Saturday, October 13.
I have chosen to travel by junk as far as the course of the Pei-Ho will permit, the junk serving as a lodging in this country where I am forced to dally.
This makes necessary many little preparations.
The first thing is to make a requisition for this junk and to appropriate this species of sarcophagus where I am to live under a roof of matting. The next is to buy in the more or less ruined shops of Tien-Tsin the things necessary for a few days of nomadic life, from bedding to arms; and lastly, to hire from the Lazarist Fathers a Chinese person to make tea,—young Toum, aged fourteen, with the face of a cat and a queue reaching to the ground.
I dined with General Frey, who, with his small French detachment, was, as every one knows, the first to enter the heart of Pekin, the Imperial City. He was good enough to relate to me in detail this magnificent journey, the taking of the Marble Bridge and his final entrance into the Imperial City,—that mysterious place which I shall soon see, and into which before him no European had ever penetrated.
As to my own small personal expedition, which in comparison with his appears so easy and unimportant, the general kindly concerned himself with what we were to drinken route, my servant and I, in this time of infection, when the water is a constant danger on account of human remains, thrown there by the Chinese, left lying in all the wells; and he made me a present of untold value,—a case of eau d'Evian.
Sunday, October 14.
An old Chinese woman, wrinkled as a winter apple, timidly opens the door at which we have loudly knocked. It stands in the deep shadow of a narrow passageway exhaling unhealthy fetid smells,between walls blackened by filth, where one feels as shut in as in the heart of a prison.
The old woman, an enigmatical figure, looks us all over with a blank impenetrable gaze; then recognizing among us the chief of the international police, she silently steps aside and permits us to enter. We follow her into a dark little court. Poor late autumn flowers are growing in the old walls, and we breathe faint sickly odors.
We are a group of officers, three French, two English, and one Russian, who are there clearly by right of conquest.
Our conductor is a strange creature, balancing on the tips of her incredibly small feet. Her gray hair fastened with long pins is so tightly drawn back that it seems to raise her eyes unduly. Her dark dress is indefinite in color, but her parchment-like face bears to a high degree that something appertaining to a worn-out race, which we are wont to call distinction. She appears to be only a servant, yet her aspect, her carriage, are disconcerting; some mystery broods over her, she seems like a refined matron who has resorted to a shameful clandestine occupation. This whole place, moreover, is difficult to describe to those who do not know it.
Beyond the court is a sordid vestibule, then a door painted black, with a Chinese inscriptionconsisting of two big red letters. Without knocking, the old woman draws the bolt and opens it.
We may be mistaken, but we have come in all good faith to pay a visit totwo goddesses,—prisoners kept shut up in this palace. For here we are in the common, the lower dependencies, the secret places of the palace of the viceroy of Petchili, and to reach this spot we have had to pass over the immense desolation of a town with cyclopean walls which is at present only a mass of débris and dead bodies.
The animation of these ruins, accidentally peopled by joyous soldiers, is singular, unique, on this Sunday, which is a holiday in camp and barracks. In the long streets filled with wreckage of all kinds, Zouaves and African chasseurs, arm-in-arm with Germans in pointed helmets, pass gaily between the walls of roofless houses. There are little Japanese soldiers, shining and automatic, Russians with flat caps, plumed Bersaglieri, Austrians, Americans with big felt hats, and Indian cavalrymen with enormous turbans. All the flags of Europe are floating over the ruins of Tien-Tsin, which has been partitioned by the allied armies. In certain quarters the Chinese who have gradually returned, after their flight, have established bazars in the open air in the lovely sunshine of this autumn Sunday,—bazars where in the midst ofincendiary ashes they sell to the soldiers articles picked up in the ruins, porcelains, jars, silk dresses, furs. There are so many of these soldiers, so many uniforms of every kind on our route, so many sentinels presenting arms, that we grow weary returning the many salutes received as we pass through this unheard-of babel.
At the farther side of the destroyed city, near the high ramparts in front of the palace of the viceroy, where we are going to see the goddesses, some Chinese, undergoing torture in a kind of pillory, are lined up along the wall, with inscriptions above them describing their offences. Two pickets guard the doors with bayonetted guns, one an American, the other a Japanese, standing alongside of the horrible grinning old stone monsters who watch, crouching, on either side of the entrance.
There is nothing sumptuous, nothing great in this dusty, decrepit palace which we have traversed unheeding, but it speaks of real China, of old China, grimacing and hostile. There is a profusion of monsters in marble, in broken faience, and in worm-eaten wood, falling to pieces from sheer old age or threatening from the edges of roofs to do so; frightful forms half buried in sand and ashes, with horns, claws, forked tongues, and big squinting eyes.
In the grim walled court a few late roses are still in blossom under trees a century old.
Now, after various turns along badly lighted passages, we reach the goddesses' door,—the one marked with two big red letters. The old Chinese woman, ever mute and mysterious, with head held high but with lifeless eyes persistently downcast, pushes open the black doors, with a gesture of submission which means: "Here they are, look at them!"
In a room which is almost dark and where the evening sun never enters, two poor girls, two sisters who look alike, are seated with bowed heads amid lamentable disorder, in positions indicative of supreme consternation,—one on a chair, the other on the edge of an ebony bed which they must share at night. They are dressed in humble black, but here and there on the floor are scattered shining silks and tunics embroidered in big flowers and gold chimæras,—the garments they put on when going to meet the armies, in the midst of whistling bullets on days of battle,—their attire as warriors and goddesses.
