And when one sees their little barricades hastily erected during the night out of nothing at all, and knows that five or six sailors succeeded in defending them (for five or six toward the end were all that could be spared), it really seems as though there were something supernatural about it all. As I walked through the garden with one of its defenders, and he said to me, "At the foot of that little wall we held out for so many days," and "In front of this little barricade we resisted for a week," it seemed a marvellous tale of heroism.
And their last intrenchment! It was alongside the house,—a ditch dug tentatively in a single night, banked up with a few poor sacks of earth and sand; it was all they had to keep out the executioners, who, scarcely six metres away, were threatening them with death from the top of a wall.
Beyond is the "cemetery," that is, the corner of the garden in which they buried their dead, until the still more terrible days when they had to put them here and there, concealing the place for fear the graves would be violated, in accordance with the terrible custom of this place. It was a poor little cemetery whose soil had been pressed and trampled upon in close combat, whose trees were shattered and broken by shell. The interments took place under Chinese fire, and an old white-headed priest—since a martyr, whose head was dragged in the gutter—said prayers at the grave, in spite of the balls that whistled about him, cutting and breaking the branches.
Toward the end their cemetery was the "contested region," after they had little by little lost much ground, and they trembled for their dead; the enemy had advanced to its very border; they watched and they killed at close quarters over the sleeping warriors so hastily put to rest. If the Chinese had reached this cemetery, and had scaled the last frail trenches of sand and gravel in sacks made of old curtains, then for all who were left there would have been horrible torture to the sound of music and laughter, horrible dismemberment,—nails torn out, feet torn off, disembowelling, and finally the head carried through the streets at the end of a pole.
They were attacked from all sides and in every possible manner, often at the most unexpected hours of the night. It usually began with cries and the sudden noise of trumpets and tam-tams; around them thousands of howling men would appear,—one must have heard the howlings of the Chinese to imagine what their voices are; their very timbre chills your soul. Gongs outside the walls added to the tumult.
Occasionally, from a suddenly opened hole in a neighboring house, a pole twenty or thirty feet long, ablaze at the end with oakum and petroleum, emerged slowly and silently, like a thing out of a dream. This was applied to the roofs in the hope of setting them on fire.
They were also attacked from below, they heard dull sounds in the earth, and understood that they were being undermined, that their executioners might spring up from the ground at any moment; so that it became necessary, at any cost, to attempt to establish countermines to prevent this subterranean peril. One day, toward noon, two terrible detonations, which brought on a regular tornado of plaster and dust, shook the French legation, half burying under rubbish the lieutenant in command of the defences and several of his marines. But this was not all; all but two succeeded in getting clear of the stones and ashes that covered them to the shoulders, but two brave sailors never appeared again. And so the struggle continued, desperately, and under conditions more and more frightful.
And still the gentle stranger remained, when she might so easily have taken shelter elsewhere,—at the English legation, for instance, where most of the ministers with their families had found refuge; the balls did not penetrate to them; they were at the centre of the quarter defended by a few handfuls of brave soldiers, and could there feel a certain security so long as the barricades held out. But no, she remained and continued in her admirable rôle at that blazing point, the French legation,—a point which was the key, the cornerstone of the European quadrangle, whose capture would bring about general disaster.
One time they saw with their field glasses the posting of an imperial edict commanding that the fire against foreigners cease. (What they did not see was that the men who put up the notices were attacked by the crowd with knives.) Yet a certain lull, a sort of armistice did follow; the attacks became less violent.