midst. A pent-house falls and crushes half a platoon beneath it. A bevy of terror-stricken women and children, bolted by flame, shell, and sights of death from their hiding places, dash blindly for the open-a moment, and they too swell the tale of massacre. The full-throated war-cry of Japan is dead. A thin wail of Banzai! goes up, an officer seizes the emblem of the rising sun, and, bending low to meet the leaden blizzard, dashes for the slope. Where ten minutes ago he had had a company to follow him, he now finds ten or fifteen men. To right and left little knots of desperate infantrymen dash out into the fury of the blast-only to wither before it. For perhaps ten seconds the colour is erect and falters onward. Then it is down. Mahtsomoto is at his captain's heel he seizes the loved emblem and raises it again. He turns back to wave it, and is swept from his legs; he struggles to his knees; the flag is upright again, for one second only, and then as if by magic the firing stops, and for one second the Russians jump up upon their works, and wave their caps and shout the shout of victory. The two Japanese battalions which furnished the forlorn-hope have ceased to exist. The Russians cheered, and then the Japanese supporting artillery reopened, and the struggle returned to its normal state. The forlorn-hope had failed-but what did that matter? were there not forty thousand as good infantry massed behind the ridge, prepared to carry on the desperate work which the two lost battalions had begun? By sunset the Japanese had carried this work, and the whole line of Russian defences went with it. The large a scale that it screens the whole expanse of wall at one end of the room. shortest of the three men holds a telegram in his hand, and as he reads from it one of the members of the Triumvirate runs his finger along the red line which seems to bifurcate the suspended chart. Having satisfied themselves that the reading of the map synchronises with the information contained in the telegram, the three men group round the table in the centre of the room. These three are worthy of close observation, for they form the Triumvirate that E |