at the foot of Mount Sampson
lay the walled city of Kinchau, which the Russians had seized and
fortified; and, finally, there were the Nanshan Heights, upon the crest
of which the Russians had constructed ten forts, armed with seventy
guns, several of which were of 8-inch or 6-inch calibre, firing shells
of from two hundred to one hundred pounds weight.

To attempt to pass these several positions while they were in the hands
of the Russians would have been simply courting annihilation; the first
task, therefore, was to capture them. 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.

First of all, there were the ten forts with their seventy guns lining
the crest of the heights, in addition to which the Russians had two
batteries of quick-fire field artillery and ten machine-guns. Next, in
front of the forts, all along the eastern slope of the heights--which
was the side from which attack was possible--there was row after row of
shelter trenches, solidly roofed with timber covered with earth, to
protect the occupants from artillery fire. Below these again the
Russians had dug countless circular pitfalls, about ten feet deep,
shaped like drinking cups, with very narrow bottoms, each pit having at
its bottom a stout, upright, sharpened stake upon which any hapless
person, falling in, must inevitably be impaled. They were, in fact, an
adaptation of the stake pitfalls employed by many African and other
natives to capture and kill big game. These pits were dug so close
together that, of a party of stormers rushing up the slope, a large
proportion must inevitably fall in, or be unwittingly pushed in by their
comrades. Passages between these pits were purposely left here and
there, but they were all mined, each mine being connected to one of the
forts above by an electric cable, so that it could be exploded at any
moment by merely pressing a button. And that moment would of course be
when the passage-way was crowded with Japanese. And, lastly, at the
foot of the hill there was a great maze of strongly constructed wire
entangleme