I
Thursday, Oct. 11, 1900.
At noon, on a beautiful calm day that is almost warm and very luminous on the water, I leave the admiral's ship, the Redoutable, to go on a mission to Pekin.
We are in the gulf of Petchili on the road to Taku, but at such a distance from the shore that it is not visible, so there is no indication of China anywhere.
The trip begins with a short ride on a steam launch, which takes us out to the Bengali, the little despatch-boat which will bring me to land by to-night.
The water is softly blue in the autumn sunshine, which is always bright in this part of the world. To-day, by chance, the wind and the waves seem to sleep. As far as one can see, great warships succeed one another, motionless and menacing. As far as the horizon there are the turrets, the masts, the smoke of the astonishing international squadron with all its train of satellites, torpedo boats, transports, and a legion of packet-boats.
The Bengali, upon which I am about to embark for a day, is one of the little French ships carrying troops and war supplies, which for a month past has been painfully and wearisomely going and coming between the transports or freighters arriving from France, and the port of Taku beyond the Pei-Ho bar.
To-day it is full of Zouaves,—brave Zouaves who arrived yesterday from Tunis, careless and happy, bound for this ominous Chinese land. They are crowded on the bridge, packed together, their faces gay and their eyes wide open for a glimpse of China, which has filled their thoughts for weeks and which is now near at hand, just over the horizon.
According to ceremonial custom, the Bengali, when it appears, must pass the stern of the Redoutable to salute the admiral. The music waits behind the armor, ready to play one of those marches so intoxicating to the sailor. And when we come up close to the big ship, almost under its shadow, all the Zouaves—those destined to return as well as those who must perish—wave their red caps to the sound of the bugle, with hurrahs for the ship, which here represents France to their eyes, and for the admiral, who from the bridge raises his cap in their honor.
At the end of half an hour China appears.
Never has an uglier and more forbidding shore surprised and congealed poor newly arrived soldiers. A low shore, a gray barren land without tree or grass. Everywhere there are forts of colossal size of the same gray as the earth, masses of geometrical outline pierced by embrasures for guns. Never has the approach to a country presented a more extensive or aggressive military array; on both sides of the horrible stream with its muddy waters loom similar forts, giving the impression of a place both terrible and impregnable, giving the impression also that this harbor, in spite of its wretched surroundings, is of the first order of importance, is the key to a great country, and gives access to a city large, rich, and powerful—as Pekin must have been. From a nearer view the walls of the first two forts, stained, full of holes, and ravaged by cannon-balls, bear witness to furious and recent battles.
We know how, on the day Taku was taken, they exhausted their strength on one another. By a miracle, a French shell from the Lion fell right into one of them, causing the explosion of its enormous powder magazine so that the yellow gunners lost their heads. The Japanese then seized this fort and opened an unexpected fire on the one opposite, and immediately the overthrow of the Chinese began. Had it not been for this chance, for this shell, and for this panic, all the European gunners anchored in the Pei-Ho would inevitably have been lost; the landing of the Allies would have been impossible or problematical, and the whole face of the war changed.
Transports on the Pei-ho
We now move up the river through the muddy infected water where impurities of all sorts are floating, as well as the bodies of men and animals. On both of the sombre shores we see by the light of the declining sun a procession of ruins, a uniform black and gray desolation of earth, ashes, and calcined slopes, tumbled walls, and ruins.
On this pestilential river a feverish animation reigns, so that it is difficult for us to make our way through the obstructions. Junks by the hundreds, each flying the colors and having at the stern the name of the nation by whom it is employed—France, Italy, United States, etc.—in big letters above the devilry of the Chinese inscription, besides a numberless flotilla of towing vessels, lighters, colliers, and packets.
On the terrible, steep, muddy banks, amongst filth and dead animals, there is an ant-like activity. Soldiers of all the armies of Europe mingle with coolies driven with sticks, unpacking military stores, tents, guns, wagons, mules, horses. Such a confusion as never was of uniforms, rubbish, cannons, débris, and provisions of all kinds. An icy wind which rises toward evening makes us shiver after the hot sun of the day and brings with it the gloom of winter.
