Indiscreet Letters From Peking Part 4

The blood was rising to our men's heads badly by now, and I saw several who could stand it no longer stabbing at the few dead Boxers we had secured. We had none of us imagined we were coming to such scenes as these; for n.o.body would have believed that such brutal things were possible. When we judged we had finished rescuing every one alive, a man in the most pitiable condition ran out from behind the smouldering cathedral carrying a newly severed human head in either hand. He seemed but little abashed when he saw us, but came forward rapidly enough towards us, glancing the while over his shoulder. Several sailors were rushing at him with their bayonets, ready to spit him, when he fell on his knees, and, tearing open his tunic, disclosed to our astonished eyes a bronze crucifix with a silver Christ hung on it. "_Je suis catholique_," he cried to us repeatedly and rapidly in fair French, and the sailors stayed their cold steel until we had extracted an explication. Then it transpired that he had used this horrible device to escape the notice of some Boxers who were still at work in a street on the other side of the cathedral. We ran round promptly on hearing this, and caught sight of a few fellows stripped to the waist, and gory with blood as I have never seen men before. Instead of fleeing, they met our charge with resolution, and one tall fellow put me in considerable danger of my life with a long spear, finally escaping before we could shoot him down.

On this side the ruins of the cathedral were covered with corpses burned black from the heat of the flames and exposure to the sun. One woman, by some freak of nature, had her arms poised above her head as she sat dead, shrivelled almost beyond human recognition. It was probable that the Boxers had pitched many of their victims alive into the flames and driven them back with their swords and spears whenever they attempted to escape....

At last we got away with everybody who was still alive, as far as we could judge. Tramping back slowly and painfully, the rescued looked the most pitiable concourse I have ever seen. Somehow it was exactly like that eloquent picture in "Michael Serogoff," showing the crowds of Siberian prisoners being driven away by Feofar Khan's Tartars after the capture of Omsk. Among our people there were the same old granddames, wrinkled and white haired, supporting themselves with crooked sticks and hobbling painfully on their mutilated feet; the same mothers with their children sucking their b.r.e.a.s.t.s; the same little boys and little girls laden with a few miserable rags; the same able-bodied men carrying the food they had saved. The older people gazed straight in front of them with the stolid despair of the fatalist East, and did not utter a word. A woman who had given birth to a child the very night before was being carried on a single plank slung on ropes, with a green-white pallor of death on her features. I have never taken part in such a remarkable procession as this.

Thus bloodstained and very weary we finally reached our Legation quarter, and once again the energy and resolution of Dr. M---- expressed themselves. The grounds of the Su w.a.n.g-fu, belonging to the Manchu prince Su, where the first Boxer we had openly seen had sought refuge a few days previously, were commandeered by him, and by evening nearly a thousand Catholic refugees were crowded into its precincts.

All day people were labouring to bring in rice and food for their people, and camp-fires were soon built at which they could cook their meals. Several of the _chefs de mission_ were again much alarmed at this action of ours in openly rescuing Chinese simply because they were doubtful co-religionists. They say that this action will make us pay dearly with our own lives; that the Legations will be attacked; that we cannot possibly defend ourselves against the numbers which will be brought to bear against us; that we are fools. Perhaps we are, but still there is some comfort in discovering that this nest of diplomacy still contains a few men.

Meanwhile there is not a word of news from S----, and there are indications that our despatches to the Chinese Government, which are being sent from every Legation more and more urgently, are hardly read. The situation is becoming more and more impossible, and our servants say it is useless bringing in any news, as there is such confusion in the Palace that n.o.body knows anything reliable.

XI

SOME MEN AND THINGS

16th June, 1900.

No developments have taken place during the past few hours. So far very few men have been conspicuous; and as it is these few who have brought about the only developments, and outlined our position, and that they are to-day all terribly tired, we have absolute monotony. I have not heard what the German Minister has been doing, but it is rumoured that he is engaged in trying to re-establish communication with Tientsin and the sea by bribing the Tsung-li Yamen smaller officials to take down packets of his despatches by pony-express. It seems doubtful whether this will succeed. For all communication has absolutely ceased now, and the Customs postal carriers say that it is impossible to get through by any stratagem, as all the roads are swarming with Boxers and banditti. The Chinese Government, in its few despatches to some of the Legations, is clearly temporising and trying to save itself. There is no means of knowing what is going on inside the Palace, or of understanding what the Empress Dowager has decided.

Everybody says it is all topsy-turvydom now in the capital, and that the most extraordinary reports are coming in from the provinces. Our Chinese despatch writers, our Manchu servants, and the few natives who come through our barricaded streets, all say the same thing--that it is too soon to speak, but that the dangers are enormous. Meanwhile the more timid of these people attached to the Legation area are sending word that they are sick and cannot come any more. It is a polite way of saying that they are afraid. I do not blame them, since anything now is possible. You cannot surely ask men to sacrifice themselves when they are only bound to you by the hire system. Such is the external and general situation.

