Hanyang was captured—how will later be explained.
HUNAN SOLDIER.
One of the men who turned traitor,
causing the disastrous fall of Hanyang.
HUPEH SOLDIER.
From time immemorial at feud with the Hunanese,
but brought into co-operation in the early part
of the Revolution.
One found it the more difficult to write an accurate account of the situation which would remain true because from now onward it seemed to change its aspect hour by hour. Everything seemed to have taken a change for the worst. Chinese met in the streets and told each other the bad news with long faces. The sight of the dead being brought in from the field and prepared for burial, under the gaze of all and sundry, brought a peculiar depression into the very atmosphere. Foreign and Chinese communities waited hour by hour for what was coming. Rumours were wild on the lips of every one. No one could be believed, and what one actually saw could scarcely be taken as truth. The general situation was extremely grave to the Republican military cause, and the Imperialists were never stronger in numbers, and in the advantage that they held over their enemy in their positions in the field. In possession now of Hanyang Hill, it was expected that they would bring their big guns into position and blow Wuchang to pieces in three hours. There was nothing to stop them. They were the military masters of the situation. All the Chinese could do now was to sit tight, interfere as little as possible, endeavour to keep their heads on their shoulders by keeping out of the way of the executioner's knife, and wait to see what would happen.
Then slowly came the story of the fall of Hanyang.[[1]]
Sensational incidents during the day that Hanyang fell, with picturesque incidents and all the gore that the newspaper-reading public calls for were provided under the eyes of every one. Junkloads of helpless, bullet-driven men were drifting down the river in a ghastly succession. Have you ever seen a boat drifting on a rapid river? Have you ever watched a Chinese junk, ungainly and ugly perhaps, just going helplessly with the tide? And have you ever seen a cargo of human freight not knowing what to do to reach the shore or any place of safety? That morning the men had been riddled by bullets as they attempted to make away in the boats. They had had machine-gun fire rained into them, and, scampering like a lot of frightened birds in their cage, had crept all over to the covered end in their frenzy, hoping that the wood cover would save them. Tighter and tighter they pressed against each other. They trampled on each other, threw their rifles out into the river, their cartridge-cases, their general impedimenta, and then settled down to die as the boat slowly drifted down-stream. And there, when they were found, these thirty, forty, fifty men were sitting huddled grimly together, their glassy eyes staring upwards into the unknown. Mercilessly, with hideous brutality, they had been slaughtered as they sat, and now were in the sitting posture, dead, wedged in tightly one against the other. Some had fallen outward to the side of the boat, and their bodies now were hanging limply, swaying to and fro with the dull motion of the junk. Some, shot through the head, through the heart, through the limbs, had sunk exhausted to the bottom of the boat, where the water was fast rushing in through the splintered bulwarks, and lay, face down, in the water, drowned as they lay. Another boatload, equally helpless and void of all hope but the river, had their wounded at the bottom, some of the less seriously wounded putting their hands through the holes into the water and endeavouring vainly to get a motion on the boat. When these junks, after terrific labour, were brought into the side of the British Bund, the sight will never be forgotten—men, bleeding from the throat, from the side, limping as they dragged a shattered leg behind them up the steps, to fall exhausted at the top and carried away to the hospitals. 'Twas a bloody conflict that ended the fall of Hanyang.
