to get up and dress, Mrs. Conger came back to our room, and her manner
was more than tragic when she saw me lying on my mattress on the floor,
not even beginning to dress for what I suppose half of the women in the
compound believed to be the beginning of the final fight. She said: “Do
you wish to be found undressed when the end comes?” It flashed through
my mind that it made very little difference whether I was massacred in a
pink silk dressing-gown, that I had hanging over the back of a chair, or
whether I was in a golf skirt and shirt waist that I was in the habit of
wearing during the day hours of this charming picnic. So I told her that
for some nights I had dressed myself and sat on the edge of the mattress
wishing I was lying down again, only to be told, when daylight came,
that the attack was over, when it was invariably too late for anything
like sleep (which way of living is distinctly trying), and after a week
of it, when one has so much to do in the day hours, I had come to the
conclusion that, as it was absolutely of no benefit to anyone my being
dressed during these attacks, I was going to stay in bed unless
something terrible happened, when I should don my dressing-gown and,
with a pink bow of ribbon at my throat, await my massacre. This way of
looking, or I should rather say of speaking, did not appeal to the
Minister’s wife, but I must say that at such terrible moments during the
siege it is a great comfort to be frivolous. By making believe that one
is not afraid one really lessen one’s own fear. “Assume a virtue if you
have it not,” says our beloved Shakespeare. After Mrs. Conger’s visit on
this same terrible, ear-deafening night came Clara, Mrs. Squiers’s
German nursery governess, and she needed all sorts of assurances to
convince her that a massacre was not in progress at that very moment.
These attacks are very terrifying, and to talk to a person two feet away
one has to shriek. People one sees are either apparently most optimistic
or desperately pessimistic, nothing between. It is a horrid thing to see
big, strong men unable to hide their innate cowardliness, and shirking
all duty of the slightest personal danger.
_Friday, June 29._
One or two days have passed without my opening my diary, but they are
very much like the days that I have already written about. The weather
is very warm, but all able-bodied men are working desperately hard over
trenches, bomb-proofs and barricades, or putting out more fires that
have started at different places. Several attacks are constantly being
made in opposite parts of our lines, with perhaps one big general attack
in the afternoon and one during the night, which causes great excitement
and sometimes great fear in everybody’s heart. Then comes more
excitement when the rumour arrives that a big fire is breaking out in
the French and American Legations, or we hear that someone, who has just
come from one of these Legations, says that he has heard the officer say
they probably cannot hold out much longer, with fire to fight as well as
the Chinese, and in ten minutes the report is all over the compound that
these Legations have been abandoned, and half of the soldiers defending
them killed. Such a quantity of rumours that are circulating every day,
only to be denied and proved untrue an hour later! It is incredible!
In the case of the Legations who are still holding their own, it is very
hard on the women whose husbands are still staying with the soldiers
until they finally evacuate. These poor women naturally wonder, “What is
my husband doing? Is he dead, and when they evacuate will he be amongst
the lucky number to retire to the British compound alive?”
Hard work is kept up on the important barricades, and men do hours and
hours of manual labour. The women make thousands of sandbags daily, and
help at the hospital, and make short rations go as far and look as
attractive as possible under the circumstances. The only strong men in
the compound who have no special work to do are Ministers
Plenipotentiary. There is no head-work to be done now, and some of them
don’t take kindly to physical work.
The British Legation Library is a complete one, and occasionally some
inquisitive soul will go to it and try to find, compared with other
sieges and massacres, what place this one will have in history. The
nearest similar harrowing siege seems to be that of Lucknow, where a
heterogeneous multitude, closed up in the Residency, were holding out
against fearful odds in expectation of relief by Havelock’s Highlanders,
resolved to die of starvation rather than surrender, for in surrendering
the fate of Cawnpore awaited them; and in thinking of these things we
recollect that the Tartar rulers of China are of the same tribal family
as the Great Mogul, who was the head of the Indian Sepoy Mutiny. But the
King of Delhi was trying to regain his throne, whereas the Empress
Dowager has no such excuse in making war on practically all the nations
of the civilized world.
