Thus a young Breton sailor, not more than seventeen years old, seeing men armed with swords collecting one night for a rush, jumped down among them from the top of an earthwork, and shot and bayonetted three or four of them before they had time to defend themselves.  Then it took him half an hour to get back to safety by creeping from one hole in the ground to another and avoiding the rifle-fire....

Self-preservation makes it necessary to rush out thus single handed and ease your front.  Every man killed is a discouragement, which holds the enemy back a bit.

Exploits of this nature must at length have shown the Chinese soldiery that they have to face men endowed with the courage of despair in this quarter; and fearing cold steel more than anything else, they have decided that the only way of reaching their prey is by blowing them up piecemeal.  That is why they have taken to mining—­most audacious mining, carried on under the noses of the French defenders.  If you come here at night, and remain until one of those curious lulls in the rifle-fire suddenly begins, you will distinctly hear this curious tapping of picks and shovels, which means the preparation of a gallery.

So as to save time, such mining is not begun from behind the enemy’s trenches; it is audaciously commenced in the ruins which litter some of the neutral territory, which neither side holds and into which Chinese desperadoes creep as soon as it is dusk.  For a few days the French did not dare to make sorties against such enterprises, but some of the younger volunteers, discovering that these sappers were only armed with their tools, have taken to creeping out and butchering in the bowels of the earth....  This is terribly but absolutely true.  Thus a young volunteer, named D——­, found, after watching for two days, that a number of men crept into a tunnel mouth every night only twenty feet from his post, and began working on a mine right under his feet.  He decided to go out himself and kill them all....  He told me the story.  He crept out two days ago as soon as he had seen them go in, and, posting himself at the entrance, called on the men to come out, else he would block them in and kill them in the most miserable way he could think of.  They came out, crawling on their hands and knees, and as each man slipped up to the level he was bayonetted.... in the end thirteen were killed like this.  Three remained, but D——­’s strength was not equal to it, and he had to drive them in as captives.  Then they were despatched and beheaded.  They say the French sailors slung back those heads far over into the advanced Chinese barricades with taunts and shouts.  That stopped all work for a few hours.  But it was not for long enough.