Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1904 PORT ARTHUR.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 10186, 21 October 1904, Page 2

Poverty Bay Herald. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. GISBORNE, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1904 PORT ARTHUR.

Onq of our cable messages to-day indicates that it is expected! at St. Petersburg that the fall of Port Arthur will take place m a fortnight. That, apparently, is the limit of endurance of the besieged garrison, whose defence of the town, it will bo admit ted) on all sides, has been truly heroic. The Japanese have, as wo anticipated months ago would bo the case, found Port Arthur a very hard nut to crack, and the policy of cndelavoring to take it by assaults being found 100 tremendously costly even for j the Mikado's men, who count their lives as nothing for their country's cau_.e, lias I given place to a policy of attrition wliich is slowly but surely wearing away the defence of the entrapped) Russians. The siego must rank as one of tbe great historical sieges of history. The attack on the fort-ftsts begsi_m with the liri't naval action m the second week m Fobruary, and on May 13th it was shut off completely from tho world' by an army larger than any used m a siege of a similar kind) sinco the fall of Sevastopol m 1855. The garrison lias now been shut m for 161 days, and if, as anticipated!, they holdout till the end of the month, the period of their endurance! will be full 171 days. The siege is noteworthy, as an American magazine points out, not only because of the numbers engaged m it, but because iit is. the first siege of a thoroughly modern fortress equipped., armed and built bj: the veiy besti. modern engineering skill. It is the first time that military experts liave liad a chance to observe tho usefulness of the more modiern defences that have been built- about the great- capitals and harbors, under the actual conditions of a siege. In the Boer war there were three great sieges, but they are not to be compared to the siego of Port Arthur m importance. Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley were small towns with unimportant defences, garrisoned by handfuls of troops, and besieged by correspondingly small bodies of men; and they were all relieved by bodies of troops serving under the same Hag. Ladysmith, however, which bad the shortest of the tires sieges, was cut off for 118 days. Captain Mahan, the eminent naval authority, makes an interesting comparison m the National Review between Port Arthur and Ladysmith. He comments: "I should imagine that there must now be much less doubt of the propriety of the Russian resolution than there was three months ago. just as I cannot but think that- as time kaxes farther behind the period' of the Boer war, there will be an increasing conviction that the occupa.tion of Ladysmith was neither an error m the beginning nor a misfortune to the future of the war. Why? Because m the first place it arrested the Boer invasion of Natal by -threatening their line of communications ; and, secondly, it detained before the besieged place a body of enemies which, m the later part- of the hostilities, would have been more for-mida-ble elsewhere. I apprehend that Port Arthur has fulfilled the same function towards the Japanese; though it saems much more evident now than at)

Port Arthur was the kej l not only to tin; naval war, but to the whole campaign, and one thing seems clear, that Kuropatkin, up to the present, has profited, and continues to profit, by the siege of Port Arthur." An interesting reference to tho present operations against Port Arthur, compared with those of the great wars of the past, is made by World's Work, which says : "In the Franco-Prus-sian war, Paris held out for 132 days, but it was starved out, and not taken by assault. In the same war, Metz held out against the Prussians for 70 days. In tho war between Russia and Turkey, m 1877, Osman Pasha defended Plevna for 94. In the American. Civil War, Vicksburg was the most important siege, but it lasted only 79 days. The greatest preceding siege of modern times was another Russian one. when the allied French, English, Italian, and Turkish troops took 11 months, m 1854 and' 1855, to make Menschikof surrendier al Sebastopol. The defences wero bo good that they bought tho enduring fame of Todleben, the engineer who constructed them. In the Napoleonic wars t-liere were few long sieges, though m 1779 the French and Spanish troops besieged Gibraltar until they got tired and stopped' m 1783. A little before that, lime, England lost one of tbe shortest but most important sieges m her history at Yorktown, which was able to hold out 0n1y,20 diiys. But m none of these did the besieged have tho advnairtrtgi-. of modern engineering skill and of modern explosives, nor the besieging army the .advantage of modern long-range guns. When the Avhole story of the siege of Port. Arthur is told the world will hear ono of the most thrilling experience m all history — horrible, too; and military engineers will gain an enormous amount of knowledge about fortifications und^r modern conditions, which they have hitherto .had to construct mainly by theory.