were all mud-stained and tired, and moved very slowly away; and their great iron-hooped wheels clanked discordantly over the stone-paved ways.  Sometimes a body of cavalry, with gaudy banners in the van and the men flogging on their steeds with short whips, have also ridden by escaping from the rout.  Infantry and horsemen, wounded in carts and wounded on foot, flow back into the city through the deserted and terror-stricken streets, and it is we who shall suffer.  So much of this has been understood by everybody, that an order has been privately given that no one is to be allowed on the Tartar Wall, excepting the regular reliefs.  There is in any case no time for most of us to creep up there and look on the city below; we are tied to the barricades and trenches down in the flat among the ruins, chained to our posts by a never-ending rifle-fire.

XXVIII

THE THIRTEENTH

13th August, 1900.

* * * * *

It is the 13th, that fateful number, and there are some who are divided between hope and fear.  Is it good to hope on a 13th, or is it mere foolishness to thing about such things?  Who knows?—­for we have become unnatural and abnormal—­subject to atavistic tendencies in thought and action....  Most people are keeping their thoughts to themselves, but actions cannot be hidden.  You would not believe some of the things....

There has not been a sign or a word from the relief column for many hours.  The fleeing Chinese soldiery we witnessed in such numbers yesterday entering the city have stopped rushing in, and now from the Tartar Wall the streets below in the outer city seem quite silent and deserted.  Last night, too, it was seen that the line of the enemy’s rifles packed against us was so continuous, and the spacing so close, that one continuous flame of fire ripped round from side to side and deluged us with metal.  So heavy was this firing, so crushing, that it was paralysing.  Any part broken into would have been irretrievably lost.  The bullets and shells struck our walls and defences in great swarms sometimes several hundred projectiles swishing down at a time.  There must have been ten or twelve thousand infantry firing at us and fifteen guns.  Where I lay, with a post of sixteen men, there were more than five hundred riflemen facing us, at distances varying from forty feet to four hundred yards.  Every ruined house outside the fringe of our defence has now been converted into a blockhouse by the persistent enemy.  Every barricade we have built has a dozen other barricades opposing it in parallels, in chessboards, in every kind of formation; and from these barricades the fire poured in since the 10th—­that is, for sixty long hours—­has only ceased at rare intervals.  Our stretcher-parties have been very busy, but how many men we have lost since the armistice was deliberately broken no one knows.  Yesterday a French captain,