Meanwhile our wounded were lying on the ground, and the news soon spread that the Japanese surgeon had pronounced the little captain’s case hopeless.  I went to see him as soon as I could, and seldom have I seen a more pitiful sight.  Lying on a coat thrown one the ground, with his side torn open by an iron bullet, the stricken man looked like a child who had met with a terrible accident.  He could not have been more than five feet high, and his sword, which was a tiny blade, about thirty inches long, was strapped to his wrist by a cord, which he refused to have released.  Beating his arms up and down in the air with that tiny sword bobbing with them, he struggled to master the pain, but the effort was too great for him, and he kept moaning in spite of himself.  A few feet from him sat a wounded Japanese sailor, who had been struck in the knee by a soft-nosed bullet.  His trousers had been ripped up to put on a field dressing, and never have I before seen a more ghastly wound.  The bullet had drilled into his knee-cap in a neat little hole, but the soft metal, striking the bony substance within, had splashed as it progressed through, with the result that the hole made on coming out was as big as the knee-cap itself.  The sailor bore his wound with a stoicism which seemed to me superhuman.  The sweat was pouring off his face in his agony, but he had stuffed a cap into his mouth so that he might not disgrace himself by crying out, and even in his agony he lay perfectly still, with staring eyes, as he waited to be carried to the operating table.

Presently the captain died with a sudden stiffening, and news came in from a number of other posts that men were falling, and we must detach some of ours to reinforce threatened points.  In utter gloom the day ended, and miserably tired, we got hardly any sleep until the small hours.

IX

AN INTERLUDE

8th July, 1900.

* * * * *

And yet in spite of such things there are plenty of interludes.  For of the nine hundred and more European men, women and children besieged in the Legation lines, many are playing no part at all.  There are, of course, some four hundred marines and sailors, and more than two hundred women and children.  The first are naturally ranged in the fighting line; the second can be but non-combatants.  But of the remainder, two hundred and more of whom are able-bodied, most are shirking.  There are less than eighty taking an active part in the defence—­the eighty being all young men.  The others have claimed the right of sanctuary, and will do nothing.  At most they have been induced to form themselves into a last reserve, which, I hope, may never be employed.  If it is....  The duties of this reserve consist in mustering round the clanging bell of the Jubilee Tower in the British Legation when a general alarm is rung.  When the firing becomes very heavy that bell begins clanging.