For they are a kind of Jeanne d'Arc,—if it is not blasphemy to pronounce a name of almost ideal purity in this connection,—they are the goddesses of the incomprehensible Boxers, so atrocious and at the same time so admirable: hystericalcreatures, exciting both the hatred and terror of the foreigner, who one day fled without fighting in a panic of fear, and the next with the shrieks of the possessed threw themselves straight into the face of death, under a shower of bullets from troops ten times as numerous as themselves.
The goddesses, taken prisoners, are the property, the curious bibelot, if one may use the word, of the seven Allies. They are not badly treated. They are merely shut up for fear they will commit suicide, which has become a fixed idea with them. What will be their fate? Already their captors are tired of seeing them and don't know what to do with them.
On a day of defeat the junk in which they sought refuge was surrounded, and they, with their mother, who followed them everywhere, threw themselves into the water. The soldiers fished them out fainting. The goddesses after much care came to their senses. But the mamma never again opened her oblique old Chinese eyes. The girls were made to believe that she had been taken to a hospital and would soon come back. At first the prisoners were brave, animated, haughty, and always well dressed. But this very morning they have been told that their mother is no more, and it is that which has stunned them, like a physical blow.
Having no money to buy mourning dress, which in China is always white, they asked to be allowed white leather shoes—which at this moment cover their doll-like feet, and which are as essential here as the crape veil is with us.
They are both slender and of a waxen pallor, scarcely pretty, but with a certain grace, a certain charm as they stand there, one in front of the other, without tears, with drooping eyes and with arms falling straight at their sides. They do not raise their eyes even to ascertain who enters or what is wanted of them. They do not stir as we come in, nothing matters to them now. They await death, indifferent to everything.
They inspire in us an unlooked-for respect by the dignity of their despair, respect and infinite compassion. We have nothing to say to one another, and are as embarrassed at being there as though we had been guilty of some indiscretion.
It occurred to us to put some money on the disordered bed; but one of the sisters, while appearing not to see us, threw the pieces of silver onto the floor and with a gesture invited the servant to dispose of them as she wished. So that this was on our part a further mistake.
There is such an abyss of misunderstanding between European officers and Boxer goddesses that it is impossible to show our sympathy forthem in any way. So we, who came to be amused by a curious sight, depart in silence with a tightening of the heartstrings at the thought of the two poor creatures imprisoned in a gloomy room in the fading evening light.
My junk, with five Chinese aboard, will go up the river under the French flag, which is already a protection. The war department has decided it to be more prudent—although my servant and I are armed—to send two soldiers with us, two men with horses carrying guns and munitions.
Beyond Tien-Tsin, where I have spent another day, one may go an hour further by train in the direction of Pekin, as far as the town of Yang-Soon. My junk, with two soldiers, Toum, and the baggage, will await me there at a bend in the river, and has gone on ahead to-day with a military escort.
I dine this evening with the consul-general, the one who escaped being shot almost by miracle, although his flag was for a long time, during the siege, a mark for the Chinese gunners.
Monday, October 15.
I left Tien-Tsin by railway at eight o'clock in the morning. An hour on the road, across the same old plain, the same desolation, the same cutting wind, the same dust. Then the ruins of Yang-Soon, where the train stops because there is no road left; from this point on, the Boxers have destroyed everything, the bridges are cut, the stations burned, and the rails scattered over the country.
My junk is there awaiting me by the river's side. For the present, for three days at least, I must arrange for a life on the water, in the little sarcophagus which is the cabin of this queer boat, under the roof of matting which gives a view of the sky through a thousand holes, and which to-night will permit the white frost to disturb our slumbers. But this room in which I am to live, eat and sleep in complete promiscuity with my French companions is so small, so very small that I dismiss one of the soldiers. We could never manage there with four.
The Chinese of my train, ragged and sordid, receive me with profound bows. One takes the rudder, the others jump onto the bank, where they harness themselves to the end of a long line attachedto the mast of the junk—and we are off, being towed against the current of the Pei-Ho, a heavy poisonous stream in which, here and there amongst the reeds on the banks, parts of human bodies appear.
The soldier I have kept is named Renaud, and he tells me he comes from Calvados. He and my servant Osman, both happy to be going to Pekin, vie with one another in gaiety and good-will and in comical ingenious inventions to make our lodging more convenient. The trip, in spite of unpleasant surroundings, begins to the sound of their merry childlike laughter. We depart in the full morning light, under the rays of a deceptive sunshine which pretends it is summer although an icy wind is blowing.
The seven allied nations have established military posts from point to point along the Pei-Ho, to insure communication by way of the river between Pekin and the gulf of Petchili, where their ships come in. Toward eleven o'clock I stop the junk near a large Chinese fort from which floats the French flag.
It is one of our posts occupied by Zouaves; we get out to get our rations, enough bread, wine, preserves, sugar, and tea for two days. We shall receive no more now until Tong-Tchow (City of Celestial Purity), which we shall reach day afterto-morrow in the evening, if nothing untoward prevents. Then the towing of our junk begins again; slowly and monotonously we move between gloomy devastated banks.
The country around us remains unchanged. On both sides as far as the eye can reach are fields of "sorghos"—which is a kind of giant millet much taller than our maize. The war prevented its being harvested in season, and so it stands reddened by the frost. The monotonous little tow-path, a narrow strip on the grayish soil, is on a level with the cold fetid water, at the foot of the eternal dried sorghos, which forms an endless curtain all along the river. Sometimes a phantom village appears on the horizon; as one approaches it, it proves to be only ruins and the bodies of the dead.
