Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun

by Harry Collingwood

  It was some time before I could turn his mind away from the events of that strenuous day; and when at length I succeeded in doing so, and could get him to talk about himself, it appeared that, stirring though the events seemed to be which were nightly happening before Port Arthur, they were all flat, stale, and unprofitable, compared with such an event as the storming of the Nanshan Heights. And so, as a matter of fact, they were, as I soon discovered for myself; for the duty of our destroyer flotilla consisted simply in steaming inshore every night industriously laying mines in the roadstead and at the harbour’s mouth, which the Russians as industriously strove to remove next day. True, the sameness of this work was occasionally relieved by a more or less exciting episode, as when, for instance, the Russians would suddenly turn their searchlights upon us and all their batteries would open fire. Then we simply had to scuttle for our lives, for, of course, the shore batteries mounted very much heavier and longer range guns than any that a destroyer could carry; and there was no sense in attempting, as a general rule, to oppose our 12-pounders and 6-pounders to their 6-inch and 11-inch guns.

  Yet we by no means allowed the Russians to invariably have it all their own way. There were times when, under cover of the darkness, one or two of us would creep right into the harbour entrance and, getting so close under the cliff that it became impossible for the Russians to depress their heavy guns sufficiently to reach us, would boldly engage the forts with our quick-firers, and even with rifle-fire, picking off any gunners that were foolhardy enough to expose themselves, and not unfrequently dismounting or otherwise putting out of action a few of their lighter guns. It was the good fortune of the Kasanumi, on one occasion, very shortly after our return, to strike one of the Russian 11-inch Canets, mounted in the fort between Golden Hill and the inner harbour, fair and square upon the muzzle and blow it clean off, with a shell from our 12-pounder; but such successes as these were of course very rare. These engagements between our destroyers and the Russian forts were immensely exciting, and afforded a most agreeable and welcome change from the monotony of mine-laying, for when we undertook such an adventure we never knew whether or not we should emerge from it scatheless. The operation of getting in close under the cliffs, undetected, was of course hazardous enough to make the attempt irresistibly fascinating; but it was the getting away again after the alarm had been given and all the enemy’s searchlights had been turned upon us, when the excitement reached its height; for, of course, the moment that we were far enough away from the shelter of the beetling cliffs to enable the Russians to train their big guns upon us, they would open fire upon us for all that they were worth, and then it became a case of dodging the shells. It was then that our ingenuity was taxed to the very utmost, twisting and turning hither and thither as we ran at full speed into the offing, always endeavouring to make a turn in the most unexpected direction possible at the precise moment when we anticipated that the guns were being brought to bear upon us. And that, on the whole, we were fairly successful was pretty conclusively evidenced by the small amount of damage which we sustained. Indeed, our most serious mishap about this time in those waters arose from a totally different cause. One of our officers, a certain Commander Oda, had invented a particularly deadly kind of mine, which the Japanese Government adopted, and which they named after the inventor. A few days after my return to the waters of Port Arthur, Oda himself was engaged upon the task of laying some of his mines in the outer roadstead, when one of them somehow exploded, killing the captain of the ship and eighteen men, and wounding Oda himself and seven others. Strangely enough, however, the ship herself was only very slightly damaged. Less fortunate were the Russians; for, only a day or two later, two of their gunboats, while engaged in the attempt to remove some of our mines, came in contact with them, and both craft immediately went to the bottom, taking most of their men with them.

  Chapter Sixteen.

  THE FLOATING MINE.

  It is a true saying, that “the pitcher which goes too often to the well gets broken at last;” and thus it came about with me, or rather with the Kasanumi.

  As the days passed, we became aware of greatly increased activity on the part of the garrison of Port Arthur. Cruising in the offing during the daytime, well beyond the range of the Russian’s biggest guns, yet near enough at hand to make sure that our blockade of the port was effective, the sound of violent explosions came floating off to us all day long, telling us in unmistakable language that strenuous efforts were being made to clear the channel of the sunken steamers wherewith we had blocked it, at such heavy cost to ourselves. There could be but one reason for such tremendous activity: it was doubtless that the enemy had it in contemplation to send his fleet to sea, probably with the object of finding a more secure shelter in the port of Vladivostock, a surmise which was confirmed by our spies in Port Arthur.

  If still further confirmation of this intention were needed, it was to be found in the increased efforts which the Russians put forth to hamper our mine-laying operations in the roadstead; for about this time it became the practice of the enemy to send out a ship, sometimes two, or even three, to lie at anchor in the roads all night. The ship, or ships, always anchored well under the cover of the heaviest guns of the fortress, yet so far out that her, or their, own heavy guns completely commanded the waters of the roadstead, thus tremendously increasing the difficulty of sowing those waters with mines.

