Chapter XLIII

WHY DID GENERAL STOESSEL SURRENDER?

It may seem ungenerous to attempt to pluck a few leaves from the laurels that adorn the brow of General Stoessel. But even contemporary history--ever indulgent toward splendid failure--ends by groping for the truth. When paeans are exhausted and the defender of Port Arthur is arraigned for criticism, his reputation is in danger of the reaction that follows a surfeit of praise. The Japanese, who are generous apologists of an enemy that kept them at bay for five months, wonder why the fortress surrendered. Knowledge of the stores of ammunition and food in Port Arthur and of the conditions of the garrison has satisfied them that the city might have been defended for another three months. Even Russian officers--military as well as naval--admit that they might have struggled one more month.

[Illustration: Japanese marching into Port Arthur.]

[Illustration: Snapshot of Madame Stoessel.]

The capitulation of a fortress is justifiable on four grounds. The purpose for which it is maintained may cease to exist; its defences may be so weak as to lay it open to immediate capture by assault; its ammunition and food may be exhausted; and the condition of the garrison from wounds and sickness may turn the balance of humanity against that of military expediency. Each of these reasons has been advanced in support of the surrender of Port Arthur. Let us consider them in the order of their importance.

Had the purpose for which the fortress was defended ceased to exist? Port Arthur served two objects. Primarily it was a naval base, and the hope of Russia was that the battleships and cruisers in its harbours would in due time raise the blockade and co-operate with the Baltic fleet. To this end, according to Admiral Wiren, the remnant of the Pacific squadron sought to preserve its existence by avoiding engagement with the overwhelming force of the enemy. The capture of 203 Metre Hill and the consequent destruction of the ships removed that hope and with it one purpose of the defence. There was, however, another object of almost equal importance. No one who was familiar with the conditions in Manchuria could doubt that the retention of Port Arthur seriously embarrassed the operations of Field-Marshal Oyama. It robbed the Japanese of the fruit of victory at Liao-yang, and reduced them to three months inactivity before Mukden. Every day that General Stoessel held out brought reinforcements to General Kuropatkin, and kept from him an army of one hundred thousand men experienced in the most desperate school of war. For that reason General Stoessel ought to have kept his flag flying over Port Arthur until the last shot had been spent.

Were the defences so weak as to lay the fortress open to capture by assault? General Reiss, Chief of the Staff, and, probably, General Stoessel himself, held that opinion, and sought to avert the horrors of a citadel taken by storm. The situation at the moment of surrender may be briefly described. On the morning of December 31st the Japanese destroyed Sungshushan at the Western extremity of the Eastern fort ridge--the centre of the main line of defensive works. Sungshushan occupied a strong natural position, though it was under fire from the supporting fort and could be enfiladed from Idjesham--also a strong fort--and from Antzushan, a battery position, across the gorge of Suishiyei valley. These three positions remained to the last in the hands of the Russians. Late in the afternoon of the 31st the Japanese advanced from Sungshushan and seized the battery position, known as Eboshiyama, to the rear of the fort. At the same time the 9th Division made an assault on the Chinese wall, breached it near East Panlung, and, pouring through the gap, drove the enemy along the trenches to the neck between H. fort and Bodai, or Wantai. Before midnight General Nogi was in possession of all the higher hills of the fort ridge from East Panlung Westward to Sungshushan, except the supporting fort. On the first day of the new year the assaulting force was under the battery position of Bodai--a lofty height on the narrow peak of which were posted two six-inch guns. Again and again this hill was stormed, and was finally carried with a brilliant rush.

From Bodai the Japanese looked down over the second line of defences into the heart of the city. During the night of January 1st--after negotiations for the capitulation had begun--when the Russians were busy exploding their battle ships with torpedoes and sinking small vessels at the entrance to the harbour, the Japanese advanced from Bodai to the back of East Keekwan. At two o’clock next morning the enemy blew up several mines in the concrete foundations of that fort and reduced it to a heap of _débris_. At dawn of the day on which the capitulation was signed the Japanese held the Western half of the Eastern fort ridge from East Keekwan to Sungshushan, and were firmly established along the centre of the main line of defensive works.

