The battalion of the Peking Field Force which faces the northern front had been industriously pushing forward massive barricades until they almost touched Prince Su’s outer wall.  Secure behind these sharpshooter fortifications a distressing fire was concentrated on the half a dozen fortified Japanese posts that lined the outer wall.  Here on high stagings, crudely made of timber and bamboo poles and protected by thick wedges of sandbags, Japanese sailors and some miscellaneous volunteers, grouped in posts of four and five men, lay hour after hour unable to show a finger or move a hand.  Hundreds of Chinese rifles at the closest possible range poured in a never-ending fire on these facile targets, and the sandbagged positions, literally eaten away by old-fashioned iron bullets in company with the most modern nickel-headed variety, crumbled down to practically nothing.  Lying on your back at these advanced posts and looking at the sloping roofs of Prince Su’s ornamental pavilions a few hundred feet within our lines was a droll sight.  The Chinese riflemen, being on a slightly lower level and forced to fire upwards at the Japanese positions, caused many of their bullets to skim the sandbagged crest and strike the line of roofs behind.  Many, I say; I should have said thousands and tens of thousands, for the roofs seemed alive and palpitating with strange feelings; and extraordinary as it may sound, big holes were soon eaten into the heavily tiled roofs by this simple rifle fusillade.  It seemed as if the Chinese hoped to destroy us and our defences by this novel method.  But there was a more ominous sign than this.  A Japanese sailor perched high up aloft on a roof five hundred feet inside these advance positions and armed with a telescope, had seen two guns being dragged forward.  In a few hours at the most, even allowing for Chinese sloth and indifference as to time, the guns would be in position, and then the outer wall would be demolished, and possibly a disordered retirement would be the result.  So the little Japanese colonel took the bull by the horns.  Setting all the coolies he could muster from among the converts, he quickly formed a second line of defence by loopholing and sandbagging all the chess-board squares that flank the northern wall.  When night came the advanced positions were quietly abandoned, and as soon as the Chinese scouts, who always creep forward at daybreak, discovered that our men had flown, their leaders ordered a charge.  A confused mass rushed forward, penetrated one of the courtyards, and finding it apparently deserted, incautiously pushed into the next square.  Before they could fly, a murderous fire caught them on three sides and wiped out several dozens of them, the rifles and ammunition being taken by our men and the corpses thrown outside.  This has apparently had a chilling effect on the policy of open charges in this quarter, and now the Chinese commanders are advancing their lines by means of ingenious parallels and zig-zag barricades, which will take some time to construct.