They ate dogs and horses. They went half naked that they might make sand bags of their clothes for greater defense. They exhausted every means for protection and life, but they forgot not to pray.
On this August night, while unknown to the besieged the Allied Armies encamped only six miles away, the reign of terror reached its height for the little Christian stronghold.
The storm beat pitilessly on the starved and ragged captives. The rain softened the earthworks and the rivers of water in the trenches threatened to undermine the walls. Across these walls the incessant attack of cannon and roar of rifles was beyond anything the six weeks’ siege had known, and only the power of Omnipotence could stay the bloody hands. So the long hours of the dreadful night dragged on.
At length came daydawn. The storm had rolled away. A lull in the besieging guns gave the Legation a little rest of mind. Hungry and helpless, it waited the passing 385 of another day. A silence seemed to fill the city and the wiser ones wondered anxiously what it might portend.
Suddenly, in the midst of it, a great gun boomed out to the northeast. Another gun, and another. Then came a pause and the besieged listened eagerly, for their own walls felt no shock. Again came the bellow of cannon, nearer and heavier, repeated and repeated, and the roll of smoke and the rattling fusillade of bullet shots told that a battle was on. Outside the gates! An army come against Peking! The Army of Deliverance! They were here fighting for the Christians! Oh, the music of birds’ song, of rippling waters, of gently pulsing zephyrs, the music of old cathedral chimes, of grandest orchestras—nothing of them all could sound so like to the music that the morning stars sang together as this deafening peal of cannon, this rippling rhythm of Krag rifles.
With bursting hearts they waited and watched the great wall to the north. It is sixty feet high and fully as wide at its base, tapering to twenty-five feet across the top. Could the gates be stormed? Could this wall be shaken? From the highest points inside the Compound eager eyes scanned the northeast as the battle raged on with crash of shells and whir of bullets. Then down to the waiting ones came a message that seemed to fly to every ear in the besieged city, making men and women drop to the ground in a very ecstasy of joy.
“They’ve run up the Stars and Stripes on the northeast wall!”
The sword of the Lord and of Gideon was come again to Peking, as it came once long ago to the Valley of Jezreel. 386
The Allied Armies broke camp early on the morning of August fourteen in the year of nineteen hundred. Six miles away stood the most impassable defense an army of the West might ever storm. Yet the twelve thousand men did not hesitate. With General Chaffee’s troops in the front of the line they fought through fiercely skirmishing forces up to the hoary old city’s gates, the Fourteenth United States Infantry leading the way. The American guns cleared the Chinese soldiery from the top of the walls, and the American cannon were in line ready to blow open the huge gates.
“I want to know what’s on the other side before I open up the gates,” General Chaffee declared.