ed
them from their prey. So more men were called for, and this morning,
after a short harangue, a storming-party, numbering sixty bayonets and
composed of British, Americans and Russians, dashed over into the
Chinese lines killing thirty of the enemy and driving the rest back in
great confusion. It was a brilliant little affair and well conducted,
but unfortunately Captain M----, who commanded, was wounded in the
foot, and the Americans have no officer now fit to lead them. It is a
curious fact worth recording that owing to wounds and staff work,
neither the British nor Americans have any good officers left. It is
only many days of this close-quarter fighting that shows you that
without good officers no men care for moving out of shelter. Unless
there are men who will sacrifice themselves, the ordinary rank and
file feel under no obligation to do anything more arduous than to lie
comfortably firing at the enemy. You can have no idea how hard it is
to get men to make sorties; on the slightest provocation, once they
have left their own barricades, they rush back to safety....

Fortunately with all these events, we have been given something else
to think about, and it is a thing of this sort which re-establishes
confidence more than any warlike deeds. I mention it because it is the
simple truth. It is also a pretty commentary on _la bete humaine_.

You remember the V-shaped barricade garrisoned by Russian sailors, I
spoke about a few days ago? Well, if you do not happen to remember, I
merely need say again, that it is a barricade facing both ways on
Legation Street, which now in the fulness of time has blossomed into a
whole network of barricades which protect our inner lines and the
British Legation base from any rush of the enemy which might succeed
momentarily in getting past our outworks. The Russian sailors who
furnish these posts have been having a very easy time with nothing to
do but to eat and to sleep, and to mount guard, turn and turn about.
Of course, this comparative idleness in all the storm and stress
around us gave them time to look around and to loot the vacant houses
near them. Not content with this, some of them discovered that a large
number of buxom Chinese schoolgirls from the American missions were
lodged but a stone's throw from their barricades. The missionaries,
fearing that some scandal might occur, had placed some elderly native
Christians in charge of the schoolgirls, with the strictest orders