The second line of defence has been described as “strong”--a term that can hardly be applied to a line of entrenched hills dominated by the fort ridge in possession of an enemy. The fact is that experience revealed serious defects in the natural strength of Port Arthur. In some respects the Russian line was admirable for defence. It had a clear field of fire, excellent observation points, and commanded mutual support among the forts. But it had one grave and incurable defect. The line of forts was too near to the city, so that magazines, workshops, supply depôts, and barracks were under constant fire from the line of hills parallel to, and only four thousand yards from, the forts.

The question whether, under these conditions, the citadel was in immediate danger of capture by assault is one upon which experts will differ. It must, however, be borne in mind that the Japanese were not likely to renew the attacks that ended so disastrously in August and September. Experience had taught them to temper the bayonet with the sap and the mine. They had reconciled themselves to a scientific siege, and would not easily have been tempted to abandon this slow yet sure method for the hazard of another series of hand-to-hand encounters. Had General Stoessel been resolute to resist to the end there were positions still capable of defence that could have been reduced only by weeks of sapping and mining.

I come now to the chief reason assigned by General Stoessel, General Reiss, and naval and military officers, with many of whom I discussed the subject:--That ammunition and food were running short. Except in an official report of General Stoessel, it was never pretended that these supplies were exhausted. The Japanese declared that when they entered Port Arthur they found one of the principal magazines untouched. This, Russian officers emphatically denied. They asserted that the only shells were those in the forts, that there was no reserve of heavy ammunition, and that the magazine contained nothing save shells for small quick-firing naval guns. Of powder and rifle cartridges they acknowledged that there was a limited supply, and the shallow waters of the harbour showed that many shells and rifles were deliberately thrown away. Official statistics published by the Japanese gave the number of shells left in the fortress at 82,670. We were not told whether they were for heavy or for light guns, though we may fairly assume that the greater part were for heavy artillery. Moreover the Russians were able to make use of the eleven-inch howitzer shells of the Japanese, a small proportion of which remained unexploded owing to the nature of the soil where they struck. The difference in the rifling of the Russian and Japanese guns made these shells available. Of rifle cartridges there remained 2,266,800, together with over thirty tons of powder, and the means of converting it into small-arms ammunition. These supplies cannot be described as great, yet they would have sufficed to prolong the defence for at least one month.

Food was abundant, and it can never be maintained that the garrison was on the edge of starvation. Some figures put this contention out of court. There were in Port Arthur at the time of surrender--1,422,000 lbs. of flour, 4,400 lbs. of barley, 176,000 lbs. of crushed wheat, 2,970 lbs. of rice, 30,800 lbs. of mealie meal or maize, 132,000 lbs. of biscuit, 77,000 lbs. of corned beef, 770,000 lbs. of salt, 44,000 lbs. of sugar, 1,375,000 lbs. of beans, 1,900 horses in fine condition, and 50,000 roubles in cash. In the naval depôt were five hundred tons of biscuit, 250 tons of new flour--brought one month before by the “King Arthur”--400 tons of flour of earlier import, 40 tons of sugar, 2 tons of butter, some barrels of salt beef, 75,000 tons of Cardiff coal, 15,000 tons of briquette coal, and 55,000 tons of Japanese coal.

There was an almost inexhaustible store of vodka, beer, champagne and other wines--“too great a store,” was the significant comment of a Russian admiral. Tobacco, cigars and cigarettes were in abundance. No private stores were commandeered, and civilians who had foresight or money suffered no privation--fresh beef, pork, poultry and other luxuries being obtainable at a price. The poor, for the most part, lived on black bread and tea--a diet not less nutritious than that of the Japanese soldiers, and one to which the Russian peasant and soldier is well accustomed. There was no lack of water, and vegetables alone were wanting.

