VI
Thursday, October 18.
It is a surprise to awaken to a dark and sombre sky. We counted upon having, as on the preceding mornings, the almost never clouded autumn and winter sun, which in China shines and warms even when everything is frozen hard, and which has, up to this time, helped us to support the gruesome sights of our journey.
When we open the door of the junk just before dawn, our horses and cart are there, having just arrived. On the forbidding shore some Mongolians with their camels are crouched about a fire which has burned all night in the dust; and behind their motionless groups the high walls of the city, of an inky blackness, rise to meet the low-hanging clouds.
We leave our small nomadic equipment in the junk, in the care of two marines of the Tong-Tchow division, who will look after it until our return, and also our most precious possession, the last of the bottles of pure water given us by the general.
The last stage of our journey is made in the company of the French consul-general at Tien-Tsin and of the chancellor of the legation, who are both bound for Pekin, under the escort of a marshal and three or four artillerymen.
Our long, monotonous route leads us across fields of sorghos reddened by the early frosts, and through deserted villages where no one is stirring. It is a cold, gray morning, and the autumn country, upon which a fine rain is falling, is in mourning.
At certain moments I almost fancy myself on the roads of the Basque country in November, amid the uncut maize. Then all at once some unknown symbol arises to recall China,—either a tomb of mysterious shape or a stele mounted upon enormous granite tortoises.
From time to time we meet military convoys of one nation or another, or lines of ambulances. In one place some Russians have taken shelter from a shower in the ruins of a village; in another a number of Americans, who have discovered some hidden clothing in an abandoned house, go on their way rejoicing, with fur mantles on their backs.
Then there are tombs, always tombs, from one end to the other; China is strewn with them; some are almost hidden by the roadside, others are magnificently isolated in enclosures which are like mortuary thickets of dark green cedars.
Ten o'clock. We should be approaching Pekin, although as yet nothing indicates its nearness. We have not seen a single Chinese since our departure; the whole country is deserted and silent under a veil of almost imperceptible rain.
We are going to pass not far from the tomb of an empress, it seems, and the French chancellor, who knows the neighborhood, proposes that he and I make a détour to look at it. So, leaving the others to continue their route, we take a side path through the tall, damp grass.
A canal and a pool soon appear, of a pale color, under the indefinite sky. There is no one to be seen anywhere; the sad quiet of a depopulated country prevails. The tomb on the opposite bank scarcely peeps out from its cedar wood, which is walled about on all sides. We see little but the first marble gates leading to it and the avenue of white stele which is finally lost under the mysterious trees. It is all rather distant, and is reproduced in the mirror of the pool in long inverted reflections. Near us the tall leaden stems of some lotus killed by the frost bend over the water, where the rain drops have traced faint rings. The whitish spheres seen here and there are heads of the dead.
When we rejoin our company they promise that we shall enter Pekin in half an hour. After the complications and delays of our journey we almost believe we shall never arrive. Besides, it is incredible that so large a city could be so near in this deserted country, such a little way ahead of us.
Copyright, 1901, by J. C. Hemment
The Great Wall surrounding the Outer City of Pekin
"Pekin does not proclaim itself," explains my new companion. "Pekin takes hold of you; when you perceive it you are there."
The road passes through groups of cedars and willows with falling leaves, and in the concentration of our effort to see the City Celestial we trot on in the fine rain, which does not wet us at all, so drying are the northern winds, carrying the dust always and everywhere; we trot on without speaking.
"Pekin!" suddenly exclaims one of our companions, pointing out an obscure mass just rising above the trees,—a crenellated dungeon of superhuman proportions.
Pekin! In a few seconds, during which I am feeling the spell of this name, a big gloomy wall, of unheard-of height, is disclosed, and goes on endlessly in the gray, empty solitude, which resembles an accursed steppe. It is like a complete change of scene, performed without the noise of machinery or the sounds of an orchestra, in a silence more impressive than any music. We are at the very foot of the bastions and ramparts, dominated by them, although a turn in the road had up to this moment concealed them. At the same time the rain is turning to snow, whose white flakes mingle with the suspended dirt and dust. The wall of Pekin overwhelms us, a giant thing of Babylonian aspect, intensely black under the dead light of a snowy autumn morning. It rises toward the sky like a cathedral, but it goes on; it is prolonged, always the same, for miles. Not a person on the outskirts of the city, not a green thing all along these walls! The ground is uneven, dusty, ashen in color, and strewn with rags, bones, and even an occasional skull! From the top of each black battlement a crow salutes us as we pass, cawing mournfully.
The clouds are so thick and low that we do not see clearly; we are oppressed by long-looked-for Pekin, which has just made its abrupt and disconcerting appearance above our heads; we advance to the intermittent cries of the crows, rather silent ourselves, overpowered at being there, longing to see some movement, some life, some one or some thing come out from these walls.
From a gate ahead of us, from a hole in the colossal enclosure, slowly emerges an enormous brown, woolly animal like a gigantic sheep; then two, then three, then ten. A Mongolian caravan begins to pass us, always in the same silence, broken only by the croakings of the ravens. These enormous Mongolian camels, with their furry coats, muffs on their legs, and manes like lions, file in an endless procession past our frightened horses. They wear neither bells nor rattles, like the thin beasts of the Arabian deserts; their feet sink deep into the sand, which muffles their footsteps so the silence is not broken by their march.
Perceived through a veil of fine snow and black dust, the caravan has passed us, and moves on without a sound, like a phantom thing. We find ourselves alone again, under this Titanic wall, from which the crows keep watch. And now it is our turn to enter the gloomy city through the gates by which the Mongolians have just passed out.
VII
AT THE FRENCH LEGATION
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?