Threading your way due south you come suddenly on a French picquet, four Frenchmen and two Austrians behind a heavy barricade.  This precious Su wang-fu is merely linked to the French Legation by a system of such posts audaciously feeble when you consider the duty they have to undertake—­to keep up a connection hundreds of yards long which any moment may be broken in a dozen places by a determined rush of the enemy.  This first French post is the extreme left of the French defence, and it is only after some long alleyways that you come on the centre itself.  Here on roofs, squatting behind loopholes, and even on tree-tops, though these are very dangerous, French and Austrian sailors exchange shots with the enemy.  Half a dozen men have been already hit here, but in spite of the strictest orders men are fearlessly exposing themselves and reaping the inevitable result.  It is only at the beginning that one is so unwise.  One giant Austrian had spread himself across the top of a roof near which I passed, with two sandbags to protect his head, and looked in his blue-black sailors clothes like an enormous fly squashed flat up there by the anger of the gods.  Now leaning this way, now that, he flashed off a Mannlicher there towards the Italian Legation, where only one hundred hours ago no one ever dreamed that Chinese desperadoes would have made our normal life such a distant memory.

As I came up the French commander allowed the remark to drop that the position did not please him—­ca ne me dit rien is the exact expression he used—­and that his defence was too thin to be capable of resisting a single determined rush.  The abandoned Italian barricade, with the Italian Legation still smouldering behind it, is indeed now filling up with more and more Chinese sharpshooters, who continually pour in a hot fire only fifty feet from the French lines.  Occasionally a reckless Chinese brave dashes across from the hiding-place he has selected to cover his advance into the nest of Chinese houses which are only separated by a twenty-foot lane from the French Legation wall, and coolly applies the torch.  Then puff; first there is a small cloud of smoke, then a volley of crackling wood, and finally flames leaping skyward.  You can see this here at all hours.  Aided by fire and rifle-shots the Chinese are pushing nearer and nearer the French.  It is clear that they will have a worse time than the Japanese if the situation develops as quietly but as rapidly as it has been doing....

Across Legation Street connection with the Germans is now had by means of more loopholed barricades; for the Germans link hands with the French and Austrians, just as they on their part link up with the little colonel of the Su wang-fu.  But the Germans are not in force at their own Legation; they are merely using it as their base, for it is only by means of the Peking Club, whose grounds run sheer back, that they touch the priceless Tartar Wall.  Spread-eagled