am personally concerned, it is largely a matter of food whether this affects one acutely or not.  If you have a full stomach you do not mind so much, and even shrug your shoulders should the man next to you be hit; but at four or five in the morning, when everything is pale and damp, and you are stomach-sick, it is nerve-shaking to see a man brutally struck and gasping under the blow.  I have seen this happen three times; once it was truly horrible, for I was so splashed with blood....

It is also largely a matter of days.  On some days, you think, in a curious sort of a way, that your turn has come, and that it will be all over in a few minutes.  You try to convince yourself by silent arguing that such thoughts are the merest foolishness, that you are at heart a real coward; but in spite of every device the feeling remains, and in place of your former unconcern a nervousness takes possession of you.  This nervousness is not exactly the nervousness of yourself, for your outer self surveys your inner depths with some contempt, but the slight fear remains.  You do not know what it is—­it is inexplicable.  Yet it is there.

Yesterday I had the experience in full force, just as a line of us in extended order were galloping up to a threatened position.  My boots untied and twice nearly tripped me.  I had to stop, perhaps two seconds, perhaps five, dropping on my knee with my head low beside it.  For some reason I did not finish tying the laces.  I sprang up, threw my right leg forward preparatory to doubling, and then ping—­I was spinning on the ground, laughing at my own clumsiness in falling down.  Then I glanced to see why my right knee-cap stung me so much.  I stopped laughing.  A bullet had split across the skin—­rafle, the French call it—­and a shred of my trousers, mixed with some shreds of skin, was hanging down covered with blood.  Half a second before my head had been exactly where my knee was, and had I not moved, spurred by some curious intuition, I would have been dead on the ground.  Perhaps one’s inner consciousness knows more than one thinks....

But such personal experiences are trivial compared with what is going on around us generally.  I should not speak of them.  For if the Chinese commands are closing in on us on every side, our fighting line is biting back as savagely as it can, and is giving them better than they give us when we get to grips.  But in spite of this our position is less enviable than ever, and it requires no genius to see that if the Chinese commanders persist in their present policy the Legations must fall unless relief comes in another two weeks.