The Tartars and Manchus are an alien race, although the rulers of China
for many centuries, and have always been inimical to everything which
tends to increase the power of foreigners; whereas the Chinese are
cleverer, from being so constantly in contact with Europeans on the
sea-coast, or anywhere where they can find gain or advantage in trading
with them, and have become, compared, at least, to the ruling Manchus in
Peking, progressive and modern. The Emperor and his party for progress
were completely snowed under in 1898 by the Empress-Dowager and her old
Manchu Conservatives, who, lacking the desire to accept anything
modern—even diplomatic relations of the most simple kind—decided, in a
childlike and unreasoning rage, that everything foreign must be swept
down into the sea, and it really looks now as if the first steps of her
policy may be realized.
Lady Macdonald has forty Europeans in all to feed three times a day
including servants, and at table they sit down thirty-three. She is very
sensible, and has only one dish. Nobody thinks of dressing for dinner,
except the Marquis Salvago, and I think it shows things are truly far
gone when English people dine, but do not dress.
Our little mess is very attractive, and as our stores are much more
numerous and of a greater variety than those of almost any mess here, we
manage to have, up to the present at least, a most satisfactory one. We
have tinned beef as our _pièce de résistance_, and rice is our
mainstay—of a necessity, as it is that of which we have most. Tomato
catsup tastes very good in this hot weather. Oatmeal is another staple
that we have, and as luxuries we have a good stock of jams, tinned
fruits, tinned vegetables, sardines, tinned mackerel, Liebig’s extract,
a big box of Stilton cheese, coffee, tinned butter, and white flour. Mr.
Squiers has a large supply of champagne, and every night we have one or
two quarts with our siege dinner. The men work so hard, and the women’s
nerves are so much on edge, that a small amount of stimulants is surely
a blessed help.
Our mess being comparatively small, these delicacies are lasting nicely,
as we use them with discretion, for we remember in the old days before
the siege a dollar was a dollar, and would buy a tin, but in these days
a tin has no market value—they cannot be bought. When one’s tins are
gone one can eat horse-meat and rice. We brought a small lead-lined
ice-box with us from our Legation, which seemed foolish at the time, but
which is a great comfort to us now. We keep our wine and drinking-water
in it, and also well-water, which is very cool, so that our drink is
somewhat cooled, and is not the same temperature as the air. No other
mess can attempt to have things cool, and this is one of the features of
our room—that we are as comfortable as we can be under these
extraordinary circumstances. During this sizzling weather cool water is
a great comfort. It is so hot that a tin of meat, if left open all
night, spoils by morning.
There is an English newspaper-man, who, when he can spare a few moments
from the siege-work, gets his camera and takes a few photographs of
things as they are. He is fond of chaffing, and to-day the Committee on
Fortifications are of opinion that the house used by the French
Minister, M. Pichon, is being undermined by the Chinese from outside,
though indistinct noises, etc., are as yet the only proof of it. The
Minister was more than usually perturbed about this new personal danger,
and was not pleased, or at all amused, at the remarks addressed him. “I
am making photographs for the Paris _Figaro_ of this siege. Very soon
your quarters will be blown up by dynamite. My camera is ready to take
the photographs, and as you will be the principal person in it, how
would you prefer me to take you—as your Excellency is going up
wholesale, or as you are coming down retail?”
At this time people are not well-balanced, it seems to me. Some take the
daily horrors as a matter of course, are more callous than they should
be, and the others are so miserably pessimistic and mournful that one
shuns them, fearing to catch this infection. There is a young man here
who has been known to indulge in temporary aberrations, usually at
night, following long, hard days of work in the broiling sun. On one
occasion he was on his sentry beat, and on being relieved by his chief,
the sight of whom was too much for him after having walked some hours on
his dangerous sentry route (which seemed doubly dangerous in the
pitch-black night) he, doubtless brooding over his probable approaching
death, pointed the muzzle of his gun straight at his relief. “C’est à
cause de vous, misérable, que je suis venu à Pékin et encore c’est à
cause de vous que ces belles années de ma jeunesse seront salement
terminées ici!” By not moving an inch the man thus threatened
undoubtedly saved his life, and most intelligently agreed with his
attacker, “Probably so; let’s talk it over.” In a few minutes the crisis
had passed, but the following day the man who had been in such danger
requested the General Committee to change his night sentry duty to a
different part of the compound, so that his young secretary should not
again be tempted to hold him responsible.