The civilian population, which included five hundred women and children, looked in good health, and readily admitted that they had suffered little or nothing from disease or scarcity of supplies. Only seventy-five, including Chinese, had been killed or wounded by shell fire--about one-third of the number of civilians injured by casual shell fire in Ladysmith. It is due to the garrison also to state that every officer with whom I spoke made no pretence of having suffered from failure of food supplies. When a Russian officer admits so much you may rest content that he lived in comparative comfort. The men who marched to Pigeon Bay and thence to the railway station showed no signs of starvation. Many had just been discharged from hospital, and nine thousand five hundred had been almost continuously on duty in the forts. Yet they were able to march nearly twenty miles and to bivouack in the open. I could not help contrasting their appearance with that of the garrison in Ladysmith during the last days of the siege. When Sir George White sent a few companies of picked men to try and cut off the retreating Boers, the men were able to walk only three or four miles and had to be carried back to Ladysmith.

There remains the fourth justification for surrender--a justification that may be pleaded by humanitarians, but not by those who believe that the first duty of a commander in the field is toward the living and not toward the dead and dying. The condition of the sick and wounded in Port Arthur was undoubtedly deplorable. Yet it was not so terrible as the first Russian statements led us to believe. In his despatch to the Czar, dated December 28th, General Stoessel wrote:--“The position of the fortress is becoming very painful, our principal enemies are scurvy, which is mowing down men, and eleven-inch shells which know no obstacle, and against which there is no protection. There remain only a few who have not been attacked by scurvy. We have taken all possible measures, but the disease is spreading. The passive endurance of the enemy’s bombardment, the eleven-inch shells, the impossibility of replying for want of ammunition, the outbreak of scurvy, and the loss of a mass of officers--all these causes diminish daily the capabilities of the defence, and the tale of losses of higher officers is an indication of the enormous losses we have sustained.” At the conference which arranged the terms of surrender, Count Ballaschoff, chief of the Red Cross Society, stated that in the hospitals were over twenty thousand sick and wounded, for whom there were neither drugs nor bandages. That number was afterwards reduced to fifteen thousand. At the same time we were told that when communication with the North was broken the garrison in Port Arthur--exclusive of naval men--numbered 35,000; that between fifteen and sixteen thousand had died during the siege, and that there remained only between nine and ten thousand combatants, of whom five thousand were effective. We were also informed that fifty per cent. of the officers had been killed, and that only twenty-eight officers had passed through the ordeal unscathed.

It is impossible to reconcile these statements with the ascertained facts. Exclusive of those in hospital there actually surrendered 28,562 soldiers and naval men, not counting volunteers. They are accounted for thus:--Generals, 8; field officers, 57; officers below field rank, 531; officers in civilian branches, 99; surgeons, 109; chaplains, 13; non-commissioned officers and men, 22,434--total for the army, 23,251. Admirals, 4; captains of ships, 100; lieutenants, 200; chaplains, 7; sailors and marines, 4,500; civilian officers of the navy, 500--total for the navy, 5,311. In addition to these were 3,645 men described as non-combatants, all of whom had either served in the army or were liable to be called to the colours, and most of whom had been volunteers during the siege. With few exceptions these 32,207 men were able to walk twenty miles to the railway outside Port Arthur, and to endure the exposure of a winter without bivouack without any apparent suffering. Moreover, when it became known that they were to be deported to Japan four thousand patients quitted the hospitals, fearing, as one of their own officers did not scruple to say to me, that they might be released and sent back to the war!

These figures--even more than the appearance of the prisoners and their capacity to perform a long march--show that the conditions of the garrison was not so terrible as it was represented by the Russians. Among the sick and wounded the suffering was great--as it must always be in an invested and bombarded city--and General Stoessel may have succumbed to the imperative calls of humanity. History will pronounce judgment upon his action, and will, doubtless, say that it was at least premature. Meanwhile, the impression must prevail that the last days of Port Arthur were less glorious than the first, and that it was the General, and not the garrison that surrendered.