Before the ruins of a quarter where the flag of France is floating, the Bengali approaches the lugubrious shore, and our Zouaves disembark rather discountenanced by the sombre reception given them by China. While waiting for some sort of a shelter to be provided, they light fires on the shore which the wind fans into flame, and there they heat their evening meal in darkness and silence and in the midst of clouds of infected dust.
On the deserted plain from which the dust, the cold, and the squalls come, the black devastated town, overrun with soldiers, extends, breathing pestilence and death.
A small street through its centre, hastily rebuilt in a few days' time with mud, broken timbers, and iron, is lined with dubious-looking taverns. Men from I don't know where, mongrels of every race, sell absinthe, salt-fish, and deadly liquors to the soldiers. There is some drunkenness, and occasionally knives are drawn.
Outside of this improvised quarter Taku no longer exists. Nothing but ruined walls, burned roofs, piles of ashes, and nameless receptacles of filth, wherein are huddled together old clothing, dogs, and human heads covered with hair.
I slept on board the Bengali, this hospitality having been extended to me by the commander. Occasional shots break the nocturnal silence, and toward morning I hear—although half asleep—horrible cries uttered by the Chinese on shore.
Friday, October 12.
I rose at daybreak to go and take the train, which still runs as far as Tien-Tsin and even a little beyond. Farther on, the road having been destroyed by Boxers, I shall continue I do not yet know how, either in a Chinese cart, in a junk, or on horseback, and from all accounts cannot count on seeing the great walls of Pekin for six or seven days. I have an order which will secure me rations from the posts along the road, otherwise I should run the risk of dying from hunger in this ravaged land. I have as little baggage as possible, nothing but a light canteen, and but one travelling companion, a faithful servant brought from France.
At the station, where I arrive at sunrise, I find again all yesterday's Zouaves, their knapsacks on their backs. No tickets are necessary for this railway, everything military is carried by right of conquest. Along with Cossack and Japanese soldiers a thousand Zouaves pile into carriages with broken panes through which the wind whistles. I find a place with their officers, and very soon we are calling up memories of Africa, where they have been, and longing for Tunis and Algeria the White.
We are two hours and a half on the road across the mournful plain. At first it was only gray earth as at Taku; then there were reeds and herbage touched with frost. On all sides are immense splashes of red, like blood stains, due to the autumn flowering of a kind of marsh plant. On the horizon of this desert myriads of migratory birds may be seen, rising like clouds, eddying and then falling. The north wind blows and it is very cold.
Soon the plain is peopled with tombs,—tombs without number, all of the same shape,—each one a kind of cone of earth piled up and surmounted by a ball of faience,—some small, like little huts, others as large as camping tents. They are grouped according to families and they are legion. The entire country is a burial-place with a gory look resulting from the splashes of red to which I have referred.
At the stopping-places where the ruined stations are occupied by Cossacks, there are calcined cars—damaged by fire—and locomotives riddled with balls. At other places we do not stop because there is nothing left; the few villages which mark this vicinity are all destroyed.
Tien-Tsin! It is ten o'clock in the morning. Pierced by the cold, we step down amid the clouds of dust which the north wind perpetually scatters over this dried-up country. We are taken in hand by Chinese scouts, who, without even knowing where we want to go, trot off, at full speed, with us in their little carriages. The European streets along which they are running (here called "concessions"), seen through a cloud of blinding dust, have the look of a big city, but the almost luxurious houses are riddled with shells, literally ripped open and without roofs or windows. The shores of the rivers, here as at Taku, are like a fevered babel; thousands of junks lie there, unloading troops, horses, guns. In the streets where Chinese workmen are carrying enormous loads of war supplies, one meets soldiers of all the nations of Europe, officers in every sort of uniform, on horseback, in chairs, or on foot. And there is of course a perpetual interchange of military salutes.
Where are we to lay our heads? Really, we have no idea, in spite of our desire for a shelter from the icy wind and dust. However, our Chinese runners keep on like rolling balls.
We knock at the doors of two or three hotels which have risen up among the ruins out of a confusion of broken furniture. Everything is full, full to overflowing; gold will not buy a loft with a mattress.
Willy-nilly we must beg our board and lodging from unknown officers, who give us the most friendly hospitality in houses where the holes made by shot and shell have been hastily stopped up so that the wind may no longer enter.
Saturday, October 13.
