my ear, a white tuft of
cotton-wool-like smoke suddenly appeared in the air above the galloping
Cossacks, and more of them went down. Another flash, and another, and
another, more tufts of cotton-wool leaping into view, tremendous
disorder and confusion among the Cossacks, men and horses falling right
and left, and then the survivors suddenly wheeled outward and galloped
back at headlong speed, leaving behind them a mangled heap of men and
horses, the greater number dead, but here and there a prostrate, kicking
horse might be seen, or a wounded Cossack crawling slowly and painfully
away from the scene of carnage.

The flight of the Cossacks was the signal for the resumption of the
advance by the Japanese, whose skirmishers reappeared, still in very
open formation, a man here and a man there showing for a few seconds as,
in a crouching attitude, he rose to his feet, scurried forward a few
yards, and then again took cover, while the fire of the Russian guns
swept the ground over which he was passing. As yet, however, there
appeared to be very few casualties among our men; here and there I
noticed a prostrate form lying motionless, while others crept up and
scuttled past him; he had been found by a shrapnel shell, and his share
of the work was done; but even shrapnel cannot do much harm if the
formation is kept sufficiently open. And as man after man pushed
forward, others crept out, following, until the whole of the ground
between our lines and the base of the heights was dotted with Japanese
infantry-men creeping ever closer up to the first line of the Russian
defence, the terrible maze of barbed wire entanglements.

Meanwhile, the whole of the Japanese field artillery, as well as that of
our ships, was concentrating its fire upon the crest of the heights,
covering the advance of the stormers; and now my attention was once more
diverted from that advance by the necessity for me to signal directions
to the fleet. And now it was that the full value of my previous labours
began to be manifested; for I had but to signal the ships to direct
their fire upon such and such a point--wherever, in fact, a Russian
battery was proving especially troublesome--and all that the gun-layers
had to do was to refer to the maps with which I had supplied them, and
they were at once informed of the exact range of that point, with the
result that a hail of shells instantly began to fall upon that
particular battery with the most deadly pre