_Sunday, July 1._
I have been quite under the weather, to use a civilized expression, and
I assure you that things have got (not are getting) to such a state that
to live and act and talk as one would do at home is quite out of place.
How soon people get accustomed to an idea! Now that we have prepared our
minds for a possible massacre we seem to be getting back, to some degree
at least, our old spirits. Now that I am well, how much nearer seem the
soldiers who are coming to relieve us!
What a place this compound would be for an epidemic! There are barely
enough mattresses for the wounded and dying at the hospital, so that,
should we have one, and take a house for those taken sick, I am sure
that there would be no ordinary comforts of any kind for them; they
could only be isolated. Let us pray that we will have no such horror to
add to the already long list.
The hospital is already full, men lying on straw bags in halls—crowded
in every conceivable corner. They are brought in dying and wounded every
day. Dysentery has its grip on almost everybody here. The treatment is
almost to stop eating and to drink rice-water in large quantities. Our
four-times-divided cook—the other three messes in the United States
bungalow have a lien on him too—is off for some hours daily on work
which all personal servants have to give to the General Committee. When
the kitchen is comparatively free, Mrs. Squiers, my maid, and I make
gallons of rice-water, thick, nutritious but tasteless, which we bottle
in quart-bottles and place to cool in our zinc-lined, cold-water-filled
box. It is placed in a corner of our two-roomed quarters, and the
constant stream of men coming and going to that box would lead an
uninitiated observer to believe that at least a Hoffman House bar was
hidden there and doing a steady business.
The rainy season and the bad time of the year _par excellence_ has
begun, and the temperature is like a Turkish bath without the clean
smell. Apropos of smell, a whole story-book could be written about the
Peking smell. The dry heat was nothing compared with this damp
temperature, that seems to soak out of Mother Earth the most incredibly
disgusting odours. There are so many dead dogs, horses, and Chinese
lying in heaps all around the defended lines, but too far for us to bury
or burn them. The contamination of the air is something almost
overpowering. All men who smoke have a cigar in their mouths from
morning until night as a protection from this unseen horror, and even
the women, principally Italians and Russians, find relief in the
constant smoking of cigarettes.
On the 29th Dr. Lippitt, who came up from Taku with our marines, was
sitting in front of the Minister’s house smoking a cigarette, when a
bullet struck a limb of a tree nearby, and, glancing down, struck him in
the thigh, fracturing the bone. He is most dangerously ill, and we shall
not know for several days whether he will have to have his leg amputated
or not. He is an attractive man and a thorough Virginian. We used to
play tennis with him and Captain Myers before the times got so terribly
out of joint.
To-day the Germans were driven off the Tartar Wall close to their
Legation, which caused a great deal of excitement. They were driven off
by Chinese soldiers, some of whom were Tung Fu-hsiang’s men, and others
were Prince Ching’s especial troops, which seems queer, as we have
supposed all along that Prince Ching was friendly.
The Germans could see from the Wall that the Ha Ta Men Gate is being
strengthened, and people who know say that the troops who are closing
the gates in such a warlike way are doing it as much against the violent
and uncontrolled soldiers of Tu Fu-hsiang, who are notorious for the
manner in which they loot and murder, as against the allied Powers. They
say that all Chinese families in Peking who have anything to lose have
left the capital, as they realize that if the foreign troops come there
will be great looting, and if the Chinese troops are successful there
will be looting and worse. Mr. Pethick tells me that during the
Japan-China War, when it was considered highly probable that the
Japanese would march on to the capital, thousands of Mandarins and
people of wealth left Peking with their families and with as much
treasure as they could carry. It is natural to suppose that the same
fright exists to-day.