I have a mandarin's arm-chair in my junk on which to enthrone myself when the sun shines and the wind is not too cutting. More frequently I prefer to walk along the shore doing my miles in company with our towers, who plod along bending over like beasts of burden, with the rope passed over the shoulders. Osman and Renaud peer out of a port-hole after me as we walk along the track of gray earth shut in by the uninterrupted border of sorghos and by the river, the wind blowing sharply all the while. We are often obliged tostep aside suddenly because of a dead man—with one leg stretched out across the path—looking slyly up at us.
The events of the day are the meeting of junks going down the river and passing ours. They go in long lines fastened together, flying the flag of some one of the allied nations, and carrying the sick, the wounded, and the spoils of war.
In the twilight we pass the remains of a village in which the Russians, on their way to Manchuria, are encamped for the night. They are taking carved furniture out of an abandoned house, breaking it up and making a fire of it. As we go on we see the flames mounting in great jets, and reaching out to the sorghos near by; for a long time its incendiary light is visible behind us, in the mournful empty grayness of the distance. This first nightfall on our junk is full of gloom in the strange solitude into which hour by hour we penetrate still further. The shadows are deep about us and there are many dead along the ground. In the confused and infinite darkness, all about us seems hostile or gloomy, and the cold increases with the silence and obscurity.
The impression of melancholy disappears at supper when our Chinese lantern is lighted, illuminating the sarcophagus, which we have closed as tightly as possible to shut out the wind. I haveinvited my two companions to my table—my comical little table, which they themselves have made from a broken oar and an old plank. The bread seems exquisite to us after our long walk on the bank; to warm us we have the hot tea which young Toum has prepared for us over a fire of sorghos, and when hunger is assuaged and Turkish cigarettes give forth their soothing clouds of smoke, we have almost a feeling of home and comfort in our poor shelter enveloped in outside darkness.
Then comes bedtime—although the junk moves on, our towers continuing their march by feeling their way along the sorghos of the dark path, so full of surprises. Toum, although he is an elegant young Chinaman, goes to roost with the others of his race in the straw in the hold. The rest of us, still dressed of course, with our boots on and firearms at hand, stretch out on the narrow camp-bed of our cabin, looking at the stars, which, as soon as the lantern is out, appear between the meshes of our matting-roof, shining brightly in the frosty sky.
Distant shots reach us from far off, indicating nocturnal dramas with which we have no concern, and just before midnight two guards, one Japanese and the other German, try to stop our junk; we are obliged to get up to discuss the matter, andby means of a hastily lighted lantern, show the French flag and the stripes that I wear on my sleeve.
At midnight the Chinese make fast our boat, at a spot they say is safe, so that they too may rest. We all fall into a profound slumber in the icy night.
Tuesday, October 16.
We are up at daylight and off again. In the cold, magnificent dawn, upon a clear pink sky, the sun rises and shines without heat on the green plain, and on the deserted place where we have slept.
All at once I leap to the ground with an instinctive longing for activity, anxious to move, to walk. Horrors! At a turn in the path as I am running fast without looking where I am going, I almost step on something in the form of a cross,—a naked corpse lying face downward with extended arms, half buried in the mud and of a corresponding color; the dogs or the crows, or some Chinese who wanted the queue, have taken the scalp, leaving the cranium white and minus hair or skin.
It grows colder each day as we get farther away from the sea, and the plain begins gradually to slope upward.
Junks pass as they did yesterday, going downthe river in files with military stores, and are under the care of soldiers of all the nations of Europe. Then come long intervals of solitude, during which no living thing appears in this region of millet and reeds. The wind that blows more and more bitterly is healthful; it dilates the chest, and for the moment redoubles life. So we march along between the sorghos and the river, on the everlasting frosty path that leads to Pekin, without fatigue, without any desire to hurry, but always ahead of the solemn Chinamen, who, tugging at their ropes, continue to draw our floating house, keeping up their pace with the regularity of machines.
There are a few trees now on the banks, willows with very green leaves of a variety unknown to us; they seem untouched by the autumn, and their beautiful color is in striking contrast to the rusty tones of the grass and the dying sorghos. There are gardens too,—abandoned gardens that belonged to hamlets that have been burned; our Chinamen sometimes send one of their number on a marauding expedition, and he brings back armfuls of vegetables for our meals.
Osman and Renaud, as we pass by ruined houses, sometimes pick up articles which they think necessary for the embellishment of our dwelling,—small mirrors, carved seats, lanterns, even bunches of artificial flowers made of ricepaper, which may have adorned the headdresses of massacred or fleeing Chinese ladies, and which they naïvely use to decorate the walls of the room. The interior of our sarcophagus soon takes on an air of distinction quite droll and barbaric.
It is astonishing how soon we accustom ourselves to the perfectly simple life on the junk, an existence of healthy fatigue, devouring appetites, and heavy sleep.
Toward the evening of this day the mountains of Mongolia, those which tower above Pekin, begin to appear on the distant horizon, on the very border of this infinitely level land.
There is something especially lugubrious about the twilight to-day. The sinuous Pei-Ho, narrowing hour by hour at each turn, seems to be but a tiny stream between its silent shores, and we feel altogether too much shut in by the confused growth which conceals such sombre things. The day goes out in one of those cold dead colorings that are a specialty of Northern winters. All that there is in the way of light comes from the water, which reflects more vividly than the sky; the river, like a mirror, reflects the sunset yellows; one might even say that it exaggerates the sad light, as it runs between the inverted images of the reeds, the monotonous sorghos and the already black silhouettes of the few trees. The solitude is deeperthan that of yesterday. The cold and the silence settle down upon one like a winding sheet. There is a penetrating melancholy in feeling the slow oncoming of the night in this nameless spot, a certain anguish in looking at the last reflections of the neighboring reeds,—reflections which continue, even though ahead of us darkness claims the hostile and unknown distance.