Within our own quarter things are much the same, developing naturally along the line of least resistance.

Now that Prince Su's palace grounds have been openly converted into a Roman Catholic sanctuary, hundreds of converts are pouring in on us from everywhere, laden with their pots and pans, their beds, and their bundles of rice; indeed, carrying every imaginable thing. The great Northern Cathedral and Monseigneur F---- are in no danger, for the time being at least, since the cathedral and its extensive grounds are surrounded by powerful walls and the bishop has now got his fifty guards and possibly a couple of thousand young native Catholics, who can probably be armed and fight. So although it seems as if the whole Roman Catholic population of Peking is pouring in on us, we are in reality only getting a few hundred miserables who had no time to fly to their chief priest when the storm caught them; we have to prepare for the worst, as everything is developing very slowly.

Even in this matter of Chinese refugees the att.i.tude of our foolish Legations is rather inexplicable. Actually up to within a few days ago some of the Ministers were still resolutely refusing to entertain the idea that native Christians--men who have been estranged from their own countrymen and marked as pariahs because they have listened to the white man's gospel--could be brought within the Legation area. In consequence of this hardly any Chinese Protestants have as yet come in. Of course circ.u.mstance, the force of example, and a timidity in the face of the growing irritation, have at length broken down this weak-kneed att.i.tude, but people have not yet finished discussing it.

For instance, there is a remarkable story about the well-known S----, who wrote that celebrated book, "Chinese Characteristics." He turned up at the British Legation late one evening, long before the Boxers entered the Tartar city, and brought positive proof that unless S---- was hurried in we would all be murdered by a conspiracy headed by the most powerful men. S---- was kept waiting for an hour, and then told that no time could be spared to see him as everybody was busy writing despatches! This is indeed our whole situation expressed in a trivial incident; all the plenipotentiaries are trying to save their positions and their careers by violent despatch-writing at the eleventh hour.

They know perfectly well that it is they alone who are responsible for the present _impa.s.se_, and that even if they come out alive they are all hopelessly compromised. Young O---- told me that in their Legation they were actually antedating their despatches so as to be on the safe side! This shows how absolutely inexcusable has been the whole policy for three entire weeks.

We do not know what is going on around us; we do not know of what the Peking Court is thinking; we do not know by whom S---- has been stopped. We know nothing now excepting that we are gradually but surely getting so dirty that our tempers cannot but be vile. One never realises how great a part soap and water play in one's scheme of things until times like these. With upturned Peking carts blocking the ingresses to our quarter; with everything disgruntled and out of order; with native Christians crowding in on us, sensible heathen servants bolting as hard as they can, ice running short, we, the eleven Legations of Peking, await with some fear and trepidation and an ever-increasing discomfort our various fates under the shadow of the gloomy Tartar Wall. What is to be the next thing? I could possibly imagine and write something about this were I not so tired.

XII

h.e.l.l HOUNDS

Night, 17th June 1900.

It is past twelve o'clock at night, but in spite of the late hour and my fatigue--I have been dead tired for a week now--I am writing this with the greatest ease, my pen gliding, as it were, over a surface of ice-like slippiness, although my fingers are all blistered from manual work. Why, you will ask? Well, simply because my imagination is afire, and taking complete control of such minor things as the nerves and muscles of my right arm, my eyes and my general person, it speeds me along with astonishing celerity. Let your imagination be aflame and you can do anything....

It began last night. No sooner had the gates which pierce the Tartar Wall been closed by the Imperial guards, who still remain openly faithful to their duties, than there arose such a shouting and roaring as I have never heard before and never thought possible. It was the Boxers. The first time the Boxers had rushed in on us, it was through the Ha-ta Gate to the east of the Legations. Last night, after having for three days toured the Tartar city pillaging, looting, burning and slaying, with their progress quite unchecked except for those few hundred rifle shots of our own, the major part of the Boxer fraternity, to whom had joined themselves all the many rapscallions of Peking, found themselves in the Chinese or outer city after dark, and consequently debarred from coming near their legitimate prey. (The gates are still always closed as before.) Somebody must have told them that they could do as they liked with Christians and Europeans; for, mad with rage, they began shouting and roaring in chorus two single words, "_Sha-shao,"_ kill and burn, in an ever-increasing crescendo. I have heard a very big ma.s.s of Russian soldiery give a roar of welcome to the Czar some years ago, a roar which rose in a very extraordinary manner to the empyrean; but never have I heard such a blood-curdling volume of sound, such a vast bellowing as began then and there, and went on persistently, hour after hour, without ever a break, in a maddening sort of way which filled one with evil thoughts. Sometimes for a few moments the sound sank imperceptibly lower and lower and seemed making ready to stop. Then reinforced by fresh thousands of throats, doubtless wetted by copious drafts of _samshu_, it grew again suddenly, rising stronger and stronger, hoa.r.s.er and hoa.r.s.er, more insane and more possessed, until the tympanums of our ears were so tortured that they seemed fit to burst. Could walls and gates have fallen by mere will and throat power, ours of Peking would have clattered down Jericho-like. Our womenfolk were frozen with horror--the very sailors and marines muttered that this was not to be war, but an Inferno of Dante with fresh horrors. You could feel instinctively that if these men got in they would tear us from the scabbards of our limbs. It was pitch dark, too, and in the gloom the towers and battlements of the Tartar Wall loomed up so menacingly that they, too, seemed ready to fall in and crush us.

