Indiscreet Letters From Peking Part 10

There was a general alarm the other night when I happened to be off duty, and I stopped in front of the bell-tower to see it all. The last reserve tumbled from their sleeping-places in various stages of deshabille, all talking excitedly. The women had too much sense to move a great deal, although the alarm might be a signal for anything.

A few of them got up, too, and came out into the open; but the majority stayed where they were. Presently the commander-in chief appeared in person in his pyjamas, twirling his moustaches, and listened to the increasing fusillade and cannonade directed against the outposts. The din and roar, judged by the din and roar of every-day life, may have been nerve-breaking, but to any one who had been so close to it for eighteen days it was nothing exceptional. The night attack, which had been heralded after the usual manner by a fierce blowing of trumpets, simply meant thousands of rifles crashing off together, and as far as the British Legation was concerned, you might stand just as safely there as on the Boulevard des Italiens or in Piccadilly. There was a tremendous noise, and swarms of bullets pa.s.sing overhead, but that was all. The time had not arrived for actual a.s.saults to be delivered; there was too much open ground to be covered.

The groups of reserves stood and listened in awe, the commander-in-chief twirled his moustaches with composure, and two or three other refugee Plenipotentiaries slipped out and nervously waited the upshot of it all. It was a very curious scene. Well, the fusillade soon reached the limit of its _crescendo_, and then with delighted sighs, the _diminuendo_ could plainly be divined. The Chinese riflemen, having blazed off many rounds of ammunition, and finding their rifle barrels uncomfortably warm, were plainly pulling them out of their loopholes and leaning them up against the barricades. The _diminuendo_ became more and more marked, and finally, except for the usual snipers' shots, all was over. So the reserves were dismissed and went contentedly off to bed. As far as the actual defence was concerned, this comedy might have been left unplayed. In the dense gloom those men could never have been moved anywhere. Such a manoeuvre would have brought about a panic at once, for there is little mutual confidence, and nothing has been done to promote it.

At first, in the hurry and scurry and confusion of the initial attacks, when everything and everybody was unprepared and upset, this state of things escaped attention. Now all the fighting line is becoming openly discontented. There is favouritism and incompetency in everything that is being done. Two days ago a young Scotch volunteer got killed almost on purpose, because he was sick and tired of the cowardice and indecision. And now, not content with all this, there is a new folly. An alleged searchlight has been seen flickering on the skies at night, and M----, the British Minister, has in a burst of optimism declared that it is the relief under S---- signalling to us.

Yet there are men who know exactly what it is--the opening of the doors of a blast-furnace in the Chinese city, which sends up a ruddy light in certain weather.

Discipline is becoming bad, too, and sailors and volunteers off duty are looting the few foreign stores enclosed in our lines. Everything is being taken, and the native Christians, finding this out, have been pouring in bands when the firing ceases and wrecking everything which they cannot carry away.

A German marine killed one, and several have been dangerously wounded.

In our present condition anything is possible. Still, the fortification work is proceeding steadily, and the appearance of the base, the British Legation, has been miraculously changed. Enormous quant.i.ties of sandbags have been turned out and placed in position, and all the walls are now loopholed. With all this access of strength, we are much more secure, and yet our best contingents are being very slowly but very continuously shot to pieces. Our casualty list is now well into the second hundred, and as the line of defenders thins, the men are becoming more savage. In addition to looting, there have been a number of attempts on the native girl converts, which have been hushed up.... Ugly signs are everywhere, and the position becomes from day to day less enviable.

X

THE GUNS

10th July, 1900.

Had we a single gun how different it would be! We could parade it boldly under the enemy's nose; sweep his barricades and his advanced lines away in a cloud of dust and brick-chips; bombard his camps which we have located; make him sorry and ashamed ... as it is we can do nothing; we have not a single piece which can be called serious artillery; and we must suffer the segment which the enemy affects in almost complete silence. Listen to our list of weapons.