Happily, the hour for supper is here, the longed-for hour, for we are very hungry. In our little retreat I shall find again the red light of our lantern, the excellent soldier's bread, the smoking tea served by Toum, and the cheerfulness of my two good servants.
Toward nine o'clock, just as we pass a group of junks full of people, all Chinese,—marauders' junks evidently,—we hear cries behind us,—cries of distress and death, cries that are horrible in the stillness. Toum, who lends his fine ear and understands all that these people are saying, explains that they are engaged in killing an old man because he has stolen some rice. We were not numerous enough or sure enough of our party, to interfere. I fired two shots into the air in their direction, and all became still as if by magic; we had, no doubt, saved the head of the old rice thief at least until the morning.
Then it is quiet until daylight. After midnight,tied up no matter where among the reeds, we all sleep a sleep that is undisturbed. It is calm and cold under the stars. There are a few shots fired in the distance. We are conscious of them, but they do not wake us.
Wednesday, October 17.
We rise at daybreak and run along the bank in the white frost; the dawn is pink, and soon the sun rises bright and clear.
Wishing to take a short cut through the everlasting sorghos fields and to rejoin the junk which is obliged to follow a long turn in the river further on, we cross the ruins of a hamlet where frightfully contorted bodies are lying, on whose blackened members the ice has formed little crystals that shine like a coating of salt.
After our noon dinner, as we emerge from the semi-obscurity of our sarcophagus, the Chinamen point to the horizon. Tong-Tchow, the "City of Celestial Purity," is beginning to show itself; great black walls surmounted with miradors, and an astonishingly tall, slender tower, of a very Chinese outline with twenty superimposed roofs.
It is all distant still, and the plains about us are full of horrors. From a stranded junk emerges a long dead arm, of a bluish tone. And the bodies of cattle borne by the current pass by us in a perfectprocession, all swollen and exhaling a bovine pest. A cemetery must have been violated hereabouts, for on the mud of the shore there are empty coffins with human bones alongside them.
Tong-Tchow, which occupies two or three kilometres along the bank, is one of those immense Chinese cities—more densely populated than many of the capitals of Europe—whose very name is almost unheard of with us. To-day, needless to say, it is but the ghost of a city, and as one approaches it it does not take long to perceive that it is now empty and in ruin.
We approach slowly. At the foot of the high black crenellated walls, junks are crowded all along the river. On the bank the same excitement as at Taku and at Tien-Tsin is complicated by some hundreds of Mongolian camels crouching in the dust.
There are soldiers, invaders, cannons, materials of war. Cossacks who are trying captured horses go and come at full gallop among the various groups, with great savage cries.
The various national colors of the EuropeanAllies are hoisted in profusion; they float from high up on the black walls pierced by cannon balls, from the camps, from the junks, from the ruins. And the continual wind—the implacable icy wind carrying the infected dust that smells of the dead—plays upon these flags, which give an ironical air of festivity to all the devastation.
I look for the French flags so as to stop my junk in our neighborhood and to go at once to our quarters. I can try our country's rations there this evening; furthermore, not being able to continue our trip on the river, I must procure for to-morrow morning a cart and some saddle horses.
Stopping near a place which seems to belong to us, I ask some Zouaves the road to our quarters; they promptly, eagerly, and politely offer to accompany me. Together we go on toward a great door in the thick black wall.
At this entrance to the city they have, by means of ropes and boards, established a cattle-yard for the purpose of supplying food for the soldiers. Besides a few live animals there are three or four on the ground, dead from the bovine pest, and some Chinese prisoners have this moment come to drag them to the river, the general rendezvous for dead bodies.
We enter a street where our soldiers are employed at various kinds of work in the midst ofheaps of rubbish. Through the broken doors and windows of the houses the wretched interiors are visible; everything is in fragments, broken, destroyed as though for pleasure. From the thick dust raised by the north wind and by our own footsteps rises an intolerable odor of the dead.
For two months the rage for destruction, the frenzy for murder, has beset this unfortunate "City of Celestial Purity," invaded by the troops of eight or ten different countries. She felt the first shock of all these hereditary hatreds. First the Boxers came her way. Then the Japanese,—heroic little soldiers of whom I do not wish to speak ill, but who destroy and kill as barbarian armies were wont to do. Still less do I wish to speak ill of our friends, the Russians; but they have sent here their Cossack neighbors from Tartary, and half-Mongolian Siberians, all admirable under fire, but looking at war in the Asiatic fashion. Then there are the cruel cavalrymen of India sent by Great Britain. America has let loose her soldiers. And when, in the first desire for vengeance for Chinese cruelties, the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the French arrived, nothing was left intact.
Our commander and his officers have improvised lodgings and offices in some of the larger Chinese houses, hastily repairing the roofs andwalls. In strong contrast to the rudeness of these places are the sumptuous wood carvings and the tall Chinese vases found intact among the ruins.
They promise me carriages and horses for to-morrow morning to be ready at sunrise on the bank near my junk. When all is settled there is about an hour of daylight left, so I wander about the ruins of the city with my armed followers, Osman, Renaud, and Chinese Toum.
As one gets farther away from the quarters where our soldiers are, the horrors increase with the solitude and the silence.
We come first to the street of the China merchants, great warehouses where the products of the Canton manufactories were stored. It must have been a fine street judging from the carved and gilded but ruined façades which remain. To-day the yawning shops, almost demolished, seem to vomit onto the highway their heaps of broken fragments. One walks on precious enamel decorated with brilliant flowers, for it literally covers the ground so that one crushes it in passing. There is no knowing whose work this was; it was already done when our troops arrived. But it must have taken whole days of furious attack with boots and clubs to reduce it all to such small bits; jars, plates, cups, are ground to atoms, pulverized, together with human bones and hair. Atthe back of these warehouses the coarser wares occupied a sort of interior court. These courts with their old walls are particularly lugubrious this evening, in the dying light. In one of them we found a mangy dog trying to drag something from underneath a pile of broken plates—it was the body of a child whose skull had been broken. The dog began to eat the flesh that was left on the legs of the poor dead thing.
