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242 THE SIEGE OF PORT ARTHUR
At East Kikuan some of the most sanguinary
encounters of the day took place during the fighrs
for the Tragedy Trench. As I have mentioned,
the 12th regiment, which made the attacks on
November 23rd and was repulsed with great losses,
had been taken out of the fighting line and placed
in reserve, and the 27th regiment of the newly-
arrived 7th Division had been put in their stead.
The Trench was taken and retaken three times at
the point of the bayonet ;
the intervening space
between the Trench and the last Japanese parallel,
which was strewn with corpses after the previous
attacks in October and November, once more
reaped a rich harvest. The next morning this
piece of ground looked, at a distance, as if covered
with a black carpet of dead bodies. Probably no
spot on earth of the same dimensions is so
saturated with the blood of brave men as this
little part of the East Kikuan hillside.
At about nine o’clock in the evening, as we sat
watching the fighting and listening to the sounds
of musketry and machine guns, trying to form an
idea of the progress of the attack, our attention
was suddenly drawn to one of the Russian search-
lights down in the lower part of Shuishi valley
which began to behave in a most peculiar and
eccentric manner. It went out and flashed forth
again with infinitesimal intervals, flickering and
beckoning deliriously ;
then it suddenly became
fixed, throwing its cone of light in the direction of
the Shuishi lunettes ;
but after a little while it
again commenced twinkling and scintillating, its
rays moving about in every direction in a most
erratic way ;
and then it suddenly went out
altogether.
Shortly after we heard a heavy fire open up in
the direction of Sungshuh Fort, which speedily
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