fell mortally wounded, M——­, the correspondent, was badly hit in the leg, the Japanese colonel alone escaping with a bullet-cut tunic.  They had drawn the enemy’s fire.  Great was the dismay when the news became generally known; it meant that the authority of headquarters had received a cruel blow.  There is no officer left who can really perform the duties of the chief of the staff, and all the outer lines will feel this loosening of a control which has really only been complimentary and nominal.  Casualties among the officers of the other detachments had allowed the British marine commanders to increase their influence.  Now it is finished.  The only two good ones have now been struck off the list.

All day long men looked gloomily about them, and felt that gradually but surely things were progressing from bad to worse.  Six of the best officers have either been killed or so badly wounded that they cannot possibly take the field again; about fifty of our most daring regulars and volunteers have been killed outright; the number of admittances to the hospital up to date is one hundred and ten; and thus of the four hundred and fifty rifles defending our lines, nearly a third have been placed out of action in less than four weeks.  Excepting for a small gap across the Northern Imperial canal bridge, a continuous double, or even treble, line of the enemy’s barricades now stretch unbroken from a point opposite the American positions on the Tartar Wall round in a vast irregular curve to the city wall overlooking the German Legation.

These barricades are becoming more and more powerful, and are being pushed so close to us by a system of parallels and traverses that at the Su wang-fu and the French lines only a few feet separate some of our own defences from the enemy’s.  Already it had twice happened that a fierce and unique deed had taken place at the same loophole between one of our men and a Chinese brave, ending in the shooting of one or the other, forcing a retirement on our part to the next line of barricades.  Thus, by sheer weight of brickwork they are crushing us in, and if they have only two weeks’ more uninterrupted work, it can only end in one way.  Colonel S——­ has made two more frantic sorties, in both of which I took part at daybreak, with a few men, which succeeded each time in pushing back the enemy for a few days in one particular corner at the cost of casualties we cannot afford.  But the work and the strain are becoming exhausting, and even the Japanese, who are being driven by little S——­ like mules, are showing the effects in their lack-lustre eyes and dragging legs.  The men are half drunk from lack of sleep and from bad, overheated blood, caused by a perpetual peering through loopholes and a continual alertness even when they are asleep.  The strain is intolerable, I say, and pony meat is becoming nauseating, and fills me with disgust.

On top of it all the trenches are now sometimes half full of water, for the summer rains, which have held back for so long, are beginning to fall.  The stenches are so bad from rotting carcases and obscene droppings that an already weakened stomach becomes so rebellious that it is hard to swallow any food at all.