There was no one to be seen in the long devastated streets where the framework of the houses, as well as the tiles and the bricks, had tumbled down. Crows croaked in the silence. Horrible dogs who feed on the dead fled before us, hanging their tails. We had glimpses of Chinese prowlers, wretched-looking creatures, trying to find something to steal, or of some of the dispossessed timidly creeping along the walls attempting to find out what has become of their homes.
The sun is already low, and the wind is rising as it does every night. We shiver with the sudden cold. Empty houses fill the shadows.
These houses are all of considerable extent, with recesses, a succession of courts, rock work, basins, and melancholy gardens. Crossing the threshold, guarded by the ever-present granite monsters worn by the rubbing of hands, one finds oneself in an endless series of apartments. The intimate detailsof Chinese life are touchingly and graciously revealed by the arrangement of potted plants, flowerbeds, and little balconies where bindweed and other vines are trained.
Here, surrounded with playthings, is a poor doll, which doubtless belonged to some child whose head has been broken; there a cage hangs with the bird still in it, dried up in one corner with its feet in the air.
Everything is sacked, removed, or destroyed; furniture is broken, the contents of drawers thrown about the floors, papers, blood-stained clothing, Chinese women's shoes spattered with blood, and here and there limbs, hands, heads, and clumps of hair.
In certain of the gardens neglected plants continue to blossom gaily, running over into the walks amongst the human remains. Around an arbor which conceals the body of a woman, twines pink convolvulus in blossoming garlands. The blossom is still open at this late hour of the day and in spite of the cold nights, which quite upsets our European ideas of convolvulus.
In one of the houses back in a recess in a dark loft, something moves! Two women cower pitifully! Finding themselves discovered, they are seized with terror and fall at our feet, trembling, weeping, clasping their hands, and begging formercy. One is young, the other older, and they look alike. Mother and daughter! "Pardon, sir, pardon; we are afraid," translates little Toum naïvely, understanding their broken words. Evidently they expect the worst of us—and then death. For how long have they lived in this hole, these two poor things, thinking with each step that resounds on the pavement of the deserted court that their end has come? We leave them a few pieces of silver, which perhaps humiliates without helping them, but it is all that we can do, and then we go.
Another house, a house of the rich this one is, with a profusion of potted plants in enamelled porcelain jars in the sad little garden. In an apartment that is already dark (for decidedly night is coming on, the uncertainty of twilight is beginning), but where the havoc is less extensive, for there are great chests and beautiful arm-chairs still intact, Osman suddenly recoils with terror before something which emerges from a bucket placed upon a board. Two torn thighs, the whole lower part of a woman thrust into this bucket with the feet in the air! Undoubtedly the mistress of this elegant home. Her body? Who knows what has been done with the body? But here is the head, under this arm-chair, near the skeleton of a cat. The mouth is open, showing the teeth, and the hair is long.
In addition to the broad, almost straight streets whose desolation is visible from one end to the other, there are little tortuous streets leading up to gray walls. They are the most desolate to enter at this twilight hour, with only the cry of the crow as an accompaniment. Little stone gnomes guard their mysterious doors, and their pavements are strewn with human heads with long queues. One approaches certain turns in the streets with a heavy heart. It is over, and nothing in the world would tempt us to enter again at this hour one of those frightfully still houses where one meets with so many gruesome encounters.
We had gone far into the city before night came on, and the silence had become intolerable. We return to the region where the troops are quartered, cut by the north wind and chilled by the cold and gloom; our return is rapid; broken china and other débris impossible to define crackle under our feet.
The banks are lined with soldiers warming themselves and cooking their suppers over bright fires, where they are burning chairs, tables, and bits of carved wood or timbers. Coming out of the Dantesque streets, it all bespeaks joy and comfort to us.
Near our junk there is a canteen, improvised by a Maltese, where intoxicants are sold to soldiers.I send my men to get whatever liquors they want for our supper, for we need something to warm and cheer us if possible. We celebrate with smoking soup, tea, chartreuse, and I don't know what besides, in our little matting-covered dwelling, tied up this time on the pestilential mud and enveloped as usual by cold and darkness.
At dessert, when the hour for smoking arrives in our sarcophagus, Renaud, to whom I have given the floor, tells us that his squadron is encamped on the borders of a Chinese cemetery in Tien-Tsin, and that the soldiers of another European nation (I prefer not to say which) in the same vicinity spend their time ransacking the graves and taking from them the money which it is the custom to bury with the dead.
"To me, colonel" (I am colonel to him, as he is ignorant of the naval appellation ofcommandant, which, with us, goes with five gold stripes), "to me it does not seem right. Even though they are Chinese, we ought to leave their dead in peace. What disgusts me is that they cut their rations up on the planks of the coffins. And I say to them, 'Put it on the outside if you will, but not on the inside, which has touched the corpse.' But these savages, colonel, laugh at me."
Thursday, October 18.
It is a surprise to awaken to a dark and sombre sky. We counted upon having, as on the preceding mornings, the almost never clouded autumn and winter sun, which in China shines and warms even when everything is frozen hard, and which has, up to this time, helped us to support the gruesome sights of our journey.