  Naturally, the presence of these ships in the roadstead offered an almost irresistible temptation to our destroyers to essay the task of sinking them, or at least putting them out of action; and this desire on our part was smiled upon by Togo, to put the case mildly, for information was now continually reaching us to the effect that the formidable Baltic fleet was being rapidly prepared for sea, and that its departure on its long voyage to the Far East was imminent; while Togo was naturally anxious that the Port Arthur fleet—and the Vladivostock fleet also, if possible—should be effectually disposed of before the arrival of so powerful a reinforcement in Japanese waters. Therefore, great as was the risk attending the attack of a powerfully armed ship at anchor under the cover of several formidable forts, and careful as our Admiral was, both of his ships and of his men, no attempt was made to discourage us of the torpedo flotilla when our desire to attack was made known; on the contrary, the desire was smiled upon, as I have said, and nothing more than a word of caution was given against the incurring of unnecessary risks.

  Perhaps I ought to explain precisely what I mean by saying that the desire of the commander of the torpedo flotilla to attack these ships was “smiled upon” by the Admiral. He had not only “smiled upon” but had given imperative orders that the torpedo fleet was to be employed upon every possible occasion for the harassing and discomfiture of the enemy; but hitherto the tactics employed had been for the destroyers and torpedo-boats to attack in numbers, a division or even two or three divisions being sent in at a time. It was due to my initiative that these tactics were now to be altered, and that attacks were now to be permitted by as few as two boats only. Up to now it had been our regular practice for a large number of craft to creep in toward the roadstead at a low speed until discovered by the enemy’s searchlights, and then dash in upon the foe at our utmost speed, through a hail of shells, discharge our torpedoes as we circled round our quarry, and then dash out again, trusting to our speed to carry us back into the zone of safety. Of course this plan had its advantages, inasmuch as that the more there were of us, the greater—in theory—the chance that some of us would score a hit. But against this there was the fact that during the final rush of the torpedo craft upon the enemy, the necessity to maintain our highest speed throughout the entire period of the attack involved forced draught, and consequently flaming funnels, which latter of course immediately attracted the attention of the enemy and nullified all our efforts to take him by surprise.

  Now, I had by this time gained a considerable amount of experience of torpedo warfare, and I had not failed to observe that in the majority
of cases where our attacks had failed, the failure had been due to the above cause, combined with the fact that ten or a dozen craft ran a much greater risk of being picked up by the enemy’s searchlights than would one or two. It had therefore seemed to me that, taking everything into consideration, the prospects of successful attack by two craft—one to support and assist the other in case of need—were as good as those of a dozen craft, while the risk would be very much less, provided that the attack were made coolly and circumspectly in accordance with a plan which I had worked out. This plan was, in brief, to run for the harbour at normal speed until we were practically within effective range, and then, instead of dashing in at full speed, to stop our engines—the throb of which was loud enough to be heard at a considerable distance on a quiet night—and head directly for our quarry, discharging our torpedoes when the momentum or “way” of the boat had carried her as far as she would go, trusting to the subsequent confusion to enable us to escape unscathed. I had fully explained this view of mine to the Admiral, and had obtained his sanction to put my plan to the test. Accordingly, on a certain night toward the middle of June, after the Russians had been let severely alone for some forty-eight hours, the Kasanumi, accompanied by the Akaisuki, my friend Ito’s ship, left the rest of the blockaders, with the object of putting my theory into practice.

  It was a splendid night for our purpose; there was a breathless calm, the water was smooth as oil, and although there was certainly a moon, she was in her last quarter, and did not rise until close upon one o’clock in the morning. Moreover, the sky was overcast by a great sheet of dappled cloud through which only a solitary star here and there peeped faintly; it was consequently dark enough to afford us a reasonable chance of getting within striking distance of our quarry undetected.

  When the Russians sent their ships out of harbour to lie all night in the roadstead, as they did pretty frequently now, it was their custom to get them out early in the afternoon, after their destroyers had carefully swept the anchorage in search of mines; and it was my hope that—we having left them alone for the preceding two days—they would by this time be getting suspicious of such unwonted inactivity on our part, and consequently would send out one, or perhaps even two ships, to guard against a possible coup on our part.

  Our mine-laying craft very rarely got to work before one or two o’clock in the morning, that being the hour when human vigilance is popularly supposed to be least active; I therefore planned to arrive in the roadstead about midnight, hoping that I should then catch the enemy off his guard, snatching a rest in preparation for the moment when our activities usually began.

  Now, the thing which we had most to fear was a long-distance searchlight established in a station on Golden Hill, at a height of some two hundred feet above the sea-level. This searchlight was generally turned on at dusk, and was kept unceasingly playing upon the anchorage and its adjacent waters all through the night. It commanded the entire roadstead, from a point three miles east of the harbour’s mouth, right round to the south and west as far as the Pinnacle Rock; and the difficulty was how to avoid being picked up by it before we had delivered our attack. But by this time I knew the seaward surroundings of Port Arthur almost by heart. I knew, for instance—and this was most important—that the searchlight station was placed so far back from the edge of the crumbling cliff that the water immediately at the foot of the latter, and for a distance of perhaps a hundred yards to seaward, could not be reached by the beam of the light, and was therefore enveloped in darkness, rendered all the deeper and more opaque by the dazzling brilliance of the light; and I also knew that along the outer edge of this patch of darkness there was a sufficient depth of water to float a destroyer, even at dead low water. My plan, therefore, was to make a wide sweep to seaward upon leaving the blockading squadron, gradually turning east and north, and thus eventually to get into Takhe Bay, some five miles east of Port Arthur anchorage, and from thence creep along the shore to the westward, keeping as close in as the depth of water would permit. There was only one difficulty about this, which was that at a certain point not far from where the searchlight station stood, there was a gap in the line of cliff where the ground sloped steeply down to the water’s edge for a short distance, and here of course the beam of the light had uninterrupted play right up to the beach; but I believed I could overcome this difficulty by simply watching my opportunity and slipping past the gap when the searchlight was not playing upon it.