I have chosen to travel by junk as far as the course of the Pei-Ho will permit, the junk serving as a lodging in this country where I am forced to dally.
This makes necessary many little preparations.
The first thing is to make a requisition for this junk and to appropriate this species of sarcophagus where I am to live under a roof of matting. The next is to buy in the more or less ruined shops of Tien-Tsin the things necessary for a few days of nomadic life, from bedding to arms; and lastly, to hire from the Lazarist Fathers a Chinese person to make tea,—young Toum, aged fourteen, with the face of a cat and a queue reaching to the ground.
I dined with General Frey, who, with his small French detachment, was, as every one knows, the first to enter the heart of Pekin, the Imperial City. He was good enough to relate to me in detail this magnificent journey, the taking of the Marble Bridge and his final entrance into the Imperial City,—that mysterious place which I shall soon see, and into which before him no European had ever penetrated.
As to my own small personal expedition, which in comparison with his appears so easy and unimportant, the general kindly concerned himself with what we were to drink en route, my servant and I, in this time of infection, when the water is a constant danger on account of human remains, thrown there by the Chinese, left lying in all the wells; and he made me a present of untold value,—a case of eau d'Evian.
II
THE TWO GODDESSES OF THE BOXERS
Sunday, October 14.
An old Chinese woman, wrinkled as a winter apple, timidly opens the door at which we have loudly knocked. It stands in the deep shadow of a narrow passageway exhaling unhealthy fetid smells, between walls blackened by filth, where one feels as shut in as in the heart of a prison.
The old woman, an enigmatical figure, looks us all over with a blank impenetrable gaze; then recognizing among us the chief of the international police, she silently steps aside and permits us to enter. We follow her into a dark little court. Poor late autumn flowers are growing in the old walls, and we breathe faint sickly odors.
We are a group of officers, three French, two English, and one Russian, who are there clearly by right of conquest.
Our conductor is a strange creature, balancing on the tips of her incredibly small feet. Her gray hair fastened with long pins is so tightly drawn back that it seems to raise her eyes unduly. Her dark dress is indefinite in color, but her parchment-like face bears to a high degree that something appertaining to a worn-out race, which we are wont to call distinction. She appears to be only a servant, yet her aspect, her carriage, are disconcerting; some mystery broods over her, she seems like a refined matron who has resorted to a shameful clandestine occupation. This whole place, moreover, is difficult to describe to those who do not know it.
Beyond the court is a sordid vestibule, then a door painted black, with a Chinese inscription consisting of two big red letters. Without knocking, the old woman draws the bolt and opens it.
We may be mistaken, but we have come in all good faith to pay a visit to two goddesses,—prisoners kept shut up in this palace. For here we are in the common, the lower dependencies, the secret places of the palace of the viceroy of Petchili, and to reach this spot we have had to pass over the immense desolation of a town with cyclopean walls which is at present only a mass of débris and dead bodies.
The animation of these ruins, accidentally peopled by joyous soldiers, is singular, unique, on this Sunday, which is a holiday in camp and barracks. In the long streets filled with wreckage of all kinds, Zouaves and African chasseurs, arm-in-arm with Germans in pointed helmets, pass gaily between the walls of roofless houses. There are little Japanese soldiers, shining and automatic, Russians with flat caps, plumed Bersaglieri, Austrians, Americans with big felt hats, and Indian cavalrymen with enormous turbans. All the flags of Europe are floating over the ruins of Tien-Tsin, which has been partitioned by the allied armies. In certain quarters the Chinese who have gradually returned, after their flight, have established bazars in the open air in the lovely sunshine of this autumn Sunday,—bazars where in the midst of incendiary ashes they sell to the soldiers articles picked up in the ruins, porcelains, jars, silk dresses, furs. There are so many of these soldiers, so many uniforms of every kind on our route, so many sentinels presenting arms, that we grow weary returning the many salutes received as we pass through this unheard-of babel.
At the farther side of the destroyed city, near the high ramparts in front of the palace of the viceroy, where we are going to see the goddesses, some Chinese, undergoing torture in a kind of pillory, are lined up along the wall, with inscriptions above them describing their offences. Two pickets guard the doors with bayonetted guns, one an American, the other a Japanese, standing alongside of the horrible grinning old stone monsters who watch, crouching, on either side of the entrance.
