forces which little Colonel S---- has already made. The Italians hold
perhaps a hundred feet of the outer wall and one hillock of some
importance. The Japanese have at least a thousand feet of loopholed
and unloop-holed wall, and are quite ready to take another thousand if
some one would be kind enough to give it to them. In posts of three
and four men, distant sometimes hundreds of feet apart, the little
Japanese takes his two hours on and his four hours off night and day
without a murmur or without ever a break. Only at one place are there
more than three or four little men together. At the eastern end of the
Fu there is a big post grouped round the fortified Main Gate, where
there are actually eight or nine men under the command of a Japanese
naval lieutenant.

But the genius who has organised all this system, the little Japanese
colonel, does not waste time walking around. He is at work at an
eternal map decorated with green, blue and red spots, which show the
distribution of his forces and their respective strength and fighting
value. Somehow I could not tear myself away from this quarter. It was
so orderly....

Behind the commanding hillock in the Italian centre I found Lieutenant
P----, the Italian naval officer, dining off bread and Bologna
sausage, which he was stripping after the Italian fashion, inelegantly
using his knife both to punctuate his sentences and to assist the
passage of his food. "Look out," he cried, as soon as I had appeared,
"it is very warm here; the bullets are flying low." The leaves of the
trees under which he was sitting were indeed falling thickly, cut down
by snipers' fire. But still I wish he would walk down to a Japanese
post not more than five hundred feet away and watch a little Jap and a
half dozen Chinese snipers at work against each other. That is where I
had just been--convoying some supplies. The little Japanese had
ostentatiously placed his sailor cap just in front of an empty
loophole twenty feet from where he actually squatted, and where he had
probably been a few seconds before I had arrived. The snipers saw this
and promptly fired, bang, bang, bang, a long line of shots following
one after the other in quick succession. Hum! they must be reloading
now, said the little Jap plainly by the expression on his face; and
jumping straight on top of the wall in front of him he hastily snapped
at one of his enemies. Then down he came again, but hardly quick
enough, for bricks we