STILL DRIFTING

October, 1900.

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There is, after all, to be no immediate peace—­that seems now quite certain.  We hear that the Russians have invaded all Manchuria and are strengthening their hold there by bringing in more and more troops from the Amur districts.  They say, too, that the French have crossed the Tonkin frontier.  But really accurately we know nothing very much of what is being done.  With sixty or seventy thousand soldiery suddenly flung down on the ruined stretch of country between Peking and the sea, everything has been put in the most horrible confusion.  You can get nothing, nor hear anything.  Telegrams are the only things which are coming through with any regularity, and even these are cut to pieces by the field telegraphs or continually getting lost.  The mails, it is true, have at last arrived, but they are all mixed in such a way, and there is such old correspondence heaped on top of the new, that general instructions and the proposals made read in this way seem to be the ravings of madmen.  There are hundreds of despatches of April, May and June, showing the calibre of some Foreign Offices in an unmistakable way.  I sometimes wonder if only the fools are left in the home offices.

Still, after a good many headaches, one can begin to appreciate the general plan which was finally settled on by the various Chancelleries, and to understand what delayed the relief so much.  Most of all it has been the South African war.  Also, is seems to me, they wanted Waldersee, the German Field Marshal, to have time to take over the supreme command for the sake of peace in Asia, and so that there should be an enormous massed advance on Peking, which would capture all North China to Christendom and enslave the cunning old Empress Dowager, and do everything as arranged in Europe.  It was, above all, necessary not to cause an imbroglio in Europe.

Of course, the very opposite has happened, and everybody is now as discontented and jealous as before the siege.  Waldersee is in Tientsin and has been there for weeks for some new decision to be made.  The grand advance is finished and done with, but now some column commanders wish to push down into the south of the province and isolate the Court, if possible.  Meetings are being held the whole time, but as Waldersee is coming up, nothing is to be done until his arrival.  By one ingenious stroke—­the sudden flight of the Court—­the Chinese have turned the tables on allied Europe and made us all ridiculous.  Any one might have anticipated something of this—­there is a precedent in the histories.  Yet history is only made to be immediately forgotten.

XIV

PUNITIVE EXPEDITIONS

October, 1900.

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