First, there is the Italian one-pounder firing ballist.i.te. It is absolutely useless. Its snapping sh.e.l.ls are so small that you can thrust them in your pocket without noticing them. This gun is merely a plaything. And yet being the best we have, it is wheeled unendingly around and fired at the enemy from a dozen different points. It may give confidence, but that is all it can give. The other day I watched it at work on a heavy barricade being constructed by night and day by the methodical enemy. By night the Chinese soldiery work as openly as they please, for no outpost may waste its ammunition by indiscriminate shooting. But during the day, orders or no orders, it has become rash for the enemy to expose himself to our view; and even the fleeting glimpse of a moving hand is made the excuse for a hailstorm of fire.

This has made excessive caution the order of the day, and you can almost believe, when no rifles are firing to disturb such a conviction, that there are only dead men round us. Yet with nothing to be seen, countless hands are at work; in spite of the greatest vigilance barricades and barriers grow up nearer and nearer to us both night and day; we are being tied in tighter. These mysterious barricades, built in parallels, are so cunningly constructed that our fiercest sorties must in the end beat themselves to pieces against brick and stone; if the enemy can complete his plans we shall be choked silently. That is why the Italian gun is so often requisitioned.

I was saying that I watched the one-pounder at work against the enemy's brick-bound lines. Each time, as ammunition is becoming precious, the gun was more carefully sighted and fired, and each time, with a little crash, the baby sh.e.l.l shot through the barricades, boring a ragged hole six or eight inches in diameter. Two or three times this might always be accomplished with everything on the Chinese side silent as death. The cunning enemy! Then suddenly, as the gun was shifted a bit to continue the work of ripping up that barricade, attention would be distracted, and before you could explain it the ragged holes would be no more. Unseen hands had repaired the damage by pushing up dozens of bricks and sandbags, and before the game could be opened again, unseen rifles were rolling off in their dozens and tearing the crests of our outworks. In that storm of brick-chips, split sandbags and dented nickel, you could not move or reply. That is the Italian gun.

The next most useful weapon should be the Austrian machine-gun, which is a very modern weapon, and throws Mannlicher bullets at the rate of six hundred to the minute. Yet it, too, is practically useless. It has been tried everywhere and found to be defective. When it rattles at full speed, it has been seen that its sighting is illusory--that it throws erratically high in the air, and that ammunition is simply wasted. It cannot help us in the slightest. The value of machine-guns has been always overrated.

Then there is a Nordenfeldt belonging to the British marines, and a very small Colt, which was brought up by the Americans. The Nordenfeldt is absolutely useless and now refuses to work; the Colt is so small, being single-barrelled, that it can only do boy's work. Yet this Colt is the most satisfactory of all, and when we have dragged it out with us and played it on the enemy, it has shot true and straight.

They say it has killed more men than all the rest put together....

There should be a Russian gun, too--a good Russian gun of respectable calibre. But although the sh.e.l.ls were brought, a thousand of them, too, the gun was forgotten at the Tientsin Station! Such a thing could only happen to Russians, everybody says. But some people say it was forgotten on purpose, because De G---- had received absolute a.s.surance from the Chinese Government that the Russian Legation would not be attacked under any circ.u.mstances, and that sailors were only brought up to keep faith with the other Powers....

This miserable list, as you will see, means that we have nothing with which to reply to the enemy's fire. We are not so proud and foolish as to wish to silence the guns ranged against us, but, at least, we should be able to make some reply. In desperation, the sailor-gunners tried to manufacture a crude piece of ordnance by lashing iron and steel together, and encasing it in wood. Fortunately it was never fired, for in the nick of time an old rusty muzzle-loader has been discovered in a blacksmith's shop within our lines, and has been made to fire the Russian ammunition by the exercise of much ingenuity. It belches forth mainly flames, and smokes and makes a terrific report.

Some say this is as useful as a modern twelve-pounder....

