All night long the feeble voices of several hundred children were heard in the church moaning for lack of food. To use the expression of Monsignor Favier, it was like "the bleatings of a flock of lambs about to be sacrificed." But their cries diminished, for they were buried at the rate of fifteen in a single day.
They knew that not far away in the European legations a similar drama was being enacted, but, needless to say, there was no communication between them; and if any young Chinese Christian offered to go there with a message from the bishop asking for help, or at least for news, it was not long before they saw his head, with the note pinned to his cheek, reappear above the wall at the end of a rod garnished with his entrails.
Not only did bullets rain by the hundreds every day, but the Boxers put anything that fell into their furious hands into their cannon,—stones, bricks, bits of iron, old kettles. The besieged had no doctors; they hopelessly, and as best they could, bound up great horrible wounds, great holes in the breast. The arms of the voluntary grave-diggers were exhausted with digging places in which to bury the dead, or parts of the dead. And the cry of the infuriated mob went on, "Cha! Cha!" (Let us kill, let us kill!) to the grim sounds of their iron gongs and the blasts of their trumpets.
Mines went off in different localities, swallowing up people and bits of wall. In the gulf made by one of them fifty little babies in their cradles disappeared. Their sufferings at least were over. Each time a new breach was made the Boxers threw themselves upon it, and it became a yawning opportunity for torture and death.
But Ensign Henry was always there; with such of his sailors as had been spared he was seen rushing to the place where he was needed, to the exact spot where the most effective work could be done,—on a roof or on the crest of a wall,—and they killed and they killed, without losing a ball, every shot dealing death. Fifty, a hundred of them, crouched in heaps on the ground; priests and Chinese women, as well as men, brought stones, bricks, marble, no matter what, from the cathedral, and with the mortar they had ready they closed the breach and were saved again until the next mine exploded!
But they came to the end of their strength, the meagre ration of soup grew less and less, and they could do no more.
The bodies of Boxers, piled up along the vast enclosure which they so desperately defended, filled the air with a pestilential odor; dogs were attracted and gathered in moments of calm for a meal. During the latter part of the time they killed these dogs from the tops of the walls and pulled them in by means of a hook at the end of a cord, and their meat was saved for the sick and for nursing mothers.
On the day when our soldiers at last entered the place, guided by the white-haired bishop standing on the wall and waving the French flag, on the day when they threw themselves with tears of joy in one another's arms, there remained just enough food to make, with the addition of many leaves, one last meal.
"It seemed," said Monsignor Favier, "as though Providence had counted the grains of rice."