It was, I should judge, about ten o’clock when at last we descended to the street.  There had been no firing for about two hours.  The lantern was re-lit, and Chung, who knew the way best, took it and went ahead.  I still wore the soldier’s dress; if met and challenged, I proposed to make it appear, as best I could, that I was making the Chinamen conduct me to one of the camps, or if I failed in this to sell my life dearly with the rifle.

Our path lay right across the town, and the dead lay thickly in nearly every street in the quarters we traversed, where, of every age, sex, and condition, they had been promiscuously butchered by the hundred.  Here and there the miserable survivors—­survivors only for the present—­were searching, with low wailings and lamentations, for those they had lost, with the aid of their coloured lanterns, which gave a look of indescribable ghastliness to the mutilated forms they bent over to examine.  To my last day I shall remember, with unfading horror, the aspect of those remnants of mortality, in all the hideousness stamped upon them by the unnamable atrocities practised during that diabolical orgy of murder and mutilation, rape, lust, and rapine.  This is war!  Away, in the splendid pavilion of the vanquished, the conquering marshal, surrounded by his generals and officers, was installed in triumph, secure of his country’s applause and his emperor’s favour; but here, amid these desolated homes, these mutilated heaps of death, was the night side, the shadow, of their glory.  And this was but the first day of four!  It must be admitted that the Chinese drew it upon themselves, that everywhere else the Japanese behaved with admirable clemency and moderation; but after making every allowance, their conduct in this instance, and particularly that of the high commanding chiefs in never seeking to put a stop to the devilish excesses perpetrated before their eyes on unoffending non-combatants, is richly deserving of everlasting infamy.

Many of the poor wretches thus cowering about ran away upon perceiving, as they thought, an armed Japanese soldier, but in one instance I had reason to be thankful that I was not alone.  A middle-aged man and two younger ones were carrying away, in one of the streets we traversed, the half-naked body of a woman, which had been split open from the abdomen to the chest.  The elder man glared upon me, in the dim light, with the expression of a tiger, and drawing a long curved knife from his breast, and pointing at me, shouted something to his companions, who perhaps were his sons.  Chung at once interposed, and talked with them rapidly for a few moments, and naturally his explanation sufficed and we proceeded.  I asked Chung what the man had said:—­“There is one of the Japanese devils; let us rip him up.”