IV
Tuesday, October 16.
We are up at daylight and off again. In the cold, magnificent dawn, upon a clear pink sky, the sun rises and shines without heat on the green plain, and on the deserted place where we have slept.
All at once I leap to the ground with an instinctive longing for activity, anxious to move, to walk. Horrors! At a turn in the path as I am running fast without looking where I am going, I almost step on something in the form of a cross,—a naked corpse lying face downward with extended arms, half buried in the mud and of a corresponding color; the dogs or the crows, or some Chinese who wanted the queue, have taken the scalp, leaving the cranium white and minus hair or skin.
It grows colder each day as we get farther away from the sea, and the plain begins gradually to slope upward.
Junks pass as they did yesterday, going down the river in files with military stores, and are under the care of soldiers of all the nations of Europe. Then come long intervals of solitude, during which no living thing appears in this region of millet and reeds. The wind that blows more and more bitterly is healthful; it dilates the chest, and for the moment redoubles life. So we march along between the sorghos and the river, on the everlasting frosty path that leads to Pekin, without fatigue, without any desire to hurry, but always ahead of the solemn Chinamen, who, tugging at their ropes, continue to draw our floating house, keeping up their pace with the regularity of machines.
There are a few trees now on the banks, willows with very green leaves of a variety unknown to us; they seem untouched by the autumn, and their beautiful color is in striking contrast to the rusty tones of the grass and the dying sorghos. There are gardens too,—abandoned gardens that belonged to hamlets that have been burned; our Chinamen sometimes send one of their number on a marauding expedition, and he brings back armfuls of vegetables for our meals.
Osman and Renaud, as we pass by ruined houses, sometimes pick up articles which they think necessary for the embellishment of our dwelling,—small mirrors, carved seats, lanterns, even bunches of artificial flowers made of rice paper, which may have adorned the headdresses of massacred or fleeing Chinese ladies, and which they naïvely use to decorate the walls of the room. The interior of our sarcophagus soon takes on an air of distinction quite droll and barbaric.
It is astonishing how soon we accustom ourselves to the perfectly simple life on the junk, an existence of healthy fatigue, devouring appetites, and heavy sleep.
Toward the evening of this day the mountains of Mongolia, those which tower above Pekin, begin to appear on the distant horizon, on the very border of this infinitely level land.
There is something especially lugubrious about the twilight to-day. The sinuous Pei-Ho, narrowing hour by hour at each turn, seems to be but a tiny stream between its silent shores, and we feel altogether too much shut in by the confused growth which conceals such sombre things. The day goes out in one of those cold dead colorings that are a specialty of Northern winters. All that there is in the way of light comes from the water, which reflects more vividly than the sky; the river, like a mirror, reflects the sunset yellows; one might even say that it exaggerates the sad light, as it runs between the inverted images of the reeds, the monotonous sorghos and the already black silhouettes of the few trees. The solitude is deeper than that of yesterday. The cold and the silence settle down upon one like a winding sheet. There is a penetrating melancholy in feeling the slow oncoming of the night in this nameless spot, a certain anguish in looking at the last reflections of the neighboring reeds,—reflections which continue, even though ahead of us darkness claims the hostile and unknown distance.
Happily, the hour for supper is here, the longed-for hour, for we are very hungry. In our little retreat I shall find again the red light of our lantern, the excellent soldier's bread, the smoking tea served by Toum, and the cheerfulness of my two good servants.
Toward nine o'clock, just as we pass a group of junks full of people, all Chinese,—marauders' junks evidently,—we hear cries behind us,—cries of distress and death, cries that are horrible in the stillness. Toum, who lends his fine ear and understands all that these people are saying, explains that they are engaged in killing an old man because he has stolen some rice. We were not numerous enough or sure enough of our party, to interfere. I fired two shots into the air in their direction, and all became still as if by magic; we had, no doubt, saved the head of the old rice thief at least until the morning.
Then it is quiet until daylight. After midnight, tied up no matter where among the reeds, we all sleep a sleep that is undisturbed. It is calm and cold under the stars. There are a few shots fired in the distance. We are conscious of them, but they do not wake us.
Wednesday, October 17.
We rise at daybreak and run along the bank in the white frost; the dawn is pink, and soon the sun rises bright and clear.
Wishing to take a short cut through the everlasting sorghos fields and to rejoin the junk which is obliged to follow a long turn in the river further on, we cross the ruins of a hamlet where frightfully contorted bodies are lying, on whose blackened members the ice has formed little crystals that shine like a coating of salt.
After our noon dinner, as we emerge from the semi-obscurity of our sarcophagus, the Chinamen point to the horizon. Tong-Tchow, the "City of Celestial Purity," is beginning to show itself; great black walls surmounted with miradors, and an astonishingly tall, slender tower, of a very Chinese outline with twenty superimposed roofs.