When we open the door of the junk just before dawn, our horses and cart are there, having just arrived. On the forbidding shore some Mongolians with their camels are crouched about a fire which has burned all night in the dust; and behind their motionless groups the high walls of the city, of an inky blackness, rise to meet the low-hanging clouds.
We leave our small nomadic equipment in the junk, in the care of two marines of the Tong-Tchow division, who will look after it until our return, and also our most precious possession, the last of the bottles of pure water given us by the general.
The last stage of our journey is made in the company of the French consul-general at Tien-Tsin and of the chancellor of the legation, who areboth bound for Pekin, under the escort of a marshal and three or four artillerymen.
Our long, monotonous route leads us across fields of sorghos reddened by the early frosts, and through deserted villages where no one is stirring. It is a cold, gray morning, and the autumn country, upon which a fine rain is falling, is in mourning.
At certain moments I almost fancy myself on the roads of the Basque country in November, amid the uncut maize. Then all at once some unknown symbol arises to recall China,—either a tomb of mysterious shape or a stele mounted upon enormous granite tortoises.
From time to time we meet military convoys of one nation or another, or lines of ambulances. In one place some Russians have taken shelter from a shower in the ruins of a village; in another a number of Americans, who have discovered some hidden clothing in an abandoned house, go on their way rejoicing, with fur mantles on their backs.
Then there are tombs, always tombs, from one end to the other; China is strewn with them; some are almost hidden by the roadside, others are magnificently isolated in enclosures which are like mortuary thickets of dark green cedars.
Ten o'clock. We should be approaching Pekin, although as yet nothing indicates its nearness. We have not seen a single Chinese since our departure;the whole country is deserted and silent under a veil of almost imperceptible rain.
We are going to pass not far from the tomb of an empress, it seems, and the French chancellor, who knows the neighborhood, proposes that he and I make a détour to look at it. So, leaving the others to continue their route, we take a side path through the tall, damp grass.
A canal and a pool soon appear, of a pale color, under the indefinite sky. There is no one to be seen anywhere; the sad quiet of a depopulated country prevails. The tomb on the opposite bank scarcely peeps out from its cedar wood, which is walled about on all sides. We see little but the first marble gates leading to it and the avenue of white stele which is finally lost under the mysterious trees. It is all rather distant, and is reproduced in the mirror of the pool in long inverted reflections. Near us the tall leaden stems of some lotus killed by the frost bend over the water, where the rain drops have traced faint rings. The whitish spheres seen here and there are heads of the dead.
When we rejoin our company they promise that we shall enter Pekin in half an hour. After the complications and delays of our journey we almost believe we shall never arrive. Besides, it is incredible that so large a city could be so near in this deserted country, such a little way ahead of us.
Copyright, 1901, by J. C. HemmentThe Great Wall surrounding the Outer City of Pekin
Copyright, 1901, by J. C. HemmentThe Great Wall surrounding the Outer City of Pekin
Copyright, 1901, by J. C. HemmentThe Great Wall surrounding the Outer City of Pekin
"Pekin does not proclaim itself," explains my new companion. "Pekin takes hold of you; when you perceive it you are there."
The road passes through groups of cedars and willows with falling leaves, and in the concentration of our effort to see the City Celestial we trot on in the fine rain, which does not wet us at all, so drying are the northern winds, carrying the dust always and everywhere; we trot on without speaking.
"Pekin!" suddenly exclaims one of our companions, pointing out an obscure mass just rising above the trees,—a crenellated dungeon of superhuman proportions.
Pekin! In a few seconds, during which I am feeling the spell of this name, a big gloomy wall, of unheard-of height, is disclosed, and goes on endlessly in the gray, empty solitude, which resembles an accursed steppe. It is like a complete change of scene, performed without the noise of machinery or the sounds of an orchestra, in a silence more impressive than any music. We are at the very foot of the bastions and ramparts, dominated by them, although a turn in the road had up to this moment concealed them. At the same time the rain is turning to snow, whosewhite flakes mingle with the suspended dirt and dust. The wall of Pekin overwhelms us, a giant thing of Babylonian aspect, intensely black under the dead light of a snowy autumn morning. It rises toward the sky like a cathedral, but it goes on; it is prolonged, always the same, for miles. Not a person on the outskirts of the city, not a green thing all along these walls! The ground is uneven, dusty, ashen in color, and strewn with rags, bones, and even an occasional skull! From the top of each black battlement a crow salutes us as we pass, cawing mournfully.
The clouds are so thick and low that we do not see clearly; we are oppressed by long-looked-for Pekin, which has just made its abrupt and disconcerting appearance above our heads; we advance to the intermittent cries of the crows, rather silent ourselves, overpowered at being there, longing to see some movement, some life, some one or some thing come out from these walls.
From a gate ahead of us, from a hole in the colossal enclosure, slowly emerges an enormous brown, woolly animal like a gigantic sheep; then two, then three, then ten. A Mongolian caravan begins to pass us, always in the same silence, broken only by the croakings of the ravens. These enormous Mongolian camels, with their furry coats, muffs on their legs, and maneslike lions, file in an endless procession past our frightened horses. They wear neither bells nor rattles, like the thin beasts of the Arabian deserts; their feet sink deep into the sand, which muffles their footsteps so the silence is not broken by their march.
Perceived through a veil of fine snow and black dust, the caravan has passed us, and moves on without a sound, like a phantom thing. We find ourselves alone again, under this Titanic wall, from which the crows keep watch. And now it is our turn to enter the gloomy city through the gates by which the Mongolians have just passed out.
Here we are at the gates, the double triple gates, deep as tunnels, and formed of the most powerful masonry,—gates surmounted by deadly dungeons, each one five stories high, with strange curved roofs,—extravagant dungeons, colossal black things above a black enclosing wall.
