Image:RusShellJapLine1905.jpg

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RusShellJapLine1905.jpg‎ (15KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Russo-Japanese War view, scanned from a Stereoscope card, published in 1905. Caption: "Russian 500-lb. shell bursting near the Japanese siege guns -- Port Arthur".

The back of the card has this text:

Position: In a valley between two and three miles north of Porth Arthur.

Direction: About southwest.

Surroundings: Barren, brown hills, several of them much higher than the one ahead, with a valley of farms and Manchu villages off at the rear.

Outlook: That fiery outburst of smoke and flame and stones and earth and splintered steel is where a shell from one of the Russian forts is just bursting as it strikes the ground. It is liable to kill anywhere within a hundred yards; it merely happened that none of the death-dealing fragments struck the photographer and his camera. This stereograph which he did succeed in making is one of themost remarkable things ever produced by photography. Five minutes after this negative was made, another Russian shell hit the Japanese siege gun which you see at the extreme right, putting it out of action.

The Russian shell-fire is directed over here in order to destroy this gun -- one of the eighteen huge 11-inch guns that the Japanese call their "Osaka babies". It is with these 11-inch mortars that the Russian forts at Port Arthur are being pounded into submission and the Russian battle ships over in the harbor smashed into hopeless wreck. The guns were brought part way from Dalny by rail, then hauled a mile and a half on huge rollers by gangs of 250 men.

Kennan, the famous war correspondent, says of the approach of the Russian shells like this one now bursting: "To me the Russian shells always seemed to say 'Here I come, Here I come, HERE I COME, HERE I COME, BANG!' I was always prepared for sudden death."


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