" But the Japanese who are left in Port Arthur will soon find out about it," said the mate, "and no power on earth will prevent them from carrying the news to Japan. They'd walk all the way to Corea, they'd go to sea in a * sampan.' Japan is bound to know of this in a few days."
"And as soon as she knows of it, she'll strike," remarked the second officer; " the two fleets are now on an equality as regards battle-ships, and the Japanese are not likely to give Russia time to repair these two."
This was the tone of our conversation as we rapidly walked the deck in the faint, grey, chilly dawn of that bleak winter morning. We could never get away from the one point, and we were so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster that we could only converse about it in monosyllables. These monosyllables generally constituted abrupt and sometimes profane exclamations expressive of the gigantic nature of the misfortune that had overtaken the Russian fleet, of the great chance the Japanese had got, of the certainty of war.
Never was there such unanimity of opinion onboard a ship. It was so perfect that nobody listened to anybody else. Each jerked out explanations absolutely identical with those jerked out by his neighbour, and then, after brooding over his own remark for a few moments in silence and taking yet another long searching look at the disabled men-o'-war, repeated the same remark in another form. It did not seem to strike any of us at the time that this was an absurd form of conversation. Sometimes this monologue was varied by a new discovery.
14 There goes a boat-load of wounded! " shouted the mate once. " That must have been a bad collision."
While the searchlights were still flashing on the face of the waters, and the dawn was still a sickly, pallid light in the east, fourteen Russian torpedo-boats splashed tumultuously past us on their way out. By the flashlights I could see the gloomy countenances of their commanders as they stood on the bridge wrapt in their great-coats, and I noticed that some of them levelled their glasses at us and inspected us carefully, as if they were not sure but that we might be a Japanese war- vessel.
"On what mysterious mission have they gone?" I asked myself, musingly, when they first dwindled into black specks on the water and then vanished in the misty portals of the dawn.
When the light had become stronger we noticed other things. We noticed that a large number of cables or chains connected the Tsarevitch with the adjacent shore, and that steam launches, tug-boats and lighters, filled with Chinese coolies, were fussing around her like courtiers around a wounded monarch.
We could also see that the forts had been manned during the night — rather a strange thing we thought. In some places where there were galleries, long lines of men were visible, and the heads of others peeping over the breastworks showed that the fortress artillerymen must have been at their posts all night.
On the highest point of Golden Hill Fort stood a large group of men, evidently high officers, all scanning the horizon with glasses. That group stood there throughout all the anxious hours that followed, in fact as long as the Columbia remained in Port Arthur. One of the group — a stout man standing a few paces in advance of the others, and never once taking his binoculars from his eyes, or turning round to say a word to his companions — resembled the Viceroy in the general contour of his figure, but on account of the distance I could not say for certain that it was Alexeieff. I afterwards found, however, that one ot the Japanese passengers on the Columbia had arrived independently at the conclusion that it was the Viceroy.
By-and-by the sun rose, and, owing to the light mist that lay upon the water, it was very round and red, looking for all the world like a red-hot cannonball.
"That's an ominous sign," I remarked, with a superstitious shiver, for that rising sun recalled at once to my memory the flag of Japan.
In the rays of this sinister orb the windows of the houses in Port Arthur became red as blood. Against the ensanguined sun itself stood out the hulls and the masts of three vessels, apparently cruisers, lying motionless, about five miles off. These could not be Russians! What on earth were they? The ship's telescope soon conveyed to me the astounding information that they flew the flag of the Rising Sun. They were, in fact, the swift cruisers, Yoshino, Takasago and Chitose, and they were calmly lying there, trying to find out through their glasses the exact amount of damage that the torpedo-boats had done.