Here we are at the gates, the double triple gates, deep as tunnels,
and formed of the most powerful masonry,--gates surmounted by
deadly dungeons, each one five stories high, with strange curved
roofs,--extravagant dungeons, colossal black things above a black
enclosing wall.
Our horses' hoofs sink deeper and deeper, disappear, in fact, in
the coal-black dust, which is blinding and all-pervading, in the
atmosphere as well as on the ground, in spite of the light rain and
the snowflakes which make our faces tingle.
Noiselessly, as though we were stepping upon wadding or felt, we pass
under the enormous vaults and enter the land of ruin and ashes.
A few slatternly beggars shivering in corners in their blue rags, a few
corpse-eating dogs, like those whose acquaintance we have already made
_en route_,--and that is all. Silence and solitude within as well as
without these walls. Nothing but rubbish and ruin, ruin.
The land of rubbish and ashes, and little gray bricks,--little bricks
all alike, scattered in countless myriads upon the sites of houses that
have been destroyed, or upon the pavement of what once were streets.
Little gray bricks,--this is the sole material of which Pekin was
built; a city of small, low houses decorated with a lacework of gilded
wood; a city of which only a mass of curious débris is left, after fire
and shell have crumbled away its flimsy materials.
We have come into the city at one of the corners where there was the
fiercest fighting,--the Tartar quarter, which contained the European
legations.
Long straight streets may still be traced in this infinite labyrinth
of ruins; ahead of us all is gray or black; to the sombre gray of the
fallen brick is added the monotonous tone which follows a fire,--the
gloom of ashes and the gloom of coal.
Sometimes in crossing the road they form obstacles,--these tiresome
little bricks; these are the remains of barricades where fighting must
have taken place.
After a few hundred metres we enter the street of the legations, upon
which for so many months the anxious attention of the whole world was
fixed.
Everything is in ruins, of course; yet European flags float on every
piece of wall, and we suddenly find, as we come out of the smaller
streets, the same animation as at Tien-Tsin,--a continual coming and
going of officers and soldiers, and an astonishing array of uniforms.
A big flag marks the entrance to what was our legation, two monsters
in white marble crouch at the threshold; this is the etiquette for all
Chinese palaces. Two of our soldiers guard the door which I enter, my
thoughts recurring to the heroes who defended it.
* * * * *
We finally dismount, amid piles of rubbish, in an inner square near
a chapel, and at the entrance to a garden where the trees are losing
their leaves as an effect of the icy winds. The walls about us are so
pierced with balls that they look like sieves. The pile of rubbish at
our right is the legation proper, destroyed by the explosion of a
Chinese mine. At our left is the chancellor's house, where the brave
defenders of the place took refuge during the siege, because it was in
a less exposed situation. They have offered to take me in there; it was
not destroyed, but everything is topsy-turvy, as though it were the
day after a battle; and in the room where I am to sleep the plasterers
are at work repairing the walls, which will not be finished until this
evening.
As a new arrival, I am taken on a pilgrimage to the garden where those
of our sailors who fell on the field of honor were hastily buried amid
a shower of balls. There is no grass here, no blossoming plants, only
a gray soil trampled by the combatants,--crumbling from dryness and
cold,--trees without leaves and with branches broken by shot, and over
all a gloomy, lowering sky, with snowflakes that are cutting.
We remove our hats as we enter this garden, for we know not upon whose
remains we may be treading. The graves will soon be marked, I doubt
not, but have not yet been, so one is not sure as one walks of not
having under foot some one of the dead who merits a crown.
In this house of the chancellor, spared as by a miracle, the besieged
lived helter-skelter, slept on a floor space the size of which was day
by day decreased by the damage done by shot and shell, and were in
imminent danger of death.
In the beginning--their number, alas, rapidly diminished--there were
sixty French sailors and twenty Austrians, meeting death, side by side,
with equally magnificent courage. To them were added a few French
volunteers, who took their turns on the barricades or on the roofs, and
two foreigners, M. and Madame Rosthorn of the Austrian legation. Our
officers in command of the defence were Lieutenant Darcy and midshipman
Herber; the latter was struck full in the face by a ball, and sleeps
to-day in the garden.
