In this way accurate fire may be brought to bear on the assault on the darkest night, and many night attacks were repulsed with machine-gun fire by the Russians at Port Arthur. Sir G. S. Clarke says: 'The front faces of the forts were retrenched in some cases by obstacles and a line of field parapet across the terre-plein. These, with the assistance of machine guns brought up at the last moment, enabled assaults of the breaches formed by the mines to be repulsed." Again, "The Russians used machine guns with effect, frequently concealing them in light blind-*ages, so that their positions could not be detected until they were brought to bear upon an attacking force."
The war correspondent Mr. F. Villiers, in his book Three Months with the Besiegers, speaking of the storming of West Panlung Redoubt,[A] says: "The death-dealing machine guns of the Russians in the casemates of the fort are playing ghastly havoc—such havoc that only a score or more of Ouchi's battalions reached the first ditch of the fence, where they threw themselves panting into the grateful cover of the pits their own artillery have torn."
The number of machine guns allotted to the permanent works of Port Arthur is given as 38 by the United States Official Report, while Nojine, in The Truth about Port Arthur, gives them in detail as 28, the distribution of which is shown in red figures on the map at the
[Footnote A: See map; the Japanese name for this work is Ban-ru-san Nishi
