When morning came we went out and inspected the corpse, and marvelled at the terrible muzzle velocity of the modern rifle. One bullet had gone through the chest, and tiny pin-heads of blood near the breast-bone and between the shoulders was all the trace that had been left. But the second pencil of nickel-plated lead had struck the fanatic on the forearm, and instead of boring through, had knocked out a clean wedge of flesh, half an inch thick and three inches deep, just as you would chip out a piece of wood from a plank. There was nothing unseemly in it all, death had come so suddenly. The blows had been so tremendous, and death so instantaneous, that there had been no bleeding.
It was extraordinary.
Meanwhile, from the Pei-t'ang we can still plainly hear a distant cannonade sullenly booming in the hot air. We have breathing space, but they, poor devils are still being thundered at. No one can understand how they have held out so long.
Our losses, now that we have time to go round and find out accurately, seem appalling. The French have lost forty-two killed and wounded out of a force of fifty sailors and sixteen volunteers; the Japanese, forty-five out of a band of sixty sailors and Japanese and miscellaneous volunteers; the Germans have thirty killed and wounded out of fifty-four; and in all there have been one hundred and seventy casualties of all classes. Many of the slightly wounded have returned already to their posts, but these men have nothing like the spirit they had before they were shot.
The shell holes and number of shells fired are also being counted up. The little Hotel de Pékin, standing high up just behind the French lines, has been the most struck. It is simply torn to pieces and has hundreds of holes in it. Altogether some three thousand shells have been thrown at us and found a lodgment. The wreckage round the outer fringe is appalling, and in this present calm scarcely believable. Another three thousand shells will bring everything flat to the ground.