The horrible part of this siege was that no pity was to be expected
from the besiegers, if, starved, and at the end of their strength,
it became necessary for the besieged to surrender, it was death, and
death with atrocious Chinese refinements to prolong the paroxysms of
suffering.
Neither was there the hope of escape by some supreme sortie; they were
in the midst of a swarming city, they were enclosed in a labyrinth of
buildings that sheltered a crowd of enemies, and were still further
imprisoned by the feeling that, surrounding them, walling in the whole,
was the colossal black rampart of Pekin.
It was during the torrid period of the Chinese summer; it was often
necessary to fight while dying of thirst, blinded by dust, under a sun
as destructive as the balls, and with the constant sickening fear of
infection from dead bodies.
Yet a charming young woman was there with them,--an Austrian, to whom
should be given one of our most beautiful French crosses. Alone amongst
men in distress, she kept an even cheerfulness of the best kind, she
cared for the wounded, prepared food for the sick sailors with her own
hands, and then went off to aid in carrying bricks and sand for the
barricades or to take her turn as watch on the roof.
* * * * *
Day by day the circle closed in upon the besieged as their ranks grew
thinner and the garden filled with the dead; gradually they lost
ground, although disputing with the enemy, who were legion, every piece
of wall, every pile of bricks.
And when one sees their little barricades hastily erected during
the night out of nothing at all, and knows that five or six sailors
succeeded in defending them (for five or six toward the end were all
that could be spared), it really seems as though there were something
supernatural about it all. As I walked through the garden with one of
its defenders, and he said to me, "At the foot of that little wall we
held out for so many days," and "In front of this little barricade we
resisted for a week," it seemed a marvellous tale of heroism.
And their last intrenchment! It was alongside the house,--a ditch dug
tentatively in a single night, banked up with a few poor sacks of
earth and sand; it was all they had to keep out the executioners, who,
scarcely six metres away, were threatening them with death from the top
of a wall.
Beyond is the "cemetery," that is, the corner of the garden in which
they buried their dead, until the still more terrible days when they
had to put them here and there, concealing the place for fear the
graves would be violated, in accordance with the terrible custom of
this place. It was a poor little cemetery whose soil had been pressed
and trampled upon in close combat, whose trees were shattered and
broken by shell. The interments took place under Chinese fire, and an
old white-headed priest--since a martyr, whose head was dragged in the
gutter--said prayers at the grave, in spite of the balls that whistled
about him, cutting and breaking the branches.
Toward the end their cemetery was the "contested region," after they
had little by little lost much ground, and they trembled for their
dead; the enemy had advanced to its very border; they watched and they
killed at close quarters over the sleeping warriors so hastily put to
rest. If the Chinese had reached this cemetery, and had scaled the last
frail trenches of sand and gravel in sacks made of old curtains, then
for all who were left there would have been horrible torture to the
sound of music and laughter, horrible dismemberment,--nails torn out,
feet torn off, disembowelling, and finally the head carried through the
streets at the end of a pole.
They were attacked from all sides and in every possible manner, often
at the most unexpected hours of the night. It usually began with cries
and the sudden noise of trumpets and tam-tams; around them thousands
of howling men would appear,--one must have heard the howlings of the
Chinese to imagine what their voices are; their very timbre chills your
soul. Gongs outside the walls added to the tumult.
Occasionally, from a suddenly opened hole in a neighboring house, a
pole twenty or thirty feet long, ablaze at the end with oakum and
petroleum, emerged slowly and silently, like a thing out of a dream.
This was applied to the roofs in the hope of setting them on fire.