There is nothing sumptuous, nothing great in this dusty, decrepit palace which we have traversed unheeding, but it speaks of real China, of old China, grimacing and hostile. There is a profusion of monsters in marble, in broken faience, and in worm-eaten wood, falling to pieces from sheer old age or threatening from the edges of roofs to do so; frightful forms half buried in sand and ashes, with horns, claws, forked tongues, and big squinting eyes.
In the grim walled court a few late roses are still in blossom under trees a century old.
Now, after various turns along badly lighted passages, we reach the goddesses' door,—the one marked with two big red letters. The old Chinese woman, ever mute and mysterious, with head held high but with lifeless eyes persistently downcast, pushes open the black doors, with a gesture of submission which means: "Here they are, look at them!"
In a room which is almost dark and where the evening sun never enters, two poor girls, two sisters who look alike, are seated with bowed heads amid lamentable disorder, in positions indicative of supreme consternation,—one on a chair, the other on the edge of an ebony bed which they must share at night. They are dressed in humble black, but here and there on the floor are scattered shining silks and tunics embroidered in big flowers and gold chimæras,—the garments they put on when going to meet the armies, in the midst of whistling bullets on days of battle,—their attire as warriors and goddesses.
For they are a kind of Jeanne d'Arc,—if it is not blasphemy to pronounce a name of almost ideal purity in this connection,—they are the goddesses of the incomprehensible Boxers, so atrocious and at the same time so admirable: hysterical creatures, exciting both the hatred and terror of the foreigner, who one day fled without fighting in a panic of fear, and the next with the shrieks of the possessed threw themselves straight into the face of death, under a shower of bullets from troops ten times as numerous as themselves.
The goddesses, taken prisoners, are the property, the curious bibelot, if one may use the word, of the seven Allies. They are not badly treated. They are merely shut up for fear they will commit suicide, which has become a fixed idea with them. What will be their fate? Already their captors are tired of seeing them and don't know what to do with them.
On a day of defeat the junk in which they sought refuge was surrounded, and they, with their mother, who followed them everywhere, threw themselves into the water. The soldiers fished them out fainting. The goddesses after much care came to their senses. But the mamma never again opened her oblique old Chinese eyes. The girls were made to believe that she had been taken to a hospital and would soon come back. At first the prisoners were brave, animated, haughty, and always well dressed. But this very morning they have been told that their mother is no more, and it is that which has stunned them, like a physical blow.
Having no money to buy mourning dress, which in China is always white, they asked to be allowed white leather shoes—which at this moment cover their doll-like feet, and which are as essential here as the crape veil is with us.
They are both slender and of a waxen pallor, scarcely pretty, but with a certain grace, a certain charm as they stand there, one in front of the other, without tears, with drooping eyes and with arms falling straight at their sides. They do not raise their eyes even to ascertain who enters or what is wanted of them. They do not stir as we come in, nothing matters to them now. They await death, indifferent to everything.
They inspire in us an unlooked-for respect by the dignity of their despair, respect and infinite compassion. We have nothing to say to one another, and are as embarrassed at being there as though we had been guilty of some indiscretion.
It occurred to us to put some money on the disordered bed; but one of the sisters, while appearing not to see us, threw the pieces of silver onto the floor and with a gesture invited the servant to dispose of them as she wished. So that this was on our part a further mistake.
There is such an abyss of misunderstanding between European officers and Boxer goddesses that it is impossible to show our sympathy for them in any way. So we, who came to be amused by a curious sight, depart in silence with a tightening of the heartstrings at the thought of the two poor creatures imprisoned in a gloomy room in the fading evening light.
My junk, with five Chinese aboard, will go up the river under the French flag, which is already a protection. The war department has decided it to be more prudent—although my servant and I are armed—to send two soldiers with us, two men with horses carrying guns and munitions.
Beyond Tien-Tsin, where I have spent another day, one may go an hour further by train in the direction of Pekin, as far as the town of Yang-Soon. My junk, with two soldiers, Toum, and the baggage, will await me there at a bend in the river, and has gone on ahead to-day with a military escort.
I dine this evening with the consul-general, the one who escaped being shot almost by miracle, although his flag was for a long time, during the siege, a mark for the Chinese gunners.