This morning our men, the Germans following, retired in a panic from
their barricades on the Wall to the United States Legation, momentarily
expecting to see Chinese hordes occupy the German position and theirs.
After an hour’s wait they retook the Wall. This example, however, was
not followed by the Germans. During this hour the excitement was intense
in the British compound. The report that the Wall had been evacuated
caused a panic, for this abandonment of the Wall would enable the
Chinese to mount their guns on this portion of it, directly commanding
the British Legation, and to fire down on us, and no one can say how
long we could hold out against such an attack. In such an event we will
put women and children into deep bomb-proofs that have been made for
that purpose, which are covered with logs, sandbags, and dirt, and are
shell-proof. These trenches we have made as near as possible like those
used in the siege of Ladysmith.
As the Germans have been unable to regain their positions on the Wall,
the difficulty for Uncle Sam’s men has been increased fifty per cent.,
as they must now be prepared at all times, either during the day or
night, for an attack by Chinese from both directions. This sentence, “to
give up the Wall,” could be, translated into siege language, “the
beginning of the end,” and this news was most terrifying to us. I think
that there are few who in their heart of hearts have given up hope of
the troops coming soon. Nevertheless, the facts remain that if we cannot
hold the place it would not take very long for us to be annihilated, and
if the troops come a day after we are finished, a miss is as good as a
mile, and we don’t care then when they come. If we had not had the
greatest luck in the world we could never have held out like this to the
present date, and what the Powers can be thinking about not to send a
column to our immediate relief, knowing, as they must, that we could
never hold out against artillery, is beyond the reasoning power of the
people in this Legation. Are the allied Powers fighting each other, or
are they fighting their way up here?
Yesterday an unsuccessful sortie was made by Colonel Shiba from the Fu
to capture a gun, and six men were killed. These offensive measures seem
to gain us nothing, and we always lose men.
Apropos of Colonel Shiba, he is a splendid, small person. He has taken
his position here by the strength of his intelligence and good right
arm, solely because the Ministers and the guard captains were not
especially inclined at the first morning conference to listen to him—in
fact, I don’t know that he tried to talk, but it is all changed now. He
has done so splendidly in his active and continuous fighting in the Fu,
and has proved himself such a general, that his opinion and help are
asked by all the commanders. His men are all so patient and untiring in
their long, long hours behind the barricades, and are so game, in great
contrast to the Italians who are with him defending the Fu. One can only
hope for Italy’s sake that her soldiers in Peking are the worst she has.
Now that we have got down to the primitive _motif_ of all nationalities
fighting for their lives, the racial friendships and animosities are
very obvious. The British and American are almost one people here;
although the expressions, “D—— Yankees!” and “D—— lime-juicers!” are
interchanged, they are used in a spirit of affection. The dislike of the
Russians for the British is so cordial that it is only equalled by the
feeling the British entertain toward them. The frankness of this avowed
enmity is delightful. Our compound joins the Russians, and they love us
and we love them in as strong a fashion as they hate their English
neighbours on their other side. Baron Von Rahden orders his men to work
and fight as much as possible side by side with our marines, as in this
way he hopes to increase the efficiency of his untrained guard. These
men can’t speak the others’ language, but are the best of friends. The
Russians are all called “Rouskies” by our guard.
The Germans are somewhat by themselves, and fraternize with no one.
Their Legation is at one end of the defended lines, and opposite the
French. They are full of sullen rage at the unavenged death of their
Minister, and when they are fighting or defending barricades in
conjunction with other nationalities, and perhaps under command of an
American or British officer, they have become notorious for their utter
disregard of ordinary military precaution and unnecessary daredevil
recklessness. The French are also far from the base of the defended
area, and come in for attacks. They are assisted by the Austrian guard,
some Belgians, some Customs students and unattached Continentals who are
able to use a gun. The Customs students constitute a splendid force of
young men, but as they are of all nationalities, they are apt, in taking
their active fighting positions, to gravitate to the guards of their
respective countries, although in many instances they simply join the
weakest spot. The Japanese are defending the Fu with the greatest
valour, and, needless to say, are tremendously pro-English and
anti-Russian.
