"At two thousand yards," sang out the naval lieutenant unexpectedly and jarringly as we stood watching, "slow fire."
I was surprised at such decision. Tang, tang, tang, tang, tang, spat the machine-gun in the black night, now rasping out bullets at the rate of three hundred a minute, as the gunner under the excitement of the hour and his surroundings forgot his instructions, now steadying to a slow second fire. This was something like a counter-excitement; we were beginning to speak at last. We were delighted. It was not so much the gun reports which thrilled us as the resonant echoes which, crackling like very dry fagots in a fierce fire as the bullets sped down the long, straight street, made us realise their destroying power. Have you ever heard a high-velocity machine-gun firing down deserted and gloomy thorough-fares? It crackles all over your body in electrical shocks as powerful as those of a galvanic battery; it stimulates the brain as nothing else can do; it is extraordinary.
The will-o'-the-wisp torches had stopped dancing forward now, but still they remained there, quite inexplicable in their fixity. We imagined that our five minutes' bombardment must have carried death and destruction to everyone and everything. And yet what did this mean? The flames, which had been licking round near the cathedral, suddenly burst up in a great pillar of fire. That was the answer; the cathedral was at last alight. At this we all gave a howl of rage, for we knew what that meant. The picquets had been mysteriously reinforced by Frenchmen, Englishmen, and men of half a dozen other nationalities, all chattering together in all the languages of Europe. "Que faire, que faire," somebody kept bawling. "Get your damned gun out of the way," shouted other angry voices, "and let us charge the beggars." But Captain T——, the Austrian commander, was already conferring with a dear colleague whom he had discovered in the dark. Even in this storm of excitement the protocol could not be forgotten. Marines, sailors, and Legation juniors groaned; was this opportunity to be missed? At last they arranged it; it should be a charge of volunteers.
"Volunteers to the front," shouted somebody. Everybody sprang forward like one man. A French squad was already fixing bayonets noisily and excusing their rattle and cursing on account of the dark; the Austrians had deployed and were already advancing. "Pas de charge," called a French middy. Somebody started tootling a bugle, and helter-skelter we were off down the street, with fixed bayonets and loaded magazines, a veritable massacre for ourselves in the dark....
The charge blew itself out in less than four hundred yards, and we pulled up panting, swearing and laughing. Somebody had stuck some one else through the seat of the trousers, and the some one else was making a horrid noise about this trivial detail. Some rifles had also gone off by themselves, how, why and at whom no one would explain. A very fine night counter-attack we were, and the rear was the safest place. Yet that run did us good. It was like a good drink of strong wine.
But we had now reached the first torches and understood why they remained stationary. The Boxers, met by the Austrian machine-gun, had stuck them in long lines along the edge of the raised driving road, and had then sneaked back quietly in the dark. Every minute we expected to have our progress checked by the dead bodies of those we had slain, but not a corpse could you see. The Austrian commander was now once again holding a council of war, and this time he urged a prompt retreat. We had certainly lost touch with our own lines, and for all we knew we might suddenly be greeted with a volley from our own people coming out to reinforce us. Our commanders wobbled this way and that for a few minutes, but then, goaded by the general desire, we pushed forward again, with a common movement, without orders this time. We moved more slowly, firing heavily at every shadow along the sides of the road. Here it seemed more black than ever, for the spluttering torches, which cast a dim light on the raised road itself, left the neighbouring houses in an impenetrable gloom. Whole battalions of Boxers could have lurked there unmarked by us; perhaps they were only waiting until they could safely cut us off. It was very uncanny.
In front of us the flames of the burning Roman Catholic Cathedral rose higher and higher, and the shouts and roars, becoming ever fiercer and fiercer, could be plainly heard. Just then a Frenchman stumbled with a muttered oath, and, bending down, jumped back with a cry of alarm. At his feet lay a native woman trussed tightly with ropes, with her body already half-charred and reeking with kerosene, but still alive and moaning faintly. The Boxers, inhuman brutes, had caught her, set fire to her, and then flung her on the road to light their way. She was the first victim of their rage we had as yet come across. That made us feel like savages. We were now not more than three hundred yards from the cathedral, and in the light of the flames, which were now burning more brightly than ever, we could see hundreds of figures dancing about busily. We had just halted to prepare for a final charge when something moved in front of us. "Halt," we all cried, marking our different nationalities by our different intonations of the word. A sobbing Chinese voice called back to us: "Wo pu shih; wo pu shih," which merely means, "I am not," leaving us to infer that he was referring to the Boxers; and then without waiting for an answer the night wanderer, whoever he might be, scampered away hurriedly. The immediate result was that we opened a terrible fusillade in the direction he had fled, our men firing at least a hundred shots. Many mocking voices then called back to us from the shadows. There was laughter, too. It was obviously hopeless trying to do anything in this dark; so when a bugler trotted up from our lines with stern orders from the French commandant for his men to retire, we all stumbled back more than willingly We had gone out of our depth.
Meanwhile the flames spread farther and farther, until half the Tartar city seemed on fire. All Peking awoke, and from every part confused noises and a vast barking of dogs was borne down on us. What course should we take, if the attack was suddenly carried all round our area?
The French Minister was by this time officially informed that native Catholics were being butchered wholesale; that there were plenty of men who were willing to go and rescue them, but that no one seemed to have any orders, and that everyone was swearing at the general incompetence. Absolute confusion reigned within our lines; the picquets broke away from their posts; the different nationalities fraternised under the excitement of the hour and lost themselves; and it would have been child's play to have rushed the whole Legation area. We felt that clearly enough.
It was not until well past midnight, and after several heated discussions, that a relief party was finally organised; but when they got to the cathedral there was hardly anything to see, for the butchery was nearly over and the ruin completed. Several hundred native Roman Catholics had disappeared, only a few Boxers were seen and shot and a few converts rescued.