The eye-witness whose account follows was careful to establish with as much lucidity as possible each phase of existence during five months of extraordinary interest.  Much in these notes has had to be suppressed for many reasons, and much that remains may create some astonishment.  Yet it is well to remember that “one eye-witness, however dull and prejudiced, is worth a wilderness of sentimental historians.”  The historians are already beginning to arise; these pages may serve as a corrective to many erroneous ideas.  Perhaps some also will allow that this curious tragedy, swept into Peking and playing madly round the entrenched European Legations, has intense human interest still.  The vague terror which oppressed everyone before the storm actually burst; the manner in which the feeble chain of fighting men were locked round the European lines, and suffered grievously but were providentially saved from annihilation; the curious way in which diplomacy made itself felt from time to time only to disappear as the rude shock of events taking place near Tientsin and the sea were reflected in Peking; the final coming of the strange relief—­all these points and many others are made in such a manner that everyone should be able to understand and to believe.  The description of the last act of the upheaval—­the complete sack of Peking—­shows clearly how the lust for loot gains all men, and hand in hand invites such terrible things as wholesale rape and murder.

The eye-witness attempts to account for all that happened; to make real and living the hoarse roll of musketry, the savage cries of desperadoes stripped to the waist and glistening in their sweat; to give echo to the blood-curdling notes of Chinese trumpets; to limn the tall mountains of flames licking sky high.  If there is failure in these efforts, it is due to the editing.

The summer of 1900 in Peking will ever remain as famous in the annals of the world’s history as the Indian Mutiny; it was something unique and unparalleled.  With the curious movements now at work in the Far East, it may not be unwise to study the story again.  And after Port Arthur these pages may show something about which little has been written—­the psychology of the seige.  The seige is still the rudest test in the world.  It is well to know it.

B. L. Putnam Weale.

China, June, 1906.

INDISCREET LETTERS FROM PEKING

PART I—­THE WARNING

I

FRAGMENTS

12th May, 1900.

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