It took a quarter of an hour for everything to be taken out and stacked on the floor.  He had carried in close on six hundred rounds of Mauser ammunition, and for every hundred he received the same weight in silver.  This man was a military cook, who crept round and robbed his comrades as they lay asleep, not a hundred yards from here.  Of course, he will be discovered one day and torn to pieces, but I have just learned that by marvellous ingenuity and with the aid of a few of his fellows thousands of eggs have been brought in by him.  It is a curious business, and adds yet another strange element to this strangest of lives.

XXIV

DIPLOMATIC CONFIDENCES

6th August, 1900.

* * * * *

Firing has been more persistent and more general during the last two days, although the armistice ostensibly still continues in the same way as before.  A number of our men have been wounded, and two or three even killed during the past week.  It is an extraordinary state of affairs, but better than a general attack all along the line.  We have no right to complain.  The day before yesterday several Russians were badly wounded; yesterday a Frenchman was killed outright and a couple of other men wounded; to-day three more have been hit.  In spite of the discharges from the hospitals, the numbers hors de combat remain the same.

To-day, too, trumpets are again blaring fiercely, and more and more troops can be seen moving if one looks down from the Tartar Wall.  Up on the wall itself, however, all is dead quiet.  It has been like that for weeks.  No men have been lost there.

Neither is there any news of the thick relief columns which should be advancing from Tientsin.  In spite of the shoals of letters I have duly recorded, assuring us of their immediate departure, the majority of us have again become rather incredulous about our approaching relief.  It has become such a regular thing, this siege life, and all other kinds of life are somehow so far away and so impossible after what we have gone through, that we look upon the outer world as something mythical....  Some men have their minds a little unhinged; two are absolutely mad.  One, a poor devil of a Norwegian missionary, who has been living in misery for years in a vain effort to make converts, became so dangerous long ago that he had to be locked up, and even bound.  But one night he managed to escape, climb our defences and deliver himself up to the Chinese soldiery.  They led him also to the Manchu Generalissimo, Jung Lu, half suspecting that he was crazy.  Jung Lu questioned him closely as to our condition, and the Norwegian divulged everything he knew.  He said the Chinese fire had been too high to do us very much harm; that they should drive low at us, and remember the flat trajectory of modern weapons.  After keeping him for some hours and learning all he could, Jung Lu sent him back.  The poor devil, when he lurched in again, vacantly told the people in the British Legation what he had said, and a number demanded that he be shot for treason.  If they once began doing that an end would never be reached....