Our horses' hoofs sink deeper and deeper, disappear, in fact, in the coal-black dust, which is blinding and all-pervading, in the atmosphere as well as on the ground, in spite of the lightrain and the snowflakes which make our faces tingle.
Noiselessly, as though we were stepping upon wadding or felt, we pass under the enormous vaults and enter the land of ruin and ashes.
A few slatternly beggars shivering in corners in their blue rags, a few corpse-eating dogs, like those whose acquaintance we have already madeen route,—and that is all. Silence and solitude within as well as without these walls. Nothing but rubbish and ruin, ruin.
The land of rubbish and ashes, and little gray bricks,—little bricks all alike, scattered in countless myriads upon the sites of houses that have been destroyed, or upon the pavement of what once were streets.
Little gray bricks,—this is the sole material of which Pekin was built; a city of small, low houses decorated with a lacework of gilded wood; a city of which only a mass of curious débris is left, after fire and shell have crumbled away its flimsy materials.
We have come into the city at one of the corners where there was the fiercest fighting,—the Tartar quarter, which contained the European legations.
Long straight streets may still be traced in this infinite labyrinth of ruins; ahead of us all is gray or black; to the sombre gray of the fallen brickis added the monotonous tone which follows a fire,—the gloom of ashes and the gloom of coal.
Sometimes in crossing the road they form obstacles,—these tiresome little bricks; these are the remains of barricades where fighting must have taken place.
After a few hundred metres we enter the street of the legations, upon which for so many months the anxious attention of the whole world was fixed.
Everything is in ruins, of course; yet European flags float on every piece of wall, and we suddenly find, as we come out of the smaller streets, the same animation as at Tien-Tsin,—a continual coming and going of officers and soldiers, and an astonishing array of uniforms.
A big flag marks the entrance to what was our legation, two monsters in white marble crouch at the threshold; this is the etiquette for all Chinese palaces. Two of our soldiers guard the door which I enter, my thoughts recurring to the heroes who defended it.
We finally dismount, amid piles of rubbish, in an inner square near a chapel, and at the entrance to a garden where the trees are losing their leaves as an effect of the icy winds. The walls about us are so pierced with balls that they look like sieves. The pile of rubbish at our right is the legationproper, destroyed by the explosion of a Chinese mine. At our left is the chancellor's house, where the brave defenders of the place took refuge during the siege, because it was in a less exposed situation. They have offered to take me in there; it was not destroyed, but everything is topsy-turvy, as though it were the day after a battle; and in the room where I am to sleep the plasterers are at work repairing the walls, which will not be finished until this evening.
As a new arrival, I am taken on a pilgrimage to the garden where those of our sailors who fell on the field of honor were hastily buried amid a shower of balls. There is no grass here, no blossoming plants, only a gray soil trampled by the combatants,—crumbling from dryness and cold,—trees without leaves and with branches broken by shot, and over all a gloomy, lowering sky, with snowflakes that are cutting.
We remove our hats as we enter this garden, for we know not upon whose remains we may be treading. The graves will soon be marked, I doubt not, but have not yet been, so one is not sure as one walks of not having under foot some one of the dead who merits a crown.
In this house of the chancellor, spared as by a miracle, the besieged lived helter-skelter, slept on a floor space the size of which was day by daydecreased by the damage done by shot and shell, and were in imminent danger of death.
In the beginning—their number, alas, rapidly diminished—there were sixty French sailors and twenty Austrians, meeting death, side by side, with equally magnificent courage. To them were added a few French volunteers, who took their turns on the barricades or on the roofs, and two foreigners, M. and Madame Rosthorn of the Austrian legation. Our officers in command of the defence were Lieutenant Darcy and midshipman Herber; the latter was struck full in the face by a ball, and sleeps to-day in the garden.
The horrible part of this siege was that no pity was to be expected from the besiegers, if, starved, and at the end of their strength, it became necessary for the besieged to surrender, it was death, and death with atrocious Chinese refinements to prolong the paroxysms of suffering.
Neither was there the hope of escape by some supreme sortie; they were in the midst of a swarming city, they were enclosed in a labyrinth of buildings that sheltered a crowd of enemies, and were still further imprisoned by the feeling that, surrounding them, walling in the whole, was the colossal black rampart of Pekin.
It was during the torrid period of the Chinese summer; it was often necessary to fight whiledying of thirst, blinded by dust, under a sun as destructive as the balls, and with the constant sickening fear of infection from dead bodies.
Yet a charming young woman was there with them,—an Austrian, to whom should be given one of our most beautiful French crosses. Alone amongst men in distress, she kept an even cheerfulness of the best kind, she cared for the wounded, prepared food for the sick sailors with her own hands, and then went off to aid in carrying bricks and sand for the barricades or to take her turn as watch on the roof.
Day by day the circle closed in upon the besieged as their ranks grew thinner and the garden filled with the dead; gradually they lost ground, although disputing with the enemy, who were legion, every piece of wall, every pile of bricks.
And when one sees their little barricades hastily erected during the night out of nothing at all, and knows that five or six sailors succeeded in defending them (for five or six toward the end were all that could be spared), it really seems as though there were something supernatural about it all. As I walked through the garden with one of its defenders, and he said to me, "At the foot of that little wall we held out for so many days," and "In front of this little barricade we resistedfor a week," it seemed a marvellous tale of heroism.
And their last intrenchment! It was alongside the house,—a ditch dug tentatively in a single night, banked up with a few poor sacks of earth and sand; it was all they had to keep out the executioners, who, scarcely six metres away, were threatening them with death from the top of a wall.