  All went well with us until about seven bells in the first watch (half-past eleven o’clock) when a great bank of fog, for which those seas are notorious, came driving in from the south-west, and in a moment we were enveloped in a cloud so thick that, standing upon the bridge, I could scarcely distinguish our aftermost funnel, and could not see our taffrail at all. We were then about three miles from the shore, with the indentation of Takhe Bay straight ahead of us, and near enough the anchorage for a man on our signal yard to make out—before the fog enveloped us, of course—that there were two ships at anchor in the roadstead, one, a five-funnelled craft which I knew could only be the Askold, while the other, showing four funnels, I gathered from his description must be the armoured cruiser Bayan. The searchlight had of course been in action ever since we had made the land, and as its beam swept slowly over the ships it had revealed enough of their details to enable us to easily identify them.

  It was most exasperating that the fog should have swept down upon us just when it did. Had it come an hour, or even half an hour, later, I would have welcomed it, for we should then have had time to get up within striking distance of the ships and, under cover of the fog, could have approached them closely enough to have made sure of both, while now! Well, it was useless to cry over what could not be helped; the only thing to do was to make the best of things as they were, and to hope that the fog might yet prove a friend in disguise, after all.

  Fortunately, as the fog came sweeping up to us, I had the presence of mind to hail the man on the yard—who was at that moment describing the ships he saw riding at anchor in the roads—asking him to tell me exactly how they bore from us. His reply was:

  “They are square abeam, honourable Captain.”

  I immediately put my head in through the window of the wheelhouse and demanded of the helmsman how we were at that moment heading. He answered that we were then steering north forty degrees west, by compass.

  “Then,” said I, “alter the course at once to west forty degrees south. That,” I added, addressing young Hiraoka, who was standing beside me, “ought to take us to them, or near enough to enable us to sight them. Kindly go aft, Mr Hiraoka, and hail the Akatsuki, telling her of our shift of helm.”

  The youngster ran aft to do my bidding, the fog at that moment being so thick that it was impossible to see one’s hand before one’s face, even the beam of the distant searchlight being so effectually obscured that it might have been extinguished for all that we knew to the contrary. I had rung down for our engines to stop, so that we might not run away from the Akatsuki, after shifting our helm, without informing her of the alteration in our course, and everything was now so still that I had no difficulty in distinguishing young Hiraoka’s hail, and the reply from the other destroyer, breaking through the soft swish and lap of water under our bows. It was the Akatsuki’s lieutenant who was answering our hail, and he had just acknowledged the intimation of our altered course, and was ordering his own helmsman to make a like change, when, without the slightest warning, I experienced a terrific shock which felt exactly as though the ship had been smitten a savage blow from below by a giant hammer. So violent was it that I was flung high in the air and over the rail of the bridge on to the steel turtle-back deck beneath, upon which I landed head-first with such violence that I immediately lost consciousness. But before that happened I was sensible of two things; one of them being a blinding flash of flame, coincident with the shock, in which our bows, for a length of some ten or twelve feet, seemed to crumple up and fly to pieces, while the other was
that, as I was tossed high in the air, I sustained a violent blow on the chest from some heavy object which seemed to sear my flesh like white-hot iron. Then down I came upon my head, and knew no more.

  My first sensation, upon coming to myself, was that of a violent aching all over my body, as though every bone in it had been broken. But the aching of my head was even worse than that of my body, while as for my chest, it smarted and throbbed as though the blade of a burning knife rested upon it. I next became aware that I was in bed; and finally, opening my eyes, I saw that I was the occupant of one of many beds in a large, airy room which somehow seemed familiar to me, and which I presently identified as the ward which I had once before occupied in the hospital at our base among the Elliot Islands.

  It was broad daylight, and the sun was shining brilliantly into the room through the widely opened windows, which admitted a gentle, refreshing breeze, pleasantly charged with ozone. Two dainty little women nurses were doing something at a table at the far end of the room, which happened to come within the range of my vision, and presently I heard the gentle splash of water in that direction, which immediately brought home to me the consciousness that my mouth and throat were parched. I opened my mouth to call to the nurses that I was thirsty, but it was only the very faintest of whispers that escaped my smarting lips. It was enough, however, to immediately produce a gentle rustle on the other side of my bed, and the next moment a pretty face was bending over me and a pair of soft, dark, almond-shaped eyes were gazing sympathetically into mine.