For possibly three or four hours this insane demonstration proceeded apace. The Manchu guards listened gloomily and curiously from the inside of the gates, but made no attempt to open them, but they equally refused sullenly to parley with a strong body of sailors and volunteers we sent with instructions to shoot any one attempting to unlock the barriers. Yet it was evident that the guards had received special instructions, and that the gates would not be handed over to the mob.

A few minutes before midnight the sounds became more sullen, and beneath the general uproar another note, one of those in distress, began, as it were, like an undercurrent to this pandemonium. The cause we had not long to seek, for presently flames began to shoot up, a sight we were by now well accustomed to, though not in this purely trading quarter of the city. The fire, started with savage disregard in the very centre of the most densely populated street of the Chinese city, spread with terrible rapidity. Soon both sides of Ch'ien Men great street, just on the other side of the Tartar Wall, were enveloped in raging flames, and a lurid light, growing ever brighter and brighter, turned the dark night into an unnatural day.

Between the incendiaries and ourselves the great Tartar Wall stood firm, but though this ancient defence against other barbarians was an effective protection for us, it could not long remain immune itself.

The _lou_, or square paG.o.da-like tower facing the Chinese city side, caught some of the thousands and tens of thousands of sparks flying skywards, and it was not long before the vast pile was burning as fiercely as the rest. The great rafters of Burmese teak, brought by Mongol Khans six centuries before to Peking, were as dry as tinder with the dryness of ages; and thus almost before we had noted that the bottom of the tower was well alight the flames were shooting through the roof and out through the hundreds of little square windows which in olden days were lined by archers. Higher and higher the flames leaped, until the top of the longest tongues of fire, pouring out through a funnel of brick, was hundreds of feet above the ground level. Only Vereschagin could have done justice to this holocaust; I have never seen anything so barbarically splendid.

Meanwhile below this in the Chinese city all had become quiet, except for the increasing and growing roar of the all-devouring flames. The Boxers, as if appalled by their own handiwork and the mournful sight of the capital in flames, had retreated into their haunts and had left the unfortunate townfolk to battle with this disaster as they could.

From the top of the wall, which I hastily climbed as soon as I obtained permission to leave my post, thousands and tens of thousands of figures could be seen moving hurriedly about laden with merchandise, which they were attempting to save. Busy as ants, these wonderful Chinese traders were rescuing as much of their invested capital from the very embrace of the flames as they could at a moment when the Boxer patriots, menacing and killing them with sword and spears as _san mao-tzu,_ or third-cla.s.s barbarians who sold the cursed foreigners' stuffs and products, had hardly disappeared.

Yet it seemed vain, indeed, to talk of salvage with half the city in flames, for other fires now began mysteriously in other places, which "lighted" the horizon. "_Tout Pekin brule_," muttered a French sailor to me as I pa.s.sed back to my post, and his careless remark made me think that this was the Commune and Sansculottism intermixed--the ends of two centuries tumbled together--because we foreigners had upset the equilibrium of the Far East with our importunities and our covetousness of the Yellow Man's possessions....

And what of S----, what of the Peking Government--what is everybody in the outside world doing--the distant world of which we have so suddenly lost all trace, while we are pa.s.sing through such times? We do not know; we have no idea; we have almost forgotten to think about it. S---- was heard of twice some days ago from Langfang, a station only forty miles from Peking, but why he does not advance, why there is this intolerable delay, we do not know. The Peking Government is still decreeing and counter-decreeing night and day according to the Government Gazettes. The Ministers of our eleven Legations are meeting one another almost hourly, and are eternally discussing, but are doing nothing else. We have blocked our roads with barricades and provided our servants and dependents with pa.s.ses written in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese--so that everyone can understand. We are now sick of such a mult.i.tude of languages and wish all the world spoken Volapuk.

Thus with our rescued native Christians, our few butchered Boxers, our score and more of fires lighting the whole of the horizon, here in the middle of the night of the 16th of June we are no further forward in our political situation than we were two and a half weeks ago, when our Legation Guards arrived, and we esteemed ourselves so secure. Two and a half weeks ago! It seems at least two and a half months; but that is merely the direct fault of having to live nearly twice the proper number of hours in twenty-four.

