Still, we are improving our position.  There is a more friendly feeling among the commands in our lines, and the various contingents are being redistributed.  By bribing the Yamen messenger, copies of the Peking Gazette have been obtained, and from these it is evident that something has happened.  For all the decreeing and counter-decreeing of the early Boxer days have begun again, and the all-powerful Boxers with their boasted powers are being rudely treated.  It is evident that they are no longer believed in; that the situation in and around Peking is changing from day to day.  The Boxers, having shown themselves incompetent, are reaping the whirlwind.  They must soon entirely disappear.

It is even two weeks since the last one was shot outside the Japanese lines at night, and now there is nothing but regular soldiery encamped around us.  This last Boxer was a mere boy of fifteen, who had stripped stark naked and smeared himself all over with oil after the manner of Chinese thieves, so that if he came into our clutches no hands would be able to hold him tight.  The most daring ones have always been boys.  He had crept fearlessly right up to the Japanese posts armed only with matches and a stone bottle of kerosene, with which he purposed to set buildings on fire and thus destroy a link in our defences.  This is always the Boxer policy.  But the Japanese, as usual, were on the alert.  They let the youthful Boxer approach to within a few feet of their rifles—­a thin shadow of a boy faintly stirring in the thick gloom.  Then flames of fire spurted out, and a thud told the sentries that their bullets had gone home.

When morning came we went out and inspected the corpse, and marvelled at the terrible muzzle velocity of the modern rifle.  One bullet had gone through the chest, and tiny pin-heads of blood near the breast-bone and between the shoulders was all the trace that had been left.  But the second pencil of nickel-plated lead had struck the fanatic on the forearm, and instead of boring through, had knocked out a clean wedge of flesh, half an inch thick and three inches deep, just as you would chip out a piece of wood from a plank.  There was nothing unseemly in it all, death had come so suddenly.  The blows had been so tremendous, and death so instantaneous, that there had been no bleeding.

It was extraordinary.

Meanwhile, from the Pei-t’ang we can still plainly hear a distant cannonade sullenly booming in the hot air.  We have breathing space, but they, poor devils are still being thundered at.  No one can understand how they have held out so long.

Our losses, now that we have time to go round and find out accurately, seem appalling.  The French have lost forty-two killed and wounded out of a force of fifty sailors and sixteen volunteers; the Japanese, forty-five out of a band of sixty sailors and Japanese and miscellaneous volunteers; the Germans have thirty killed and wounded out of fifty-four; and in all there have been one hundred and seventy casualties of all classes.  Many of the slightly wounded have returned already to their posts, but these men have nothing like the spirit they had before they were shot.