ch Legation and the protected Legation Street--the
Christian refugees are found gathered here in huge droves. In one
building there are alone four hundred native schoolgirls, rows upon
rows of them that never seem to come to an end, sitting on the ground
in their sober blue coats and trousers, peacefully combing each
other's hair, or working on sandbags with the imperturbability of the
Easterner who is placid under death. Farther on, again, you come on
families, sometimes three generations huddling together on a six-foot
straw mat. A mother trying to feed a child from her half-dry breasts
tells you quietly that it is no use, since the meagre fare she is
already getting does not make sustenance enough for her, let alone her
child. Yet everything possible is being done to feed them. All the
able-bodied converts have long ago been drafted off for
barricade-building and loophole-making in the endless walls, and here
the curious Japanese passion for order and detail is shown on the
coats of the older men. The boss-shifts, each responsible for so many
men who have to accomplish a given amount of work in a specified time,
have big white labels with characters written squarely across them,
telling everyone clearly what they are. At a little table near by
writers, who have been carefully sorted out from this incongruous
gathering, are provided with brush and ink, and have been set to work
making up reports and lists of all the people. These are handed to a
Japanese Secretary of Legation, who has been evolved into an
engineer-in-chief and overseer of native labour, and thus at every
hour of the day the distribution of the barricaders is known. Amid
these crowds of native refugees, who number at least a couple of
thousand people, two or three Japanese occasionally wander to see that
all's well, and give the babies little things they have looted from
Prince Su's palace to play with. Content to be where they are and
assured that the European will not abandon them, these natives exhibit
in a strange manner that inexplicable thing--Faith. Poor people--they
little know! Is it always thus with faith?

So the Su wang-fu, which is but the northwestern part of our lines, is
now a city in itself, inhabited by the most unlikely people in the
world. Three days have sufficed to give it an entity of its own. The
nature of the defence and the fighting value of the Japanese as
compared to the Italians, are fitly illustrated by the distribution of