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.
These pitfalls were arranged in regular lines, interrupted at intervals
by patches of mined ground, while outside these again there ran a
practically continuous girdle of barbed wire entanglements, the wire
being charged with an electric current powerful enough to instantly
destroy any one who should be unfortunate enough to come into contact
with it. 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 attack upon Liao-yang was indeed in many respects a repetition of
the attack upon Kinchau; for, as in the case of Kinchau, there was a
formidable hill position--that of Shushan--to be first stormed and
taken. This task was entrusted to the Second Japanese Army, under the
leadership of General Oku; and they accomplished it on 1st September,
after three nights and two days of desperate fighting, in the course of
which the heroic Japanese suffered frightful losses. On the same day,
the Russians began to withdraw from Liao-yang under a heavy fire from
the Japanese artillery. On the following day the Japanese captured the
Yentai mines; and a few hours later, General Nodzu, at the head of the
Fourth Japanese Army, entered the town of Liao-yang unopposed.

Meanwhile, what was the state of affairs on land before Port Arthur?

As has already been said, the great general assault upon the land
defences, which began on 19th August 1904, resulted in disastrous
failure with frightful losses for the Japanese. Yet that failure,
terrible as it was, was not by any means complete; its blackness was
irradiated by a gleam of light here and there which sufficed to keep
alive that spirit of hope and indomitable resolution which no misfortune
could ever quite quench in the breast of the Japanese, and which was
undoubtedly the determining factor in the campaign. To particularise.
On 14th August the 1st Japanese Division was ordered to capture the five
redoubts on the crest of the ridge west of the railway, known as the
Swishiying redoubts. These redoubts w