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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 somber 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 meters 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 Mme. Rosthorne, of the Austrian Legation.
Our officers in command of the defense were Lieutenant Darcy and
Midshipman Herber; the latter was struck full in the face by a ball,
and sleeps today in the garden.
The horrible part of the 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 inclosed
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 Peking.
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
marvelous tale of heroism.
And their last entrenchment! 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 off the executioners, who,
scarcely six meters away, were threatening them with death from the
top of a wall. Beyond is the "cemetary," that is, the corner of the
garden in which they buried the 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 cemetary 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 whiteheaded 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 cemetary 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
off, feet torn off, disemboweling, 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 tom-toms; 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 timber 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 risk, 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 defenses 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 center 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 role 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 inclosed them in a Dantesque circle; Peking 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! |
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