It is curious to go among these houses, abandoned in haste and terror, and to find ourselves in the midst of the disorder of precipitate flight; broken furniture and dishes, clothing, guns, bayonets, ballistic books, boots with paper soles, umbrellas, and ambulance supplies are piled pell-mell before the doors. In the kitchens dishes of rice are ready for the oven, with plates of cabbage and cakes made of fried grasshoppers.
There are shells everywhere, cartridges strew the grounds, gun-cotton is dangerously dispersed, and black powder is scattered in long trains. But side by side with this debauch of war materials, droll details attest the human side of Chinese life; on all the window-sills are pots of flowers, on all the walls are household gods placed there by the soldiers. The familiar sparrow abounds here, and is never interfered with, it seems, by the inhabitants of the place, and from the roofs the cats, circumspect but anxious to enter into relations with us, are observing the sort of ménage that will be possible with such unexpected hosts as ourselves.
Very near us, a hundred metres from our fort, passes the Great Wall of China. It is surmounted at this point by a watch tower, where the Japanese are now established, and there they have planted their white flag on a bamboo stick in the red sunlight.
Always smiling, especially at the French, the little Japanese soldiers invite us to come up to see from above the surrounding country.
The Great Wall, seven or eight hundred metres thick at this point, descends gently amid green grass on the Chinese side, but drops vertically on the side toward Manchuria, where it is flanked by enormous square bastions.
We mount, and at our feet we see the wall plunging on one hand into the Yellow Sea, while on the other it rises to the summits of the mountain and goes winding on through the fields as far as the eye can see, giving the impression of a colossal thing which never comes to any end.
Toward the east we have a view, in this clear light, of the deserted plains of Manchuria.
Toward the west—in China—the wooded country has a deceptive look of peace and confidence. All the European flags hoisted on the forts have a festive air amid all the green. It is true that on a plain near the shore there are evidences of an immense movement of Cossacks, but they are far away and the noise does not reach us, though there are at least five thousand men among the tents and among the flags which are stuck into the ground. Where the other powers send to Ning-Hia only a few companies, the Russians on the contrary proceed in great masses, because of their designs on neighboring Manchuria. Shan-Haï-Kouan, the Tartar village which has closed its gates through fear of pillage, appears in the distance, gray and mute as though asleep behind its high crenellated walls. On the sea off toward the horizon, rests the squadron of the Allies,—a fleet of steel monsters with black smoke, friends for the moment, silently assembled in the motionless blue.
The weather is calm, exquisite, buoyant. The prodigious rampart of China blossoms at this season like a garden. Between its sombre bricks, loosened by time, asters, and quantities of pinks like those at the seashore in France are pushing their way through.