We are progressing more quietly now that the big fires are out; but still there is scant reason for any congratulations.  S——­, for instance, is quite forgotten, I assure you, for I mentioned his name to P——­, the French Minister, only an hour ago, and the only reply he made was to spread out his hands in front of him and give vent to an immense sigh.  Then he muttered as he went away, “II a disparu completement—­entierement; c’est la fin."...

All relief is now felt to be out of the question.  Men are also beginning to fall with regularity, and are carried in bloodstained, as evidence that this is really a serious business.  The British Chancery is now the hospital; despatch tables have been washed and covered with surgical cloth; cases are dropping in (seventeen up to date, I hear), and doctors are busy.  Already in the night smothered cries burst from the walls of these torture-rooms, and make one conscious that it may be one’s turn next.  I have always felt that it is all right up in the firing line, but it is that dreadful afterwards on the operating-table....  But nurses and doctors are doing valiantly.  There is a German army doctor who knows his business very well, they say; and his reputation has already spread so far among the men of our all-nation sailors and marines that they all ask for him.  I have heard that request in four languages already.

To me it seems that by incontestable laws each actor is taking his proper place, and that each nationality is pushing out its best to the proper perspective.  Ah! a siege is evidently the testing-room of the gods.  If we could only in ordinary life apply the great siege test, what mistakes would be avoided, what reputations would be saved from being shattered!  Because no weak man would ever be given advancement.

IV

THE BONDS TIGHTEN

25th June, 1900.

* * * * *

On all sides our position has become less secure, less enviable, and the enemy more menacing, more daring and more intent in breaking in on us.  The few dropping shots which opened the ball on the 20th have now duly blossomed into a rich harvest of bullets that sometimes continues for hours without intermission or break.  The Japanese, unable to hold their huge line, consisting of Prince Su’s outer wall, have already been forced to give way at several points, but in doing so they have each time managed to bite hard at the enemy’s attacking head.  The day before yesterday the little Japanese colonel decided he would have to give up a block of courts on the northeast—­some of those courts I have already described, which, hemmed in by walls almost as high as the outer monster, itself eighteen or twenty feet high and three feet thick, form veritable death-traps if you can entice any one inside and hammer them to pieces by loophole fire.  This is precisely the policy adopted by Colonel S——.