HELL HOUNDS
Night, 17th June 1900.
...
It is past twelve o'clock at night, but in spite of the late hour and my fatigue—I have been dead tired for a week now—I am writing this with the greatest ease, my pen gliding, as it were, over a surface of ice-like slippiness, although my fingers are all blistered from manual work. Why, you will ask? Well, simply because my imagination is afire, and taking complete control of such minor things as the nerves and muscles of my right arm, my eyes and my general person, it speeds me along with astonishing celerity. Let your imagination be aflame and you can do anything....
It began last night. No sooner had the gates which pierce the Tartar Wall been closed by the Imperial guards, who still remain openly faithful to their duties, than there arose such a shouting and roaring as I have never heard before and never thought possible. It was the Boxers. The first time the Boxers had rushed in on us, it was through the Ha-ta Gate to the east of the Legations. Last night, after having for three days toured the Tartar city pillaging, looting, burning and slaying, with their progress quite unchecked except for those few hundred rifle shots of our own, the major part of the Boxer fraternity, to whom had joined themselves all the many rapscallions of Peking, found themselves in the Chinese or outer city after dark, and consequently debarred from coming near their legitimate prey. (The gates are still always closed as before.) Somebody must have told them that they could do as they liked with Christians and Europeans; for, mad with rage, they began shouting and roaring in chorus two single words, "Sha-shao," kill and burn, in an ever-increasing crescendo. I have heard a very big mass of Russian soldiery give a roar of welcome to the Czar some years ago, a roar which rose in a very extraordinary manner to the empyrean; but never have I heard such a blood-curdling volume of sound, such a vast bellowing as began then and there, and went on persistently, hour after hour, without ever a break, in a maddening sort of way which filled one with evil thoughts. Sometimes for a few moments the sound sank imperceptibly lower and lower and seemed making ready to stop. Then reinforced by fresh thousands of throats, doubtless wetted by copious drafts of samshu, it grew again suddenly, rising stronger and stronger, hoarser and hoarser, more insane and more possessed, until the tympanums of our ears were so tortured that they seemed fit to burst. Could walls and gates have fallen by mere will and throat power, ours of Peking would have clattered down Jericho-like. Our womenfolk were frozen with horror—the very sailors and marines muttered that this was not to be war, but an Inferno of Dante with fresh horrors. You could feel instinctively that if these men got in they would tear us from the scabbards of our limbs. It was pitch dark, too, and in the gloom the towers and battlements of the Tartar Wall loomed up so menacingly that they, too, seemed ready to fall in and crush us.
For possibly three or four hours this insane demonstration proceeded apace. The Manchu guards listened gloomily and curiously from the inside of the gates, but made no attempt to open them, but they equally refused sullenly to parley with a strong body of sailors and volunteers we sent with instructions to shoot any one attempting to unlock the barriers. Yet it was evident that the guards had received special instructions, and that the gates would not be handed over to the mob.
A few minutes before midnight the sounds became more sullen, and beneath the general uproar another note, one of those in distress, began, as it were, like an undercurrent to this pandemonium. The cause we had not long to seek, for presently flames began to shoot up, a sight we were by now well accustomed to, though not in this purely trading quarter of the city. The fire, started with savage disregard in the very centre of the most densely populated street of the Chinese city, spread with terrible rapidity. Soon both sides of Ch'ien Men great street, just on the other side of the Tartar Wall, were enveloped in raging flames, and a lurid light, growing ever brighter and brighter, turned the dark night into an unnatural day.
Between the incendiaries and ourselves the great Tartar Wall stood firm, but though this ancient defence against other barbarians was an effective protection for us, it could not long remain immune itself. The lou, or square pagoda-like tower facing the Chinese city side, caught some of the thousands and tens of thousands of sparks flying skywards, and it was not long before the vast pile was burning as fiercely as the rest. The great rafters of Burmese teak, brought by Mongol Khans six centuries before to Peking, were as dry as tinder with the dryness of ages; and thus almost before we had noted that the bottom of the tower was well alight the flames were shooting through the roof and out through the hundreds of little square windows which in olden days were lined by archers. Higher and higher the flames leaped, until the top of the longest tongues of fire, pouring out through a funnel of brick, was hundreds of feet above the ground level. Only Vereschagin could have done justice to this holocaust; I have never seen anything so barbarically splendid.
Meanwhile below this in the Chinese city all had become quiet, except for the increasing and growing roar of the all-devouring flames. The Boxers, as if appalled by their own handiwork and the mournful sight of the capital in flames, had retreated into their haunts and had left the unfortunate townfolk to battle with this disaster as they could. From the top of the wall, which I hastily climbed as soon as I obtained permission to leave my post, thousands and tens of thousands of figures could be seen moving hurriedly about laden with merchandise, which they were attempting to save. Busy as ants, these wonderful Chinese traders were rescuing as much of their invested capital from the very embrace of the flames as they could at a moment when the Boxer patriots, menacing and killing them with sword and spears as san mao-tzu, or third-class barbarians who sold the cursed foreigners' stuffs and products, had hardly disappeared.
Yet it seemed vain, indeed, to talk of salvage with half the city in flames, for other fires now began mysteriously in other places, which "lighted" the horizon. "Tout Pékin brûlé," muttered a French sailor to me as I passed back to my post, and his careless remark made me think that this was the Commune and Sansculottism intermixed—the ends of two centuries tumbled together—because we foreigners had upset the equilibrium of the Far East with our importunities and our covetousness of the Yellow Man's possessions....
And what of S——, what of the Peking Government—what is everybody in the outside world doing—the distant world of which we have so suddenly lost all trace, while we are passing through such times? We do not know; we have no idea; we have almost forgotten to think about it. S—— was heard of twice some days ago from Langfang, a station only forty miles from Peking, but why he does not advance, why there is this intolerable delay, we do not know. The Peking Government is still decreeing and counter-decreeing night and day according to the Government Gazettes. The Ministers of our eleven Legations are meeting one another almost hourly, and are eternally discussing, but are doing nothing else. We have blocked our roads with barricades and provided our servants and dependents with passes written in English, French, German, Italian, Russian and Chinese—so that everyone can understand. We are now sick of such a multitude of languages and wish all the world spoken Volapük.
Thus with our rescued native Christians, our few butchered Boxers, our score and more of fires lighting the whole of the horizon, here in the middle of the night of the 16th of June we are no further forward in our political situation than we were two and a half weeks ago, when our Legation Guards arrived, and we esteemed ourselves so secure. Two and a half weeks ago! It seems at least two and a half months; but that is merely the direct fault of having to live nearly twice the proper number of hours in twenty-four.