It is all distant still, and the plains about us are full of horrors. From a stranded junk emerges a long dead arm, of a bluish tone. And the bodies of cattle borne by the current pass by us in a perfect procession, all swollen and exhaling a bovine pest. A cemetery must have been violated hereabouts, for on the mud of the shore there are empty coffins with human bones alongside them.
V
AT TONG-TCHOW
Tong-Tchow, which occupies two or three kilometres along the bank, is one of those immense Chinese cities—more densely populated than many of the capitals of Europe—whose very name is almost unheard of with us. To-day, needless to say, it is but the ghost of a city, and as one approaches it it does not take long to perceive that it is now empty and in ruin.
We approach slowly. At the foot of the high black crenellated walls, junks are crowded all along the river. On the bank the same excitement as at Taku and at Tien-Tsin is complicated by some hundreds of Mongolian camels crouching in the dust.
There are soldiers, invaders, cannons, materials of war. Cossacks who are trying captured horses go and come at full gallop among the various groups, with great savage cries.
The various national colors of the European Allies are hoisted in profusion; they float from high up on the black walls pierced by cannon balls, from the camps, from the junks, from the ruins. And the continual wind—the implacable icy wind carrying the infected dust that smells of the dead—plays upon these flags, which give an ironical air of festivity to all the devastation.
I look for the French flags so as to stop my junk in our neighborhood and to go at once to our quarters. I can try our country's rations there this evening; furthermore, not being able to continue our trip on the river, I must procure for to-morrow morning a cart and some saddle horses.
Stopping near a place which seems to belong to us, I ask some Zouaves the road to our quarters; they promptly, eagerly, and politely offer to accompany me. Together we go on toward a great door in the thick black wall.
At this entrance to the city they have, by means of ropes and boards, established a cattle-yard for the purpose of supplying food for the soldiers. Besides a few live animals there are three or four on the ground, dead from the bovine pest, and some Chinese prisoners have this moment come to drag them to the river, the general rendezvous for dead bodies.
We enter a street where our soldiers are employed at various kinds of work in the midst of heaps of rubbish. Through the broken doors and windows of the houses the wretched interiors are visible; everything is in fragments, broken, destroyed as though for pleasure. From the thick dust raised by the north wind and by our own footsteps rises an intolerable odor of the dead.
For two months the rage for destruction, the frenzy for murder, has beset this unfortunate "City of Celestial Purity," invaded by the troops of eight or ten different countries. She felt the first shock of all these hereditary hatreds. First the Boxers came her way. Then the Japanese,—heroic little soldiers of whom I do not wish to speak ill, but who destroy and kill as barbarian armies were wont to do. Still less do I wish to speak ill of our friends, the Russians; but they have sent here their Cossack neighbors from Tartary, and half-Mongolian Siberians, all admirable under fire, but looking at war in the Asiatic fashion. Then there are the cruel cavalrymen of India sent by Great Britain. America has let loose her soldiers. And when, in the first desire for vengeance for Chinese cruelties, the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the French arrived, nothing was left intact.
Our commander and his officers have improvised lodgings and offices in some of the larger Chinese houses, hastily repairing the roofs and walls. In strong contrast to the rudeness of these places are the sumptuous wood carvings and the tall Chinese vases found intact among the ruins.
They promise me carriages and horses for to-morrow morning to be ready at sunrise on the bank near my junk. When all is settled there is about an hour of daylight left, so I wander about the ruins of the city with my armed followers, Osman, Renaud, and Chinese Toum.
As one gets farther away from the quarters where our soldiers are, the horrors increase with the solitude and the silence.
We come first to the street of the China merchants, great warehouses where the products of the Canton manufactories were stored. It must have been a fine street judging from the carved and gilded but ruined façades which remain. To-day the yawning shops, almost demolished, seem to vomit onto the highway their heaps of broken fragments. One walks on precious enamel decorated with brilliant flowers, for it literally covers the ground so that one crushes it in passing. There is no knowing whose work this was; it was already done when our troops arrived. But it must have taken whole days of furious attack with boots and clubs to reduce it all to such small bits; jars, plates, cups, are ground to atoms, pulverized, together with human bones and hair. At the back of these warehouses the coarser wares occupied a sort of interior court. These courts with their old walls are particularly lugubrious this evening, in the dying light. In one of them we found a mangy dog trying to drag something from underneath a pile of broken plates—it was the body of a child whose skull had been broken. The dog began to eat the flesh that was left on the legs of the poor dead thing.
