Winning the Wilderness

by Margaret Hill McCarter

A low boom of thunder rolled across the western sky; a twilight darkness fell on the earth, and a long night of storm and stress began for the army of deliverance encamped before Peking.

Outside the city the Boxers massed in numbers. Inside more than a hundred thousand waited the coming of hardly more than one-tenth of their number. No wonder they felt secure behind their centuries-old walls. 382

Thaine Aydelot was accustomed to sleeping tentless on the ground and to being beaten by rains. He was a sound sleeper and he was very weary. But tonight he could not sleep. The morrow would see world movements that should change all future history; in which movements he was a tiny unit, as every furrow that his father, Asher Aydelot, had run across the face of the prairie had by so much won it from wilderness to fruitfulness.

All night long the rain poured in torrents upon the camp. A terrific cannonade of thunder shook the earth. The lightning tore through the clouds in jagged tongues of flame. Where Thaine lay he could see with every flash the great frowning black walls of Peking looming up only a few miles away. In the lull of the thunder a more dreadful cannonading could be heard, hour after hour. Thaine knew that inside the walls the Boxers were besieging the Compound. And inside that Compound, if he were yet alive, was his old teacher, Pryor Gaines. He wondered if the God of Battles that had led the armies all this long hard way would fail them now when one more blow might bring deliverance to His children. He remembered again the blessing with which his father had sent him forth:

“As thy day so shall thy strength be. The Eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

The memory brought peace, and at length, wrapped round in the blessing of an absolute trust, he fell asleep.

Inside of the City of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury 383 possessing the demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. For such as these the missionary is offered up. A human jungle, untamed and waiting, to whose wilderness the soldier became a light-bearer, albeit he brought the gospel of gunpowder to aid him.

The great walls about Peking enclose an area some fourteen miles in length and twelve miles in width. Within these walls lie several cities, separated from each other by walls of lesser strength, intended, with one exception, in the opening of the twentieth century, not so much for defense as for boundary lines.

The exception is the Imperial City, inside whose sacred precincts it was firmly believed a foreigner might not set foot and not be stricken dead by the gods. This City within a city had defenses the allied armies were yet to come against. It lies on the north, inside the great wall. Just east of it, along the north wall, was the Foreign Legation, whose south and east bounds were lesser structures of brick and earth. Here all the foreigners and many native Christians had been shut in for six long weeks, with the infuriated Boxers hammering daily at their gates, mad for massacre.

Here they had barricaded themselves with all the meager means available. They had fortified every gate with whatever might stop a bullet or check a cannon ball. They filled up the broken places in the walls with piles of earth; they dug deep trenches inside these walls, and inside these trenches they had built up heaps of earthworks. Daily they strengthened the weaker places and watched and 384 prayed. No word from the big world outside seemingly could come to them—a little handful of the Lord’s children, forgotten of Him, and locked dungeon deep from human aid. They had sent out a cry for help and had sent up prayers for deliverance. How far that cry had gone they could not know. Frowning walls besieged by enemies lay all around them. They could only look up and lift up helpless hands in prayer to the hot, unpitying August skies above them. Sickness stalked in over the walls. Hunger tore its way through the gates. Death swooped down, and sorrow seeped up, and despair lay in wait. But hope, and trust, and faith, and love failed not.