into a rich harvest of bullets that sometimes continues
for hours without intermission or break. The Japanese, unable to hold
their huge line, consisting of Prince Su's outer wall, have already
been forced to give way at several points, but in doing so they have
each time managed to bite hard at the enemy's attacking head. The day
before yesterday the little Japanese colonel decided he would have to
give up a block of courts on the northeast--some of those courts I
have already described, which, hemmed in by walls almost as high as
the outer monster, itself eighteen or twenty feet high and three feet
thick, form veritable death-traps if you can entice any one inside and
hammer them to pieces by loophole fire. This is precisely the policy
adopted by Colonel S----.

The battalion of the Peking Field Force which faces the northern front
had been industriously pushing forward massive barricades until they
almost touched Prince Su's outer wall. Secure behind these
sharpshooter fortifications a distressing fire was concentrated on
the half a dozen fortified Japanese posts that lined the outer wall.
Here on high stagings, crudely made of timber and bamboo poles and
protected by thick wedges of sandbags, Japanese sailors and some
miscellaneous volunteers, grouped in posts of four and five men, lay
hour after hour unable to show a finger or move a hand. Hundreds of
Chinese rifles at the closest possible range poured in a never-ending
fire on these facile targets, and the sandbagged positions, literally
eaten away by old-fashioned iron bullets in company with the most
modern nickel-headed variety, crumbled down to practically nothing.
Lying on your back at these advanced posts and looking at the sloping
roofs of Prince Su's ornamental pavilions a few hundred feet within
our lines was a droll sight. The Chinese riflemen, being on a slightly
lower level and forced to fire upwards at the Japanese positions,
caused many of their bullets to skim the sandbagged crest and strike
the line of roofs behind. Many, I say; I should have said thousands
and tens of thousands, for the roofs seemed alive and palpitating with
strange feelings; and extraordinary as it may sound, big holes were
soon eaten into the heavily tiled roofs by this simple rifle
fusillade. It seemed as if the Chinese hoped to destroy us and our
defences by this novel method. But there was a more ominous sign than
this. A Japanese sailor perched high up aloft on a roof five