signals which he wished me to transmit to our ships in the offing, I was naturally ignorant as to the critical pass at which we had arrived, and could only draw my conclusions from what I actually saw happening.
The defences of Liao-yang were of great extent and enormous strength, including not only formidable forts and earthworks armed with powerful guns, and mile upon mile of most carefully and elaborately constructed trenches, but also with innumerable pitfalls, each with its sharpened stake at the bottom, as in the case of the Nanshan Heights defences.
I had a distant view of the whole affair from a knoll on the northern spur of the Nanshan Heights, where I had taken up a position which commanded a view, not only of practically the whole of the ground over which the stormers would have to pass, but also of the bay and our fleet, to which I should probably be required to signal from time to time as the fight progressed.
And now the stormers of the 1st and 3rd Divisions, seeing the success of their comrades, were stung into the making of a further effort, and, hurling themselves bodily upon the entanglements, actually broke them down by sheer physical force, although hundreds were horribly mangled in the process, and despite the awful fire from rifles and machine-guns that mowed through them, up they swept irresistibly until, with deafening yells of "Banzai!" they joined their victorious comrades on the crest and planted the banner of Japan upon the topmost height of Nanshan.
To that end celerity was all important, and on June 14th, that is to say, only eighteen days after the battle of Kinchou, a Russian army of some thirty-five thousand combatants, under the command of General Baron Stackelberg, moving down the railway to recover Kinchou and Nanshan, came into collision with the Japanese and fought the battle of Telissu.
This, so far as Mount Sampson was concerned, had been done when I arrived upon the scene; but there still remained Kinchau and the Nanshan Heights to be taken; and each of these threatened to be an even tougher piece of work than the storming of Mount Sampson; for the Russians, after their experience of the extraordinary intrepidity of the Japanese when storming the mountain, had adopted every conceivable means to make the heights impregnable.
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