Riding quickly, at last we reached the famous cathedral, with great trenches and earthworks surrounding it, and the torn and battered buildings showing how bitter the struggle had been. To our siege-taught eyes a single look explained the nature of the defence, and the lines which had been naturally formed. It was written as plain as on a map. The priests and their allies had now hauled the enemy's abandoned guns to the cathedral entrances and the spires were now crowned with garlands of flags of all nations. But that was all. There was no one to be seen. Everybody was away, out minding the new business—that of making good the damage done by levying contributions on the city at large. It was all dead quiet, silent like some deserted graveyard. The sailors and the priests and their converts, remembering that Heaven helps those who help themselves, had sallied out and were reprovisioning themselves and making good their losses. Indeed, the only men we could find were some converts engaged in stacking up silver shoes, or sycee, in a secluded quadrangle. These had become the property of the mission by the divine right of capture; there seemed at the moment nothing strange about it.
This silent cathedral, with its vast grounds and its deserted quadrangles torn up by the savage conflict, became to us curiously oppressive—almost ghostlike in the bright sunshine. It seemed absurd to imagine that forty or fifty rifle-armed sailors, a band of priests and many thousands of converts had been ringed in here by fire and smoke for weeks, and had lost dozens and hundreds at a time through mine explosions. It seemed, also, equally absurd that the twenty or thirty thousand men who had poured into Peking had already become so quickly lost in the expanses of the city. Where were they all?...
My mad companion had tired, too, of looking, and wanted again to rush off and discover some signs of life. He wanted, above all, to see the place where the first companies of the French infantry had suddenly come on a mixed crowd of Boxers, soldiers and townspeople fleeing in panic all mixed together, and had mown them down with mitrailleuses. There was a cul-de-sac, which was horrible, it was reported. The machine-guns had played for ten or fifteen minutes in that death-trap without stopping a second until nothing had moved. The incident was only a day or two old, yet everyone had heard of it. People exclaimed that this was going too far in the matter of vengeance. But everything had been allowed to go too far....
We rode out at a canter, and wondered more and more as we rode at the solitude, where so few hours before there had been such a deafening roar. We plunged straight into the maze of narrow streets, and then suddenly, before we were aware of it, our mounts were swerving and snorting in mad terror! For corpses dotted the ground in ugly blotches, the corpses of men who had met death in a dozen different ways. Lying in exhausted attitudes, they covered the roadway as if they had been merely tired to death. It was awful, and I began to have a terrible detestation for these Asiatic faces, which, because they are dead, become such a hideous green-yellow-white, and whose bodies seem to shrivel to nothing in their limp blue suitings. Such dead are an insult to the living.
We picked our way on our trembling mounts, trying vainly to push through quickly to escape it all. But it was no good. We had stumbled by chance on the actual route taken by an avenging column, and the men who had been mad with lust to loot the Palace, and had been turned off almost as an afterthought to relieve co-religionists, had vented their wrath on everything. The farther and farther we penetrated the more hideous did the ruins and the corpses become. There was nothing but silence once again—death, ruin, and silence; and at last we came on such a mountain of corpses that our ponies suddenly stampeded and went madly careering away. Frightened more and more by the sound of their galloping hoofs, the animals soon laid their legs to the ground and bolted blindly. Vainly we tugged at our bridles; vainly we tried every device to bring them to a halt. But again it was no good. It had become a sort of mad gallop of death; the animals had to be allowed to rid themselves of their feelings.
Eventually we pulled up far away to the west of where we had started. We were now near the districts which had only the day before been proclaimed highly dangerous to everyone until clearing operations had swept them clean of lurking Boxers or disbanded soldiery. But now attracted by a roar of flames, and indifferent to any dangers which might lurk near by, we followed up the trail of smoke hanging on the skies to see what was taking place. One's interest never ceased, yet it was only the same thing. French soldiers, some drunk and some merely savage, had found their way here by some strange fate, and being quite-alone had evidently looted and then set fire to a big pile of buildings. They were discharging their rifles, too; for as we approached, bullets whistled overhead, and sobbing townspeople, driven from their hiding-places, began rushing away in every direction. This was strange.
Our arrival was only the signal for a fresh discharge of rifles, and then there was no doubt who was attracting the fire. The men were deliberately aiming at us to drive us away! We halted behind cover, and then with the same callousness as they displayed, we gave them a volley back, as a note of warning. It was my insane companion who drove us to do that; but, forthwith, on the sound of that well-knit discharge, there was more firing on every side, some shots coming from houses quite close to us and some from the open streets. With the growing roar and crackle of the flames these shots made very insignificant popping and attracted but little attention. Yet I soon saw that this continuous firing could not come from the rifles of European soldiery, unless there were whole companies of them, and that perhaps we had been mistaken for other people. And soon my suspicions were confirmed by a confused shouting in the vernacular, and a rush of men from lanes not a hundred yards away. Then there were some half-suppressed blasts on the hideous Chinese trumpet and—Chinese soldiery....
They came out with a mad rush and charged straight at the drunken French marauders, firing quickly as they ran after the old manner which we knew so well. As we gazed, the men from the relief columns fell back in disorder without any hesitation—indeed, fled madly to the nearest houses and began pelting their assailants with lead in return. Suppressed trumpet-blasts came again, rallying the attackers; more and more men rushed out from all sorts of places, and as this was no affair of ours, and our retreat would certainly be cut off if we dallied, we retreated at full gallop farther and farther to the west. We were going straight away to where might be our damnation.
I do not remember clearly how far we rode, or why we galloped, but soon we arrived almost at the flanking city walls miles away, and found ourselves among scores and hundreds of the enemy, who were still lurking on the streets, half disguised and mixed with the townspeople. They fired at us as we rode; they fired at us when we stopped; for many minutes there was nothing to be heard but the hissing of lead and fierce yells....
Conscious that only a big effort would pull us through, we boldly turned bridle and galloped to the south—reached a city gate, went through at a frantic pace, and sought safety in the outer Chinese town. Here it was quieter for a time, but as once more we approached the central streets, down which the Allies had marched, we came across other marauders. This time they were Indian troops going about in bands, with only their side arms with them, but leaving the same destruction behind them. Then we came across Americans, again some French, then some Germans, until it became an endless procession of looting men—conquerors and conquered mixed and indifferent....