The History of the Russo-Japanese War. Sydney Tyler

      JAPANESE GENERALS.

      "The Japanese fleet suffered but very slight damage, and its fighting strength is not decreased. Our casualties were 4 killed and 54 wounded. The Imperial Princes on board suffered no harm.

      "The conduct of the officers was cool, and not unlike their conduct at manœuvres.

      "This morning, owing to heavy south wind, detailed reports from the vessels have not been received, so I merely report the above fact."

      This dispatch, as we know both from the Russian official accounts and from independent witnesses, really understated the extent of the blow which the Japanese Admiral had dealt to the Russian fleet; the vessels torpedoed were not cruisers only, but the two crack battleships upon which Admiral Alexeieff necessarily placed peculiar dependence, and the "considerable damage" which Admiral Togo believed had been done by the subsequent bombardment had put out of action, for the time being, the battleship Poltava and the cruisers Diana, Askold and Novik. Of these the Poltava and the Novik were badly hit on the water line—damage the seriousness of which needs no comment.

      The most significant confession, indeed, of the crushing character of the blow which at the very commencement of the war the Japanese had succeeded in dealing to their powerful adversary was contained in a subsequent dispatch from the Viceroy to the Czar. Telegraphing on February 11th, Admiral Alexeieff reported "the Czarevitch and the Pallada were brought on the 9th inst. into the inner harbor. The leak in the Retvisan is being temporarily stopped. The repairing of an ironclad is a complicated business, the period for the completion of which it is hard to indicate." This guarded language must be read in the light of the fact that the Russians had only one repairing dock capable of holding a large ship at Port Arthur, and the terrible character of the disaster which within forty-eight hours had befallen the naval power of the haughty Muscovite in the Far East will be realized. The losses in men were not very serious, amounting in all to 10 men killed and 2 officers and 41 men wounded, but the injury to the fleet was practically irreparable. Seven out of Russia's best vessels had been placed hors de combat, her battleships' strength being reduced to 4, namely, the Petropavlovsk, Peresviet, Pobieda and Sevastopol (the last two being themselves under repair when the war broke out), and her already small cruiser force being reduced to two, namely, the Bayan and the Boyarin. The following is the list of the damaged ships:—

      Czarevitch, battleship, torpedoed.

      Retvisan, battleship, torpedoed.

      Poltava, battleship, shelled on the water-line.

      Novik, cruiser, shelled on the water-line.

      Askold, cruiser, shelled on the water-line.

      Diana, cruiser, shelled on the water-line.

      Pallada, cruiser, torpedoed.

      It should be added that the repairs to the Askold were quickly executed, and that she was able to take part in the subsequent operations a few days later.

      Admiral Alexeieff's dispatch to the Czar stated that the majority of the wounded belonged to the Pallada. The reason for this was that they were "poisoned by gases produced by the explosion of the torpedo charged with melinite."

      The Japanese fleet, naturally, did not emerge from such an action unscathed. Its losses in men were officially reported as 4 killed and 54 wounded; and although the fighting efficiency of the fleet was not seriously impaired, two armored cruisers, the Iwote and the Yakumo, were injured, and, as the casualties show, several other vessels were struck. But the most remarkable circumstance was that the torpedo-boats by which the night attack had been delivered escaped scot-free.

      While the Russian capital was still reeling under the shock of this unexpected disaster, there came the news of a fresh blow struck by the Japanese arms in another quarter of the theatre of war. This was the naval engagement at Chemulpo—a port on the northwest coast of Korea—in which two of the Czar's warships and one transport steamer were destroyed. It is true that only one of these vessels had any fighting capacity, and that the conflict in itself was of much less consequence than the battle at Port Arthur, but the incident gave a further and mortifying revelation of the disorganization of the naval forces of Russia in the Far East, and of the total absence of anything like a bold and definite plan of operations from the minds of her commanders. In spite of the critical position in which the negotiations between the two Powers had been standing for weeks, the Russian fleet in the Yellow Sea was unconcentrated and generally unprepared for war. The outbreak of hostilities found two vessels, the Varyag, a protected cruiser of 6,500 tons, and the Korietz, a gunboat, old, indeed, but not without some use for coast defence, quietly stationed at Chemulpo, a ready prey for a Japanese squadron.

      On the 8th instant a Russian steamer called the Sungari, which was employed for the transport of stores, entered the harbor with the news that a large fleet, which her captain believed to be Japanese, was fast approaching. The Korietz was sent out to reconnoitre. The columns of smoke on the horizon did indeed come from the funnels of the enemy's ships. The advancing squadron consisted of a first-class battleship flying the flag of Admiral Uriu, and the cruisers Akashi, Takachiho, Naniwa and Chiyoda, as well as seven torpedo-boats, the whole convoying transports with 2,500 Japanese troops on board. The Korietz cleared her decks for action and fired—one account says that the shot was accidental—upon the rapidly approaching foe. The latter replied by discharging two torpedoes at the daring gunboat, which then retreated back into harbor. It is interesting to note that, whether the gunner of the Korietz acted under orders or not, he fired the first shot in the war, for the incident occurred several hours before the torpedo attack upon Port Arthur.

      The Japanese took no further notice of the Russian ships until the disembarkation of their troops had been carried out, a process which was commenced immediately and was carried out through the night with great celerity and in the most perfect order. In this matter, indeed, as in all the preliminary stages of the war, the operations of the Mikado's forces showed how carefully thought out were the plans of his naval and military advisers. Not a detail appeared to have been omitted, every eventuality had been skilfully calculated beforehand, and as a result the whole machinery of warfare moved like clockwork.

      By four o'clock on the morning of the 9th the process of disembarkation had been successfully completed, and the soldiers had all found their pre-arranged billets on shore. The Japanese squadron then put out to sea once more, and waited for daylight before taking any action. At seven o'clock, however, the captain of the Varyag was served with an ultimatum from Admiral Uriu declaring that hostilities had broken out between Russia and Japan, and summoning him to leave the harbor by midday. Should he refuse to do so, then the Japanese fleet would be compelled to attack the Varyag and the Korietz within the harbor. A correspondent of a London paper who was present on the spot states that the commanders of the other warships stationed at Chemulpo—namely, the British cruiser Talbot, the Italian Elba and the French Pascal, held a meeting and drew up a strong protest addressed to the Japanese Admiral against his proposal to attack the Russian vessels in a neutral port. The message was sent out in the Talbot's launch.

      The protest, however, was not needed, for the captain of the Varyag, in spite of the overwhelming disparity of forces, determined to face his enemies in the open. It was an act of conspicuous gallantry, only to be expected, it must be said, from the representative of a country whose sons, whatever their faults, have never been slow to die for her sake. The manner, too, in which the Varyag set about her voyage to inevitable destruction was well worthy of the finest naval traditions of all countries and all ages. We are told that as the drums beat to quarters, and as the doomed ship steamed out amid the cheers of the foreign crews in the port, the band