The Last Days of Pekin

by Pierre Loti

The sandy roads strewn with yellow leaves are solitary. The Cossacks have evacuated their camps and disappeared to the other side of the Great Wall, in the direction of Manchuria. The agitation of the earlier days is over, as well as the confusion and the joyous crowds; all have gone into winter quarters in the places assigned to them, and as the peasants of the vicinity have not returned, their villages are abandoned and empty.

The fort, though still ornamented with Chinese emblems, now bears a French name; it is called "Fort Admiral-Pottier." As we entered trumpets resounded for the admiral, and the Zouaves, ranged under the guns, looked with respectful sorrow at their chief, who had just honored with his presence the funeral services of two soldiers.

As soon as we cross the threshold we feel quite unexpectedly as though we were on French soil; it would be hard to say by what spell these Zouaves have made of this place and its surroundings in one short month, something which is like a bit of home.

There have been no great changes; they have been content with removing Chinese filth, with putting the war supplies in order, with whitewashing their quarters, and with organizing a bakery where the bread has a good smell, and a hospital where the many wounded, alas, and the sick, sleep on very clean little camp beds. All this at once and quite inexplicably creates a feeling that one is in France again.

In the court of honor in the centre of the fort, in front of the door leading to the room where the mandarin is enthroned, two gun-carriages stand, unharnessed. Their wheels are decorated with leaves and they are covered over with white sheets, upon which are scattered poor little bouquets fastened on with pins. They are the last flowers from the neighboring Chinese gardens,—poor chrysanthemums and stunted roses touched by the frost, all arranged with touching care and kindly soldierly awkwardness, for the dead comrades who lie there on these carriages in coffins covered with the French flag.

It is a surprise to find this vast mandarin's room transformed by the Zouaves into a chapel. A strange chapel truly! On the whitewashed walls the vests of Chinese soldiers are fastened up and arranged like trophies with sabres and poniards, while the candlesticks that stand on the white altar-cloth are made of shell and bayonets,—thus naïvely and charmingly does the soldier know how to manage when he is in exile.

A military mass begins with trumpet blasts that make the Zouaves fall upon their knees; mass is said by the chaplain of the squadron, in mourning dress,—a mass for the dead, for the two who are asleep on the wagons near the door decorated with late flowers. From the court Bach's Prelude, played on muffled brass, rises like a prayer, the dominant note in this mingling of home and foreign land, of funeral service and gray morning.

Then they depart for a near-by enclosure which we have turned into a cemetery. Mules are harnessed to the heavy gun-carriages, the admiral himself leading the procession along the sandy paths where the Zouaves form a double row, presenting arms.

The sun does not pierce the autumn clouds that lower this morning over the burial of these children of France. It is cold and gloomy, and the birches and willows of the desolate country continue to drop their leaves upon us.

This improvised cemetery, surrounded by so much that is exotic, has also taken on a French air,—no doubt because of the brave home names inscribed on wooden crosses that mark the new-made graves; because of pots of chrysanthemums brought by comrades to these sad mounds of earth. And yet just beyond the wall which protects our dead, that other wall which rises and is indefinitely prolonged into the gray November country, is the Great Wall of China; and we are in exile far, frightfully far from home.