About the Chinese guns we can find out very little, excepting that none, or very few, of the modern weapons which are in stock at Peking have been used against us. There are at most only nine or ten in constant use; perhaps the others have been dragged away down the long Tientsin road. But even these nine or ten, if they were worked together, would nearly wreck us. Our sorties have pushed some of them back.

Two of these guns are being fired at us from a staging on the Palace wall--sometimes regularly and persistently, sometimes as if they had fallen under the influence of the conflicting factors which are struggling to win the day in the Palace. If they bombarded us without intermission for twenty-four hours, they would render the British Legation almost untenable. Two or three more guns are on the Tartar Wall; three or four are ranged against the Su w.a.n.g-fu and French lines; some are kept travelling round us searching for a weak spot.

They have no system or fire-discipline. Some use shrapnel and segment; others fire solid round shot all covered with rust. Silent sometimes with a mysterious silence for days at a time, they come to life again suddenly in a blaze of activity, and wreak more ruin in a few minutes than weeks of rifle fusillade and days of firing on the fringe of outer buildings. And yet we cannot complain. We have so many walls, so many houses, so many trees, so many obstructions of every kind, that they cannot get a clear view of anything. These singing sh.e.l.ls, which might breach any one part, were the guns ma.s.sed and their fire continuous, are sneered at by most of us already. Provided you can lie low, sh.e.l.l-fire soon loses even its moral effect.

XI

SNIPING

The siege has now become such a regular business with everyone that there are almost rules and regulations, which, if not promulgated among besieged and besiegers, are, at least, more or less understood things. Thus, for instance, after one or two in the morning the crashing of rifles around us is always quite stilled; the gunners have long ceased paying us their attentions, and a certain placid calmness comes over all. The moon may then be aloft in the skies; and if it is, the Tartar Wall stands out clear and black, while the ruined entrenchments about us are flooded in a silver light which makes the sordidness of our surroundings instantly disappear in the enchantment of night. Our little world is tired; we have all had enough; and even though they may run the risk of being court-martialled, it is always fairly certain that by three or four in the morning half the outposts and the picquets will be dead asleep. It was not like that in the beginning, for then n.o.body slept much night or day; and if one did, it was only to awake with a moan, the result of some weird nightmare.

Now with the weeks which have gone by since we broke off relations with the rest of the world it is quite different, and we pander to our little weakness of forty winks before a loophole, although orderly officers may stumble by all night on their rounds and curse and swear at this state of affairs. By training yourself, however, I have found that you can practically sleep like a dog, with one eye open and both ears on the alert--that light slumber which the faintest stirring immediately breaks; when you are like this you can do your duty at a loophole.

It is such dull work, too, in front of the eternal loopholes, with nothing but darkness and thick shadows around you, and the rest of a post of four or five men vigorously snoring. The first half hour goes fairly quickly, and, perhaps even the second; but the last hour is dreary, tiresome work. And when your two hours are up, and contentedly you kick your relief on the ground beside you, he only moans faintly, but does not stir. Dead with sleep is he. Then you kick him again with all that zest which comes from a sense of your own lost slumbers, and once more he moans in his fatigue, more loudly this time, but still he does not move.

Finally, in angry despair you land the b.u.t.t of your rifle brutally on his chest, and he will start up with a cry or an oath.

"Time," you mutter. The relief grumblingly rises to his feet, rubbing his glued eyes violently, and asks you if there is anything.

"Nothing," you answer curtly. It is always nothing, for although the enemy's barricades rear themselves perhaps not more than twenty or thirty feet from where you stand, you know that it takes a l.u.s.ty stomach to rush that distance and climb your fortifications and ditches in the dark in the face of the furious fire which sooner or later would burst out. For we understand our work now. Experience is the only schoolmaster.

