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102 THE SIEGE OF PORT ARTHUR
Their guns had proved quite ineffective against
the strong forts. The bombardment, lasting for
several days, had been very violent, and the
silence of the enemy’s guns led them to believe
that their own fire had compelled the Russian
gunners to keep to their bomb-proofs and made
it impossible for them to man their guns. Then
later they had found that these same “ silenced
”
guns suddenly opened fire, playing havoc with
the attacking forces.
They believed that they had discouraged and
demoralized the garrison by the long-sustained,
heavy bombardment, and they found, on the
contrary, that the Russians had come out from
their positions and met and beaten them in the
open field.
It was a hard blow to the Japanese to learn
that they had been wrong in their calculations
everywhere as to the strength of the fortress, the
effectiveness of their own offensive power, and
the moral and numerical weakness of the enemy
and it took them some days to swallow and digest
the bitter pill. But this state of things did not
last long. The Japanese soldier is a man in the
full significance of the word. It was hard to
acknowledge themselves beaten—for the first
time in this war ;
but once they had realized this
fact and that the methods they had adopted to
gain their ends had been unavailing, they did not
sit down and ponder over what might have been,
and they did not, like the Russians at Plevna,
obstinately adhere to the same methods and go
on running their heads against the wall. They
manfully accepted the situation and set to work
to reach their goal by other means and along
other roads. They realized that it was hopeless
to attack the fortress across open fields, leaving
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