Our barricades were full of men here, and it was no use trying to push in.  I postponed my own shooting, for after a brisk fusillade here, urgent summons came from other quarters, and I had to rush away....  The siege had begun in earnest.  I record these things just as they seemed to happen.  We are so tired, my account cannot seem very sensible.  Yet it is the truth.

PART II—­THE SIEGE

I

CHAOS

21st June, 1900.

* * * * *

I passed the night in half a dozen different places, assimilating all there was to assimilate; gazing and noting the thousand things there were to be seen and heard, and sleeping exactly three hours.  Few people would believe the extraordinary condition to which twelve hours of chaos can reduce a large number of civilised people who have been forced into an unnatural life.  It is indeed extraordinary.  Half the Legations are abandoned, excepting for a few sailors; others are being evacuated, and most people have even none of the necessities of life with them.  For instance, at eight o’clock I discovered that I had had no breakfast, and on finding that it would be impossible for me to get any for some hours, I forthwith became so ravenously hungry that I determined I would steal some if necessary.  What a position for a budding diplomatist!

Fortunately I thought of the Hotel de Pekin before I had done anything startling, and soon C——­, the genial and energetic Swiss, who is the master of this wonderful hostelry, had given me coffee.  He told me then to go into his private rooms, ransack the place and take what I liked.  I found I was not alone in his private apartments.  Baron R——­, the Russian commandant, had just come in before me, and had fallen asleep from sheer fatigue as he was in the act of eating something.  He looked so ridiculous lying in a chair with his mouth wide open and his sword and revolver mixed up with the things he had been eating, that I began laughing loudly, and, aroused by this sound, two more men appeared suddenly—­Marquis P——­, the cousin of the Italian charge, and K——­, the Dutch Minister.  What they were doing there I did not inquire.  The Dutch Minister was in a frightful rage at everything and everybody, and began talking so loudly that R——­ woke up, and commenced eating again in the most natural way in the world, without saying a single word.  As soon as he had finished he went to sleep again.  He was plainly a man of some character; the whole position was so ridiculous and yet he paid no attention.