Forcing Port Arthur Gate

1905

One hour before midnight you could see once more the same men who had applied the explosives in the day making for their victim. The foundation of the caponiere was made of concrete, sand and steel plates. It could turn the largest and most powerful shells ever manufactured by men into a loud and foolish joke. The men carried this time a large quantity of gunpowder. This they applied to the cracks made by the former explosion.

The white heat fuse was applied. The report certainly handled the serene silence of the midnight without mercy, tore it into pieces. This time there was a large rent made in the wall. Night, once more, rocked the confusion back to peace and there came into the rent a number of Russian heads. Some of us laughed. Quick as a flash the rifles of our men greeted them. Wide as the rent was, it was not quite sufficient for men in haste to pass, and for the third time we made the preparation of explosives. At 14 minutes past 4, in the still dark hours of the 28th, the earth about us shuddered as it had never shuddered before, and we saw a hole in the wall that was over one meter in width and considerably over one meter in height.

Through this hole our engineer threw in over twelve sacks of explosives. The caponiere was choked with fume and smoke. The ash gray of the breaking day and the most sinister gray of the smoke from the explosives creeking like cowardly ghosts from the hole in the wall was broken by silvery flashes here and there. They were the icy blades of our men rushing into the caponiere through the confusion of the explosion. A crash of arms, groans, sounds of failing bodies, of broken steel, shrieks with which the life flew away from the clay, all mingled and melted in a confusion far beyond pen and brush. A few moments later the sun-round flag waved from out of a torn hole over the covered caponiere a welcome to the new-born day. — Leslie's Monthly.

Wikipedia: Port Arthur, Manchuria. 1904, the starting battle of the Russo-Japanese War.