They were also attacked from below, they heard dull sounds in the
earth, and understood that they were being undermined, that their
executioners might spring up from the ground at any moment; so that
it became necessary, at any cost, to attempt to establish countermines
to prevent this subterranean peril. One day, toward noon, two terrible
detonations, which brought on a regular tornado of plaster and dust,
shook the French legation, half burying under rubbish the lieutenant
in command of the defences and several of his marines. But this was
not all; all but two succeeded in getting clear of the stones and
ashes that covered them to the shoulders, but two brave sailors never
appeared again. And so the struggle continued, desperately, and under
conditions more and more frightful.
* * * * *
And still the gentle stranger remained, when she might so easily have
taken shelter elsewhere,--at the English legation, for instance, where
most of the ministers with their families had found refuge; the balls
did not penetrate to them; they were at the centre of the quarter
defended by a few handfuls of brave soldiers, and could there feel
a certain security so long as the barricades held out. But no, she
remained and continued in her admirable rôle at that blazing point, the
French legation,--a point which was the key, the cornerstone of the
European quadrangle, whose capture would bring about general disaster.
One time they saw with their field glasses the posting of an imperial
edict commanding that the fire against foreigners cease. (What they
did _not_ see was that the men who put up the notices were attacked by
the crowd with knives.) Yet a certain lull, a sort of armistice did
follow; the attacks became less violent.
They saw that incendiaries were everywhere abroad; they heard
fusillades, cannonades, and prolonged cries among the Chinese; entire
districts were in flames; they were killing one another; their fury was
fermenting as in a pandemonium, and they were suffocated, stifled with
the smell of corpses.
Spies came occasionally with information to sell--always false
and contradictory--in regard to the relief expedition, which amid
ever-increasing anxiety was hourly expected. "It is here, it is there,
it is advancing," or "It has been defeated and is retreating," were the
announcements, yet it persisted in not appearing.
What, then, was Europe doing? Had they been abandoned? They continued,
almost without hope, to defend themselves in their restricted quarters.
Each day they felt that Chinese torture and death were closing in upon
them.
They began to lack for the essentials of life. It was necessary to
economize in everything, particularly in ammunition; they were growing
savage,--when they captured any Boxers, instead of shooting them they
broke their skulls with a revolver.
One day their ears, sharpened for all outside noises, distinguished a
continued deep, heavy cannonade beyond the great black ramparts whose
battlements were visible in the distance, and which enclosed them in a
Dantesque circle; Pekin was being bombarded! It could only be by the
armies of Europe come to their assistance.
Yet one last fear troubled their joy. Would not a supreme attack
against them be attempted, an effort be made to destroy them before the
allied troops could enter?
As a matter of fact they were furiously attacked, and this last day,
the day of their deliverance, cost the life of one of our officers,
Captain Labrousse, who went to join the Austrian commander in the
glorious little cemetery of the legation. But they kept up their
resistance, until all at once not a Chinese head was visible on the
barricades of the enemy; all was empty and silent in the devastation
about them; the Boxers were flying and the Allies were entering the
city!
* * * * *
This first night of my arrival in Pekin was as melancholy as the nights
on the road, but in a more commonplace way, with more of _ennui_. The
workmen had just finished the walls of my room; the fresh plaster gave
forth a chilling dampness that penetrated to my very bones, and as the
room was empty, my servant spread my narrow mattress from the junk upon
the floor, and began to make a table out of some old boxes.
My hosts were good enough to have a stove hastily set up for me and
lighted, which called up a picture of European discomfort in some
wretched place in the country. How could one fancy oneself in China, in
Pekin itself, so near to mysterious enclosures, to palaces so full of
wonders?
As to the French minister, whom I am anxious to see, to convey to
him the admiral's communications, I learn that he, having no roof to
cover his head, has gone to seek shelter at the Spanish legation; and
furthermore, that he has typhoid fever, which is epidemic on account
of the poisonous condition of the water, so that for the present no
one can see him. So my stay in this damp place threatens to be more
prolonged than I anticipated. Through the window-panes covered with
moisture I gloomily look out onto a court filled with broken furniture,
where the twilight is falling and the snow.
Who could have foreseen that to-morrow, by an unexpected turn of
fortune, I should be sleeping on a great gilded, imperial bed in a
strange fairyland in the heart of the Forbidden City?