They saw that incendiaries were everywhere abroad; they heard fusillades, cannonades, and prolonged cries among the Chinese; entire districts were in flames; they were killing one another; their fury was fermenting as in a pandemonium, and they were suffocated, stifled with the smell of corpses.
Spies came occasionally with information to sell—always false and contradictory—in regard to the relief expedition, which amid ever-increasing anxiety was hourly expected. "It is here, it is there, it is advancing," or "It has been defeated and is retreating," were the announcements, yet it persisted in not appearing.
What, then, was Europe doing? Had they been abandoned? They continued, almost without hope, to defend themselves in their restricted quarters. Each day they felt that Chinese torture and death were closing in upon them.
They began to lack for the essentials of life. It was necessary to economize in everything, particularly in ammunition; they were growing savage,—when they captured any Boxers, instead of shooting them they broke their skulls with a revolver.
One day their ears, sharpened for all outside noises, distinguished a continued deep, heavy cannonade beyond the great black ramparts whose battlements were visible in the distance, and which enclosed them in a Dantesque circle; Pekin was being bombarded! It could only be by the armies of Europe come to their assistance.
Yet one last fear troubled their joy. Would not a supreme attack against them be attempted, an effort be made to destroy them before the allied troops could enter?
As a matter of fact they were furiously attacked, and this last day, the day of their deliverance, cost the life of one of our officers, Captain Labrousse, who went to join the Austrian commander in the glorious little cemetery of the legation. But they kept up their resistance, until all at once not a Chinese head was visible on the barricades of the enemy; all was empty and silent in the devastation about them; the Boxers were flying and the Allies were entering the city!
This first night of my arrival in Pekin was as melancholy as the nights on the road, but in a more commonplace way, with more of ennui. The workmen had just finished the walls of my room; the fresh plaster gave forth a chilling dampness that penetrated to my very bones, and as the room was empty, my servant spread my narrow mattress from the junk upon the floor, and began to make a table out of some old boxes.
My hosts were good enough to have a stove hastily set up for me and lighted, which called up a picture of European discomfort in some wretched place in the country. How could one fancy oneself in China, in Pekin itself, so near to mysterious enclosures, to palaces so full of wonders?