XIII

A FEW CRUMBS

18th June, 1900.

It has just transpired that Hsu Tung, an infamous Manchu high official, who has been the Emperor's tutor, and whose house is actually on Legation Street some fifty yards inside the lines of the Italian Legation, has been allowed to pa.s.s out of our barricaded quarter, going quite openly in his blue and red official chair. This is a terrible mistake which we may pay for dearly.

Hsu Tung is a scoundrel who is at least thorough in his convictions as far as we are concerned. It is he who has long been boasting--and all Peking has been repeating his boast--that in the near future he is going to line his sedan chair with the hides of foreign devils and fill his harem with their women; and it is he, above all other men, who should have been seized by us, held as hostage, and shot out of hand the very moment the Chinese Government gives its open official sanction to this insane Boxer policy. Had we acted in this way and taken charge of a number of other high officials who live just around us, we might have shown the trembling government that a day of retribution is certain to come. And yet listen what happened. Either on the 15th or 16th Hsu Tung sent the majordomo of his household cringing to the French Legation for a _pa.s.separtout_. He had already tried once to escape by way of the Italian barricades, but had been sternly ordered back, and his house placed under watch. Somehow, through the foolishness of an interpreter of the French Legation, he got his safe-conduct pa.s.s, and started out bold as bra.s.s in the morning, seated in his official chair and accompanied by his official outriders. He pa.s.sed a first French barricade and reached an outer second barrier manned by volunteers, who challenged him roughly and then refused to let him pa.s.s.

The outriders then tried to ride our men down, and it needed a rifle-shot to bring them to their senses. Fortunately n.o.body was hurt, and presently the youthful volunteers had Hsu Tung himself out of the chair, and kept him seated on the ground while they debated whether they should respect the French pa.s.s or strap the great man up and send him to their own quarters as a prisoner of war.

In the end, however, one of the secretaries came up and inquired what it all meant, and then, of course, weak counsels prevailed, and Hsu Tung was allowed to sneak off unmolested down a side lane.

This incident is typical as showing the stamp of men who have commanding voices in our beleagued quarter.

G.o.d help us if any considerable force is sent against us, for we can never help ourselves. Every proper-minded young man is a natural soldier methinks, even in Anno Domini 1900, but every elderly person in the same year of grace is quite valueless--that is what we have already discovered.

And yet even to-day all the senior people in our Legation area--those who are our guides and mentors--though they be secretly much alarmed, are comforting themselves with a great deal of garrulous talk because a letter has arrived from Tientsin--in fact, several letters have arrived. This is the first reliable news we have had for many days, and everybody seems now to imagine that we are safe. The chief item in these fateful missives seems to be that the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Tientsin has also been burned; that this was accompanied by ma.s.sacres of native converts; and that the riverine port is swarming with Boxers. And there is no news of S----, no news of anything good.

What has become of him we cannot imagine. Yet Ministers, secretaries, and elderly nondescripts are somewhat relieved, and go about nervously smiling in a very ridiculous way. No one can quite make out why they are relieved, excepting perhaps, that they are delighted to find that the visible world still exists elsewhere, and goes on revolving on its own axis in spite of our dilemma. Why should the obvious be so often discovered?

Our poor Legation Guards and their commanding officers, with whom we were so pleased a fortnight ago, are quite as crushed as everyone else now--perhaps even more. You see the rank and file are merely a crowd of uneducated sailors, who have not yet made head or tail of what all this Peking _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ means. They were suddenly entrained and rushed up to Peking many days ago; they arrived in the dark; they were crammed into their respective Legations as quickly as possible; they have done a little patrol and picquet work on the streets, and have stood expectantly behind barricades which they were told to erect; but otherwise they are as completely at sea again as if they were back to their ships.... In all the clouds of dust and smoke around them, how can they understand? It is true I have rather a grudge against some persons of the Legation defenders as yet unknown, and think of them perhaps a little angrily, for, like all soldiery, they loot. They have already taken my field-gla.s.ses, an excellent revolver, and several other things during the confusion of the nights.

Of course this is the fortune of war, as all old campaigners will tell you, but a more decent interval should have been allowed to elapse before beginning the inevitable stripping process....

As for the detachment officers, some of them are very good fellows and some of them are not; but already they have each of them instinctively adopted the old att.i.tude of the Legations towards one another. They are mutually suspicious. The detachment officers are also considerably tired and in very bad tempers, for the night has been turned into day with a regularity which cannot leave anybody very happy. Then dirt is acc.u.mulating, too, sad truth; and in the East you cannot feel dirty in the summer and be happy. That is quite impossible....