Discipline is becoming bad, too, and sailors and volunteers off duty are looting the few foreign stores enclosed in our lines.  Everything is being taken, and the native Christians, finding this out, have been pouring in bands when the firing ceases and wrecking everything which they cannot carry away.

A German marine killed one, and several have been dangerously wounded.  In our present condition anything is possible.  Still, the fortification work is proceeding steadily, and the appearance of the base, the British Legation, has been miraculously changed.  Enormous quantities of sandbags have been turned out and placed in position, and all the walls are now loopholed.  With all this access of strength, we are much more secure, and yet our best contingents are being very slowly but very continuously shot to pieces.  Our casualty list is now well into the second hundred, and as the line of defenders thins, the men are becoming more savage.  In addition to looting, there have been a number of attempts on the native girl converts, which have been hushed up....  Ugly signs are everywhere, and the position becomes from day to day less enviable.

X

THE GUNS

10th July, 1900.

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Had we a single gun how different it would be!  We could parade it boldly under the enemy’s nose; sweep his barricades and his advanced lines away in a cloud of dust and brick-chips; bombard his camps which we have located; make him sorry and ashamed ... as it is we can do nothing; we have not a single piece which can be called serious artillery; and we must suffer the segment which the enemy affects in almost complete silence.  Listen to our list of weapons.

First, there is the Italian one-pounder firing ballistite.  It is absolutely useless.  Its snapping shells are so small that you can thrust them in your pocket without noticing them.  This gun is merely a plaything.  And yet being the best we have, it is wheeled unendingly around and fired at the enemy from a dozen different points.  It may give confidence, but that is all it can give.  The other day I watched it at work on a heavy barricade being constructed by night and day by the methodical enemy.  By night the Chinese soldiery work as openly as they please, for no outpost may waste its ammunition by indiscriminate shooting.  But during the day, orders or no orders, it has become rash for the enemy to expose himself to our view; and even the fleeting glimpse of a moving hand is made the excuse for a hailstorm of fire.  This has made excessive caution the order of the day, and you can almost believe, when no rifles are firing to disturb such a conviction, that there are only dead men round us.  Yet with nothing to be seen, countless hands are at work; in spite of the greatest vigilance barricades and barriers grow up nearer and nearer to us both night and day; we are being tied in tighter.  These mysterious barricades, built in parallels, are so cunningly constructed that our fiercest sorties must in the end beat themselves to pieces against brick and stone; if the enemy can complete his plans we shall be choked silently.  That is why the Italian gun is so often requisitioned.