But though for us there is still some hope, there is very little for the wretched native Christians quartered in the palace grounds of Prince Su, whom we have saved from the Boxers.

They soon heard the news, too, that the foreigner who has once saved them is going—­going away because he has been ordered to.  All night long there was an awful panic among these people which made one’s heart sick, for they understood better than us how quickly they would be massacred once they left our care.

I shall never forget the night of the 19th of June, 1900, with all its tragedy and tragi-comedy, though I live to be a hundred.  It allowed me to see something of real human nature in momentary flashes; of how mean and full of fear we really are, how small and how easily impressed.  A hundred times I longed to have the time and the power to set down exactly so that everyone might understand the incidents and the sudden impulses which took place—­all prompted by that master of human beings—­FEAR.  That is why we worship heroes, or we pretend we worship them, because it is the culte.  For a moment these people who have been set on pedestals were not afraid.  Is it only the power not to be afraid which makes one a hero?

XV

THE DEBACLE BEGINS

20th June, 1900.

* * * * *

It is notorious that in moments of tension, when the mind has been stimulated to too great an activity by unhealthy excitement, you think of the most curiously assorted things—­in fact, of absurd things which are quite out of place.  I have been thinking the whole time of something very stupid which is only fiction:  That a Zulu, named Umslopagas, rode and ran one hundred miles in a single night and then refreshed himself sufficiently by a couple of hours’ sleep to deliver battle with such vigour at the head of a marble staircase, that he saved the haggard hero.  That is what I have been thinking of....

We of Peking are, unfortunately, not of the mettle of Zulus, and as far as I am personally concerned, three hours’ sleep is but the appetite-giver for five hours more.  And so on this fateful 20th June, with the time limit of our ultimatum expiring at four o’clock, I got up in no sort of valorous spirit, and with the feeling that tragedies outside the theatre—­at least those that spin themselves out for an indefinite number of days—­are quite impossible for us Moderns.  But, then, probably everybody has always thought the same thing—­even those who lived before the Renaissance.