Disconsolately I turned and rode back into the Legation lines, feeling as if an immense misfortune had come.  Here I met finally some Japanese cavalry and some Cossacks.  After being actually in Peking twenty-four hours, they had at length formed junction with their Legations.  The cavalrymen were trotting up and down, and trying to discover their own people.  Neither did they understand it all.

I communicated the news I had learned speedily enough to all people of importance whom I could find, told it to them all frantically; but it aroused no interest, even hardly any comment.  Once or twice there was a start of surprise, and then the old attitude of indifference.  A species of torpor seems to have come over everyone as a crushing anti-climax after the various climaxes of the terrible weeks.  No one cares, excepting that the siege is finished.  C——­, of the British Legation, who has practically directed its policy for years (indeed, ever since it has been in the present hands), told me that when the British commander had come in, he had simply placed himself at the disposal of the Legation, and had said that his orders were concerned only with the relief.  He was not to attempt anything else; to do nothing more, absolutely nothing....

Later in the afternoon, at a Ministerial meeting, convened in haste, the Ministers decided that as they did not know what was going to happen to them or what policy their governments proposed to adopt, in the absence of instructions they could take no steps about anything.  Of course, everyone of importance will be transferred elsewhere, and probably be sent to South America, or the Balkan States, or possibly Athens.  The confirmation of the news that the Empress Dowager and the Court had fled concerned them less than the dread possibilities which the field telegraphs bring.  The wires have already been stretched into Peking, and messages would have to come through soon....

That evening, as dusk fell, and I was idly watching some English sappers blowing an entrance from the canal street through the pink Palace walls, so that a private right of way into this precious area could be had right where the twin-cannon were fired at us for so many weeks, a sound of a rude French song being chanted made me turn round.  I saw then that it was a soldier of the Infanterie Coloniale in his faded blue suit of Nankeen, staggering along with his rifle slung across his back and a big gunny-sack on his shoulder.  He approached, singing lustily in a drunken sort of way, and reeling more and more, until, as he tried to step over the ruins of a brick barricade, he at last tripped and fell heavily to the ground.  The English sappers watched him curiously for a few moments as he lay moving drunkenly on the ground, unable to rise, but no one offered to help him, or even stepped forward, until one soldier, who had been looking fixedly at something on the ground, said suddenly to his mates in a hoarse whisper, “Silver!  Silver!” He spoke in an extraordinary way.