V
AT TONG-TCHOW
Tong-Tchow, which occupies two or three kilometres along the bank, is one of those immense Chinese cities—more densely populated than many of the capitals of Europe—whose very name is almost unheard of with us. To-day, needless to say, it is but the ghost of a city, and as one approaches it it does not take long to perceive that it is now empty and in ruin.
We approach slowly. At the foot of the high black crenellated walls, junks are crowded all along the river. On the bank the same excitement as at Taku and at Tien-Tsin is complicated by some hundreds of Mongolian camels crouching in the dust.
There are soldiers, invaders, cannons, materials of war. Cossacks who are trying captured horses go and come at full gallop among the various groups, with great savage cries.
The various national colors of the European Allies are hoisted in profusion; they float from high up on the black walls pierced by cannon balls, from the camps, from the junks, from the ruins. And the continual wind—the implacable icy wind carrying the infected dust that smells of the dead—plays upon these flags, which give an ironical air of festivity to all the devastation.
I look for the French flags so as to stop my junk in our neighborhood and to go at once to our quarters. I can try our country's rations there this evening; furthermore, not being able to continue our trip on the river, I must procure for to-morrow morning a cart and some saddle horses.
Stopping near a place which seems to belong to us, I ask some Zouaves the road to our quarters; they promptly, eagerly, and politely offer to accompany me. Together we go on toward a great door in the thick black wall.
At this entrance to the city they have, by means of ropes and boards, established a cattle-yard for the purpose of supplying food for the soldiers. Besides a few live animals there are three or four on the ground, dead from the bovine pest, and some Chinese prisoners have this moment come to drag them to the river, the general rendezvous for dead bodies.
We enter a street where our soldiers are employed at various kinds of work in the midst of heaps of rubbish. Through the broken doors and windows of the houses the wretched interiors are visible; everything is in fragments, broken, destroyed as though for pleasure. From the thick dust raised by the north wind and by our own footsteps rises an intolerable odor of the dead.
For two months the rage for destruction, the frenzy for murder, has beset this unfortunate "City of Celestial Purity," invaded by the troops of eight or ten different countries. She felt the first shock of all these hereditary hatreds. First the Boxers came her way. Then the Japanese,—heroic little soldiers of whom I do not wish to speak ill, but who destroy and kill as barbarian armies were wont to do. Still less do I wish to speak ill of our friends, the Russians; but they have sent here their Cossack neighbors from Tartary, and half-Mongolian Siberians, all admirable under fire, but looking at war in the Asiatic fashion. Then there are the cruel cavalrymen of India sent by Great Britain. America has let loose her soldiers. And when, in the first desire for vengeance for Chinese cruelties, the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the French arrived, nothing was left intact.