Yesterday, the 13th, the Chinese had their revenge for the loss of the hundred odd men who have been shot or bayonetted along this front during the past week.  At six in the evening, when the rifle-fire all along the line had become stilled, a tremendous explosion shook every quarter of our besieged area and made everyone tremble with apprehension.  Even in the most northerly part of our defences—­the Hanlin posts beyond the British Legation, which are probably three or four thousand feet away—­the men said it was like an earthquake.  In the French lines it seemed as if the end of the world had come.  The Chinese, having successfully sapped right under one of the remaining fortified houses, had blown it up with a huge charge of black gunpowder.  D——­, the French commander, R——­, the Austrian Charge d’Affaires, the same indomitable volunteer D——­, and a picket of four French sailors were in the house, and were buried in the ruins.  Hardly had the echoes of the first explosion died away, when a second one blew up another house, and out of the ruins were lifted, as if the powers of darkness had taken pity on them all, the defenders who had been buried alive, excepting two.  Never has such a thing been heard of before.  Providence is plainly helping us.  The wretched men thus cruelly treated were all the colour of death and bleeding badly when they were dragged out.  The two missing French sailors must have been crushed into fragments.  Only a foot has been found....

That was afterwards; for the mine explosions were the signals for a terrible bombardment and rifle-fire all along the line, from which we have not yet recovered.  The French, more than a little shaken, were driven into their last trench—­the tranche Bartholin, which has just been completed.  They held this to this morning and then counter-attacked.  That is why I have found myself here.  Reinforcements were rushed in by us at daybreak, and after a sleepless forty hours the Chinese advance has been fairly held.  But for how long?  If they act as earnestly during the next week we are finished!

XIII

THE BRITISH LEGATION BASE

15th July, 1900.

* * * * *

Fortunately, startling events of the sort I have just described are confined to the outposts, and the half a dozen closely threatened points.  Our main base, the British Legation, is little affected, and many in it do not appear to realise or to know anything of these frantic encounters along the outer lines.  They can tell from the stretcher-parties that come in at all hours of the day and night, and pass down to the hospital, what success the Chinese fire is having, but beyond this they know nothing.  They secretly hope, most of them, that it will remain like this to the end; that bullets and shells may scream overhead, but that they may be left attending to minor affairs.  As I look around me, it appears more and more evident that self-preservation is the dominant, mean characteristic of modern mankind.  The universal attitude is:  spare me and take all my less worthy neighbours.  In gaining in skin-deep civilisation we have lost in the animal-fighting capacity.  We are truly mainly grotesque when our lives are in danger.