The Battle or the Yalu                113
negation of accuracy, but also the negation of individualism and wide extensions. Occasionally it has its use as a reassert ion of discipline on rallied troops ; for very deliberate very long range fire at a large, slowly moving, or stationary object, and for both offence and defence in night attacks, but for the general purposes of war it is dead as the dodo.
Altogether, I take it then, the Japanese were in luck to have had volley-firing Russians behind the parapets, instead of a few hundred Boer sharpshooters. The Russian trenches were similarly placed to those from which the old Boer warned his little nephew firing at his side not to hurry, and to continue still to take careful aim; " for," said he, " notwithstanding the Eooineks are now only 400 paces from us, and are coming on bravely enough, not a man of them can ever reach you here if you hit one with every three cartridges, as you were taught to do with the springbok under pain of a whipping." The Boers, it must be allowed, would have been invisible, whereas the Russians were plainly to be seen, not only by the infantry of the attack, but also by its artillery, which makes a considerable difference. There can be no doubt that showers of shrapnel and ceaseless hairbreadth escapes from bullets tend to make the aim of even the best soldier considerably less accurate than when he is well concealed and firing through a good loophole, whereas the indifferent soldier is only too apt to stick his head down and fire at random, if he fires ataU.
Bad as the Russian marksmanship is acknowledged on all hands to have been, still the ground was so open and showed up so well the dark uniforms of the Japanese in their close formations that they suffered