There was no one to be seen in the long devastated streets where the framework of the houses, as well as the tiles and the bricks, had tumbled down. Crows croaked in the silence. Horrible dogs who feed on the dead fled before us, hanging their tails. We had glimpses of Chinese prowlers, wretched-looking creatures, trying to find something to steal, or of some of the dispossessed timidly creeping along the walls attempting to find out what has become of their homes.
The sun is already low, and the wind is rising as it does every night. We shiver with the sudden cold. Empty houses fill the shadows.
These houses are all of considerable extent, with recesses, a succession of courts, rock work, basins, and melancholy gardens. Crossing the threshold, guarded by the ever-present granite monsters worn by the rubbing of hands, one finds oneself in an endless series of apartments. The intimate details of Chinese life are touchingly and graciously revealed by the arrangement of potted plants, flowerbeds, and little balconies where bindweed and other vines are trained.
Here, surrounded with playthings, is a poor doll, which doubtless belonged to some child whose head has been broken; there a cage hangs with the bird still in it, dried up in one corner with its feet in the air.
Everything is sacked, removed, or destroyed; furniture is broken, the contents of drawers thrown about the floors, papers, blood-stained clothing, Chinese women's shoes spattered with blood, and here and there limbs, hands, heads, and clumps of hair.
In certain of the gardens neglected plants continue to blossom gaily, running over into the walks amongst the human remains. Around an arbor which conceals the body of a woman, twines pink convolvulus in blossoming garlands. The blossom is still open at this late hour of the day and in spite of the cold nights, which quite upsets our European ideas of convolvulus.
In one of the houses back in a recess in a dark loft, something moves! Two women cower pitifully! Finding themselves discovered, they are seized with terror and fall at our feet, trembling, weeping, clasping their hands, and begging for mercy. One is young, the other older, and they look alike. Mother and daughter! "Pardon, sir, pardon; we are afraid," translates little Toum naïvely, understanding their broken words. Evidently they expect the worst of us—and then death. For how long have they lived in this hole, these two poor things, thinking with each step that resounds on the pavement of the deserted court that their end has come? We leave them a few pieces of silver, which perhaps humiliates without helping them, but it is all that we can do, and then we go.
Another house, a house of the rich this one is, with a profusion of potted plants in enamelled porcelain jars in the sad little garden. In an apartment that is already dark (for decidedly night is coming on, the uncertainty of twilight is beginning), but where the havoc is less extensive, for there are great chests and beautiful arm-chairs still intact, Osman suddenly recoils with terror before something which emerges from a bucket placed upon a board. Two torn thighs, the whole lower part of a woman thrust into this bucket with the feet in the air! Undoubtedly the mistress of this elegant home. Her body? Who knows what has been done with the body? But here is the head, under this arm-chair, near the skeleton of a cat. The mouth is open, showing the teeth, and the hair is long.
In addition to the broad, almost straight streets whose desolation is visible from one end to the other, there are little tortuous streets leading up to gray walls. They are the most desolate to enter at this twilight hour, with only the cry of the crow as an accompaniment. Little stone gnomes guard their mysterious doors, and their pavements are strewn with human heads with long queues. One approaches certain turns in the streets with a heavy heart. It is over, and nothing in the world would tempt us to enter again at this hour one of those frightfully still houses where one meets with so many gruesome encounters.
We had gone far into the city before night came on, and the silence had become intolerable. We return to the region where the troops are quartered, cut by the north wind and chilled by the cold and gloom; our return is rapid; broken china and other débris impossible to define crackle under our feet.
The banks are lined with soldiers warming themselves and cooking their suppers over bright fires, where they are burning chairs, tables, and bits of carved wood or timbers. Coming out of the Dantesque streets, it all bespeaks joy and comfort to us.
Near our junk there is a canteen, improvised by a Maltese, where intoxicants are sold to soldiers. I send my men to get whatever liquors they want for our supper, for we need something to warm and cheer us if possible. We celebrate with smoking soup, tea, chartreuse, and I don't know what besides, in our little matting-covered dwelling, tied up this time on the pestilential mud and enveloped as usual by cold and darkness.
At dessert, when the hour for smoking arrives in our sarcophagus, Renaud, to whom I have given the floor, tells us that his squadron is encamped on the borders of a Chinese cemetery in Tien-Tsin, and that the soldiers of another European nation (I prefer not to say which) in the same vicinity spend their time ransacking the graves and taking from them the money which it is the custom to bury with the dead.
"To me, colonel" (I am colonel to him, as he is ignorant of the naval appellation of commandant, which, with us, goes with five gold stripes), "to me it does not seem right. Even though they are Chinese, we ought to leave their dead in peace. What disgusts me is that they cut their rations up on the planks of the coffins. And I say to them, 'Put it on the outside if you will, but not on the inside, which has touched the corpse.' But these savages, colonel, laugh at me."