was still smoking, were full of Christian families hiding in the most impossible places, and everywhere Boxers and banditti, sometimes in groups, sometimes singly, still chased them and cut them down.  Numbers had already been massacred, and several lanes looked like veritable shambles.  The stench of human blood in the hot June air was almost intolerable, and the sights more than we could bear.  Men, women and children lay indiscriminately heaped together, some hacked to pieces, others with their throats cut from ear to ear, some still moving, others quite motionless.

Gradually we collected an ever-growing mob of terror stricken people who had escaped this massacre.  Some of the girls seemed quite paralysed with fear; others were apparently temporarily bereft and kept on shrieking with a persistency that was maddening.  A young French sailor who did not look more than seventeen, and was splashed all over with blood from having fallen in one of the worst places, kept striking them two and three at a time, and cursing them in fluent Breton, in the hope of bringing them to reason. “Eh bien, mes belles!  Vous ne finissez pas,” he ended despairingly, and rushed off again to see whether he could find any more.

The blood was rising to our men’s heads badly by now, and I saw several who could stand it no longer stabbing at the few dead Boxers we had secured.  We had none of us imagined we were coming to such scenes as these; for nobody would have believed that such brutal things were possible.  When we judged we had finished rescuing every one alive, a man in the most pitiable condition ran out from behind the smouldering cathedral carrying a newly severed human head in either hand.  He seemed but little abashed when he saw us, but came forward rapidly enough towards us, glancing the while over his shoulder.  Several sailors were rushing at him with their bayonets, ready to spit him, when he fell on his knees, and, tearing open his tunic, disclosed to our astonished eyes a bronze crucifix with a silver Christ hung on it. “Je suis catholique,” he cried to us repeatedly and rapidly in fair French, and the sailors stayed their cold steel until we had extracted an explication.  Then it transpired that he had used this horrible device to escape the notice of some Boxers who were still at work in a street on the other side of the cathedral.  We ran round promptly on hearing this, and caught sight of a few fellows stripped to the waist, and gory with blood as I have never seen men before.  Instead of fleeing, they met our charge with resolution, and one tall fellow put me in considerable danger of my life with a long spear, finally escaping before we could shoot him down.

On this side the ruins of the cathedral were covered with corpses burned black from the heat of the flames and exposure to the sun.  One woman, by some freak of nature, had her arms poised above her head as she sat dead, shrivelled almost beyond human recognition.  It was probable that the Boxers had pitched many of their victims alive into the flames and driven them back with their swords and spears whenever they attempted to escape....