Oh, the heroism, the lowly heroism of these poor Chinese Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who sought protection in the bishop's palace, knowing that one word of abjuration, one reverence to a Buddhist image would ensure their lives, yet who remained there, faithful, in spite of gnawing hunger and almost certain martyrdom! And at the same time, outside of these walls which protected them in a measure, fifteen thousand of their brothers were burned, dismembered, and thrown piecemeal into the river on account of the new faith which they would not renounce.
Unheard-of things happened during this siege: a bishop,[1] followed by an ensign and four marines, went to wrest a cannon from the enemy, balls grazing their heads; theological students manufactured powder from the charred branches of the trees in the close, and from saltpetre, which they scaled the walls to steal at night from a Chinese arsenal.
They lived in a continual tumult under a continual fire of stones and shot; all the marble bell-towers of the cathedral, riddled by shells, tottered and fell piecemeal upon their heads. At all hours, without truce, bullets rained in the court, breaking in the roofs and weakening the walls. At night especially balls fell like hailstones to the sound of the Boxers' trumpets and frightful gongs. And all the while their death-cries, "Cha! Cha!" (Let us kill, let us kill) or "Chao! Chao!" (Let us burn, let us burn) filled the city like the cries of an enormous pack of hounds.
It was in July and August under a burning sky, and they lived surrounded by fire; incendiaries sprinkled their roofs and their entrances with petroleum by means of pumps and threw lighted torches onto them; they were obliged to run from one place to another and to climb up with ladders and wet blankets to put out the flames. They had to run, run all the time, when they were so exhausted and their heads so heavy from having had no food, that they could scarcely stand.
Even the good Sisters had to organize a kind of race for the women and children, who were stupefied from fear and suffering. It was these sublime women who decided when it was necessary to change positions according to the direction from which the shells came and who chose the least dangerous moment to fly, with bowed heads, across a court, and to take refuge elsewhere. A thousand women without wills or ideas of their own, with poor dying babies clinging to their breasts, followed them; a human eddy, advancing, receding, pushing, in order to keep in sight the white caps of their protectors.
They had to run when, from lack of food, they could scarcely stand, and when a supreme lassitude impelled them to lie down on the ground to await death! They had to become accustomed to detonations that never ceased, to perpetual noise, to shot and shell, to the fall of stones, to seeing one of their number fall bathed in his own blood! Hunger was the most intolerable of all. They made soup of the leaves and young branches of the trees, of dahlia roots from the gardens and of lily bulbs. The poor Chinese would say humbly, "We must keep the little grain we have left for the sailors who are protecting us, and whose need of strength is greater than ours."
The bishop told of a poor woman who had been confined the previous night, who dragged herself after him imploring: "Bishop, bishop, give me a handful of grain so that my milk will come and my child may not die!"