So with your two hours on and your four hours off the night spends itself and dawn blushes in the skies. It is in all truth weary work, those long watches of the night.... Sometimes even your four hours'

sleeping time is rudely broken into by half a dozen alarms; for separated sometimes by hundreds of feet from your comrades of the next post, the instinct of self-preservation makes you line your loopholes and peer anxiously into the gloom beyond, when any one of the enemy shows that he is afoot. A single rifle-shot spitting off near by is as often as not the cause of the alarm; for that rifle-shot cracking out discordantly and awakening the echoes may be the signal for the dread rush which would spell the beginning of the end. Once one line is broken into we know instinctively that the confusion which would follow would engulf us all. There is no confidence....

When you have time you may relieve his monotony by sniping.

In the early morning, the very early morning, is the time for this work--say, roughly, between the hours of four and six, when the soldier Chinaman beyond our lines is yawningly arousing himself from his slumbers and squats blinking and inattentive before his morning tea. Then if you are a natural hunter, are inclined to risk a good deal, and something of a quick shot, you may have splendid chances which teach you more than you could ever learn by months in front of targets. Baron von R----, the cynical commander of the Russian detachment, is the crack sniper of us all, because he has not a great deal to do in the daytime, and, also, because beyond his lines of the Russian Legation all is generally quiet with a curious and suggestive quietness. At four in the morning R----, with his sailor's habits, generally rises, shakes himself like a dog, lights his eternal Russian cigarette, takes a few whiffs, and then sallies forth with a Mannlicher carbine and a clip of five cartridges. His sailors are duly warned to cover him if he has to retire in disorder, but so far he has met with no mishap. Cautiously pushing out beyond his barricades, he climbs a ruined wall, reaches the top and buries himself in the dust in pleasant antic.i.p.ation of what will follow.

Presently he is rewarded. A Chinese brave comes out into the open, selects a corner, and sits down to smoke under cover of a barricade.

The Baron pushes his clip of cartridges deliberately into the magazine, shoots one into the rifle barrel through the feed, and then very cautiously and very slowly draws a steady bead on the man. I have seen him at work. Five seconds may go by, perhaps even ten, for the Baron allows himself only one shot in each case, and then bang! the bullet speeds on its way, and the Chinaman rolls over bored through and through. On a good day the bag may be two or three; on a bad day the Russian commander returns with his five cartridges intact and a persistent Russian shrug, for he never fires in vain, and there are certain canons in this sport which he does not care to violate lightly.

Myself, enamoured with this game, after I had watched the Russian commander two mornings, I, too, determined that I would embark on it, although I have no such leisure in the early hours. Eleven or twelve o'clock in the bright sunlight has become my hour, when the sun beats down hotly on our heads, and everyone is drowsy with the noon-heat.

Then you may also catch the Chinaman smoking and drinking his tea once again, and if you are quick a dead man is your reward. Every dead man puts another drop of caution into the attackers. It is therefore good and useful.

Yesterday I had great luck, for I got three men within very few minutes of one another; and then when I was fondly imagining that I might pick off dozens more from my coign of vantage, I was swept back into our lines under such a storm of fire as I have never experienced before. I should tell you that there are practically only two shooting-grounds where this curious sport may be had; there are only two areas of brick and ruins where by judicious manoeuvring you may steal out and get the enemy on his exposed flank where no barricades protect him from an enfilading fire. These two areas lie opposite the Russian front, and beyond the extreme j.a.panese western posts of the Su w.a.n.g-fu. Since the Russian front is the Russian commander's own preserve, it is from the j.a.panese posts that I work.

On the day when I made my record bag, half-past eleven found everybody drowsy and the time propitious. Our northern Peking sun beats down pitilessly from the cloudless skies at such a time, and so I had the field completely to myself. Firing had ceased absolutely on all sides, and the Chinese had begun to sleep. Crouching low down I scurried across from the j.a.panese post to some ruins fifty feet off, and remained quietly squatting there, panting in the heat, to get myself bearings. Around me all was silent, and thirty or forty yards from where I lay I could see the brown face of the j.a.panese sailor laughing at me through a loophole. Presently bringing my gla.s.ses into play I swept the huge pile of ruined houses and streets lying huddled on all sides.