Beyond is the "cemetery," that is, the corner of the garden in which they buried their dead, until the still more terrible days when they had to put them here and there, concealing the place for fear the graves would be violated, in accordance with the terrible custom of this place. It was a poor little cemetery whose soil had been pressed and trampled upon in close combat, whose trees were shattered and broken by shell. The interments took place under Chinese fire, and an old white-headed priest—since a martyr, whose head was dragged in the gutter—said prayers at the grave, in spite of the balls that whistled about him, cutting and breaking the branches.
Toward the end their cemetery was the "contested region," after they had little by little lost much ground, and they trembled for their dead; the enemy had advanced to its very border; they watched and they killed at close quarters over thesleeping warriors so hastily put to rest. If the Chinese had reached this cemetery, and had scaled the last frail trenches of sand and gravel in sacks made of old curtains, then for all who were left there would have been horrible torture to the sound of music and laughter, horrible dismemberment,—nails torn out, feet torn off, disembowelling, and finally the head carried through the streets at the end of a pole.
They were attacked from all sides and in every possible manner, often at the most unexpected hours of the night. It usually began with cries and the sudden noise of trumpets and tam-tams; around them thousands of howling men would appear,—one must have heard the howlings of the Chinese to imagine what their voices are; their very timbre chills your soul. Gongs outside the walls added to the tumult.
Occasionally, from a suddenly opened hole in a neighboring house, a pole twenty or thirty feet long, ablaze at the end with oakum and petroleum, emerged slowly and silently, like a thing out of a dream. This was applied to the roofs in the hope of setting them on fire.
They were also attacked from below, they heard dull sounds in the earth, and understood that they were being undermined, that their executioners might spring up from the ground at any moment;so that it became necessary, at any cost, to attempt to establish countermines to prevent this subterranean peril. One day, toward noon, two terrible detonations, which brought on a regular tornado of plaster and dust, shook the French legation, half burying under rubbish the lieutenant in command of the defences and several of his marines. But this was not all; all but two succeeded in getting clear of the stones and ashes that covered them to the shoulders, but two brave sailors never appeared again. And so the struggle continued, desperately, and under conditions more and more frightful.
And still the gentle stranger remained, when she might so easily have taken shelter elsewhere,—at the English legation, for instance, where most of the ministers with their families had found refuge; the balls did not penetrate to them; they were at the centre of the quarter defended by a few handfuls of brave soldiers, and could there feel a certain security so long as the barricades held out. But no, she remained and continued in her admirable rôle at that blazing point, the French legation,—a point which was the key, the cornerstone of the European quadrangle, whose capture would bring about general disaster.
One time they saw with their field glasses the posting of an imperial edict commanding that thefire against foreigners cease. (What they didnotsee was that the men who put up the notices were attacked by the crowd with knives.) Yet a certain lull, a sort of armistice did follow; the attacks became less violent.
They saw that incendiaries were everywhere abroad; they heard fusillades, cannonades, and prolonged cries among the Chinese; entire districts were in flames; they were killing one another; their fury was fermenting as in a pandemonium, and they were suffocated, stifled with the smell of corpses.
Spies came occasionally with information to sell—always false and contradictory—in regard to the relief expedition, which amid ever-increasing anxiety was hourly expected. "It is here, it is there, it is advancing," or "It has been defeated and is retreating," were the announcements, yet it persisted in not appearing.
What, then, was Europe doing? Had they been abandoned? They continued, almost without hope, to defend themselves in their restricted quarters. Each day they felt that Chinese torture and death were closing in upon them.
They began to lack for the essentials of life. It was necessary to economize in everything, particularly in ammunition; they were growing savage,—when they captured any Boxers, insteadof shooting them they broke their skulls with a revolver.
One day their ears, sharpened for all outside noises, distinguished a continued deep, heavy cannonade beyond the great black ramparts whose battlements were visible in the distance, and which enclosed them in a Dantesque circle; Pekin was being bombarded! It could only be by the armies of Europe come to their assistance.
Yet one last fear troubled their joy. Would not a supreme attack against them be attempted, an effort be made to destroy them before the allied troops could enter?
As a matter of fact they were furiously attacked, and this last day, the day of their deliverance, cost the life of one of our officers, Captain Labrousse, who went to join the Austrian commander in the glorious little cemetery of the legation. But they kept up their resistance, until all at once not a Chinese head was visible on the barricades of the enemy; all was empty and silent in the devastation about them; the Boxers were flying and the Allies were entering the city!
This first night of my arrival in Pekin was as melancholy as the nights on the road, but in a more commonplace way, with more ofennui. The workmen had just finished the walls of my room;the fresh plaster gave forth a chilling dampness that penetrated to my very bones, and as the room was empty, my servant spread my narrow mattress from the junk upon the floor, and began to make a table out of some old boxes.
My hosts were good enough to have a stove hastily set up for me and lighted, which called up a picture of European discomfort in some wretched place in the country. How could one fancy oneself in China, in Pekin itself, so near to mysterious enclosures, to palaces so full of wonders?
As to the French minister, whom I am anxious to see, to convey to him the admiral's communications, I learn that he, having no roof to cover his head, has gone to seek shelter at the Spanish legation; and furthermore, that he has typhoid fever, which is epidemic on account of the poisonous condition of the water, so that for the present no one can see him. So my stay in this damp place threatens to be more prolonged than I anticipated. Through the window-panes covered with moisture I gloomily look out onto a court filled with broken furniture, where the twilight is falling and the snow.
Who could have foreseen that to-morrow, by an unexpected turn of fortune, I should be sleeping on a great gilded, imperial bed in a strange fairyland in the heart of the Forbidden City?