of us the barricades were silent, and
the Japanese sailor so curiously wounded in the earlier part of the
day was fiercely wrangling with an English volunteer, who had taught
him the game and had just insulted him by saying he was cheating. The
colonel declared he had thought us all dead, but that although he had
sent twice to find out how we were faring, the tremendous storm of
shells and bullets raging round our entire lines had made it
impossible to reinforce us. The French, he said, had been so heavily
beaten that he had had to prepare for a general retreat into the
British Legation; the Germans had been swept off the Tartar Wall; the
Americans had been shaken and almost driven back; and had not the
Chinese themselves tired of the game, another hour would have seen a
general retreat sounded. We were much commended for not having fallen
back, but we pointed out that it had been really nothing, since we had
only had one man slightly wounded. Still, it was an experience hard to
beat to be left in a house practically levelled to the ground by
shell-fire, and as I got eighteen hours off duty granted me, during
which time I slept solidly without waking once, the whole affair
remains most firmly impressed on the tablets of my memory. It is only
when you have been through it that you understand what you can endure.

All this was some days ago, and was really nothing to what we had the
day before yesterday, which happened to be the 1st of July.

The Chinese artillery practice, although poor, the guns and shells
being hopelessly ancient, had become so annoying and so distressing
that it was determined to adopt a policy of reprisals, taking the form
of sorties, and by bayonetting the gunners and damaging the guns if we
could not drag them off, to induce the enemy to make his offensive
less galling. The ball was opened by an attack which was miserably
conducted on the selfsame gun that had so harshly treated that little
post I have described a few days before. On the 1st of the month,
Lieutenant P----, the commander of the Italian hillock, laid a plan of
sortie before headquarters to which consent was given. Supported by
British marines and volunteers, the Italians were to make a sortie in
force from their position and seize the gun. The Japanese were to
co-operate from their barricades and trenches by opening a heavy fire,
and moving slowly forward in extended order as soon as the Italian
charge had commenced. All the mornin