We now feel that our tactics must be entirely defensive. Although to-day
is Sunday, most of the women in the compound, missionary women included,
are working hard at sewing sandbags, the non-fighting men filling them.
Beautiful material of all kinds is being used for these bags. Liberty
satin curtains from London and linen monogrammed sheets from Paris are
cut up ruthlessly to be used. One hundred thousand bags, as near as they
can be counted, have been made already. It was principally in the Fu,
defended by gallant Colonel Shiba, that the materials procured were so
gorgeous. Bags were made from the bolts and rolls of brocades and satins
that constituted part of the treasure left by Prince Su in his palace
when he so kindly turned it over to his persecuted fellow-citizens. This
is the one bright, wonderful bit of colouring in the compound: it is the
barricades of thousands of big sandbags made entirely of these
gorgeous-coloured satin brocades—sky-blues, blood-red, Imperial
yellows—thousands and thousands piled one upon the other. It has been
built from the ground up to the second story of the Chancery building—a
rather high house for Peking. It was made at this building, as the
firing has been very heavy here—a most extraordinary, butterfly-coloured
barricade; and if it were anywhere in the world except in this siege in
Peking, there would be seen lines of artists, with sketch-book and
easel, trying to put this unusual effect on canvas.
_Tuesday, July 3._
For several days past the Chinese on the Tartar Wall have been bolder
and bolder, and yesterday they built their last barricade so near ours
that they could, and did, throw big rocks over into our lines, which, by
a lucky chance, hurt no one. The moral effect of this dangerous
propinquity was terrible on our men. They felt that there was only one
almost ineffective barricade between them and hordes of Tu Fu-hsiang’s
soldiers—the notoriously cruel Mohammedan chief and his bandits. Mr.
Squiers was the first to appreciate this great danger, and certainly the
first to think of the cure, and, what was more to the point, he put it
through. The pros and cons were discussed with Sir Claude in conference,
and it was decided that a charge down the Wall must be made, and soon,
or else we must leave it entirely, and that none of the Americans were
willing to do, as we had been there from the beginning, and although the
Germans gave up their position on the Wall, we were not content to do
the same.
Captain Myers was more than ready to lead the charge, and he was given
twenty British marines, fifteen Russians, and thirty of our own men. At
dawn this morning, about three o’clock, he charged the Wall. No one in
the compound had gone to bed; the excitement was very great. We sent
sixty of our fighting men on this sortie, and if they failed we should
have lost what we could ill afford to lose. We felt that the odds were
about even, and _that_ waiting at the hour of dawn was frightful. The
charge was successful, and two Chinese regimental flags were captured.
Sixty-five dead Chinese soldiers were afterwards found between the two
barricades, but the actual number killed and wounded is unknown. Our men
came back at five o’clock carrying their dead and wounded. This has been
the only effectual offensive measure accomplished during the siege.
Captain Myers led it most gallantly—an inspiration to his men—and was
wounded by a spear-thrust in the leg.
[Illustration:
CAPTAIN JOHN T. MYERS
]
_Thursday, July 5._
The Glorious Fourth came in during the last twenty-four hours, and the
Chinese kindly announced the fact about 3 o’clock a.m. by a violent
firing from all sides, which terrified everybody, but like most of the
similar attempts recently made, only resulted in giving everyone a bad
fright, and materially weakening some one or two points of our defence.
Von Below, of the German Legation, notwithstanding his military
physique, seems to be developing into a man of moods instead of a man of
action, and the story comes over from his quarters that during this last
terrifying attack he was seized with the premonition that this was the
end. He preferred to meet his doom by making his piano interpret his
last feeling. The music from the “Valkyrie” that he drew from that
instrument was marvellous. He played, regardless of time and place, in a
soul agony, but was rudely awakened some hours later to be told that the
attack was all over, and that for this time at least he was not to be
massacred in a storm of music.