The new Russian town was situated along the bay to the west, and was reached by a road running along the shore of the bay from Old Town. The two towns were about a mile or so apart, and the road between them was always, except in winter, either so dusty or so muddy as to be well nigh impassable.
Towards nightfall Port Arthur was at its worst. It was not lighted at all, and the narrow wooden footway that ran along the streets and raised one above the roadway, on which in summer time the mud was ankle deep, was full of treacherous holes. Some planks were all right as long as somebody was walking on the other end of them. When this was not the case — well, then they were not all right, as I several times learned to my cost.
The shops in Port Arthur generally sold liquor, tinned meats, lamps and other such necessaries of life. Thrifty people bought their goods in Chinese stores, while officers and their wives were always to be found in the large stores such as Kunst and Albers, Sietas
Block, etc., where they were always attended to before a civilian. Business was always very brisk.
The only bank in the city was the Russo-Chinese Bank, which was small and always crowded like an important but inadequate railway station, with officers, soldiers, and shaggy business men. Unless one was a lady or a military officer, he had as a rule to wait there in a foetid atmosphere for at least four hours before being attended to. At the Post-office things were nearly as bad.
The new town of Port Arthur was built in a good position, commanding as it did the bay, and being at the same time well sheltered by high hills from the piercingly cold northern wind that blows well-nigh all the winter. No Chinese were allowed to reside in it, and all the houses had to be built in European style. Quite a considerable number of houses had been built at the time the war broke out, but from an architectural point of view the whole effect was not exactly good. Many houses were built in weak imitation of the German style, that is, with little turrets and odd gables and chimneys. The quarters of the General Staff consisted of a massive block, two storeys high, near which an Officers' Club was being constructed, at an estimated outlay of about,£20,000. The naval barracks at the far end of the bay were completed at the time the war broke out, and were the best buildings of their kind in all the Far East, with the exception perhaps of some of the barracks in India. They are three storeys high, above three hundred feet long, and capable of accommodating very comfortably one thousand sailors. Opposite them, on Tiger's Tail Peninsula, were other barracks much on the same plan and capable of housing about the same number of men. In these barracks the men's food was prepared, and in winter the whole place was heated by steam.
New Town resembled Dalny inasmuch as it contained a great number of half- completed buildings, and was at all times as deserted as a graveyard. The two or three shops that were opened there looked painfully new, and as no customer ever by any chance strayed into them, the shop assistants were generally to be found dozing in a back room. In July 1904 Old Town was to be abandoned and afterwards razed to the ground, but, in spite of this, few of the merchants took any steps to provide themselves with premises elsewhere. Perhaps they had a presentiment that New Town would never receive them.
The most remarkable public work that was going on in Port Arthur at the time the war began was the Sobor or Russian Cathedral. The top of the hill between New Town and Old Town and overlooking the harbour had been sliced off at enormous expense in order to make room for the massive foundations which, looking like the stump of some gigantic feudal castle, formed a striking feature in the landscape. This unfinished work was the first thing my eyes used to fall on in the morning after I had left my house in New Town to walk to the Novi Krai office, and I can still remember it covered with pigmy figures of stonemasons and Chinese labourers going to and fro. The broad roadway that wound gracefully up to it was the only good road in Port Arthur, I suppose because it was the one road that was never used.
When completed, this Cathedral was to have been
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as high as St. Paul's, and, if one can judge from the designs, of great architectural beauty. In fact there would have been in the Far East no Christian church, save perhaps the Russian Cathedral at Tokio, to compare with it; and the Russians often told me that the powerful electric light which would be placed on the cross at its summit would be visible to mariners far off at sea. Alas! that light will never shine!