There was not a twig stirring or a shadow moving. All was dead quiet.

The main Chinese camp on this side was placed in H----'s abandoned compounds--that we had discovered long ago--but the battalions there were now apparently asleep with not so much as a sentry out. So, gaining confidence, I pushed on, working parallel to Prince Su's outer walls and about fifty feet beyond them. Suddenly I stopped and dropped, quite by instinct, for although my mind had telegraphed the danger to my knees, I did not fully realise what it was until I was on the ground. Just round the corner there was a glimpse of three men stripped to the waist to be seen. Had they seen me? I waited in some suspense for a few seconds pressed my gla.s.ses back into their case, and gripped my rifle. My anxiety was soon set at rest, for with a clatter, which seemed ten times greater than it really was, the men set quickly to work on a structure. They were building something, and now was my chance. Getting to the corner again I peered cautiously around, and there but seventy or eighty feet from where I lay three strapping fellows were raising a heavy log. They had pulled off their red and black tunics, and were only in their baggy breeches and the curious little stomach ap.r.o.n the Northern Chinaman affects to keep himself from catching cold.

Their brown backs glistened with sweat in the bright sunshine, and between their belts and the loose black turbans, under which their pigtails were gathered up, an ideal two-feet target presented itself.

Carefully I fired.

In a flash one broad brown back was suddenly splashed with red, a fellow sank on his knees with outstretched arms, and at last rolled over without a moan, apparently as dead as dead could be. It was brutalising.

The log the men were carrying crashed down heavily on the ground and the two remaining soldiers started back in surprise. From whence came that shot? In front of where they were working lay their advanced posts, which, facing our own, two or three hundred feet away, should completely cover them. They peered around for a few minutes, anxiously searching their front and not looking behind them. At last they apparently decided that it must have been a stray shot, for, bending down, they once more raised the log, paying no more attention to their dead companion than they would to a dead dog.

This time I let them advance towards their outposts until they were a hundred feet farther away. Then I fired again. The log came down once more with a dull thud, and both the men fell as well. But imagine my disgust when they both rose to their feet, one man merely showing the other a snipped shoulder which must be bleeding, but was evidently nothing as a wound. I cursed my government rifle, which always throws to the right. At less than a hundred yards such practice was disgraceful. This time both the men were aroused, and, abandoning their log, they disappeared round some ruins, only to reappear with their tunics on, their bandoliers strapped round them, and their Mausers in their hands. They meant to have some revenge. I lost sight of them for quite ten minutes, only to have them both out again almost halfway between myself and the j.a.panese posts from which I had sallied forth. I was cut off! I would have to wipe those two men out or else they would do that to me.

They were in no hurry, however, for they began by beating the ground carefully and taking advantage of every piece of cover. They evidently suspected that some of our men had come out in skirmishing order and were still lying hidden; at last one saw something. He had caught sight of the j.a.panese sentry who was looking out anxiously to see what had become of me. So rising hurriedly, the soldier fired at the brown j.a.panese face. Before he had sunk on his knees again I had drilled him fair with a snapshot--in the head it must have been, because he went over with a piercing yell and with his hands plucking at his cap. The other man did not wait to see what would happen, but fled as fast as he could down a small lane that ran only twenty feet past me. Seeing the game was played out, I rose and fired rapidly from under the crook of my arm and missed. Reloading as I scrambled after him, I drove another bullet at him, and he staggered wildly but did not fall. My blood was now up, and I was determined to get him, even if I had to follow into the Chinese camp, so I sped along too. The fellow was now yelling l.u.s.tily, calling his comrades to his aid, and I seemed to be going mad in my excitement. I fired again as I ran, and must have hit him again, for he reeled still more; then he turned totteringly into a ruined doorway....