uriously attacking the persistent enemy, and each time
driving him back with loss, only to find him dribbling in again like
muddy water through every hole and cranny in the imperfect defences.
But even this did not do much good. No one could keep an accurate
record of these curious encounters during the first few days, for they
have succeeded one another with such rapidity that men have become too
tired, too sleepy to wish to talk. They try to act, and some of their
adventures have been astonishing.

Thus a young Breton sailor, not more than seventeen years old, seeing
men armed with swords collecting one night for a rush, jumped down
among them from the top of an earthwork, and shot and bayonetted three
or four of them before they had time to defend themselves. Then it
took him half an hour to get back to safety by creeping from one hole
in the ground to another and avoiding the rifle-fire....

Self-preservation makes it necessary to rush out thus single handed
and ease your front. Every man killed is a discouragement, which holds
the enemy back a bit.

Exploits of this nature must at length have shown the Chinese soldiery
that they have to face men endowed with the courage of despair in this
quarter; and fearing cold steel more than anything else, they have
decided that the only way of reaching their prey is by blowing them up
piecemeal. That is why they have taken to mining--most audacious
mining, carried on under the noses of the French defenders. If you
come here at night, and remain until one of those curious lulls in the
rifle-fire suddenly begins, you will distinctly hear this curious
tapping of picks and shovels, which means the preparation of a
gallery.

So as to save time, such mining is not begun from behind the enemy's
trenches; it is audaciously commenced in the ruins which litter some
of the neutral territory, which neither side holds and into which
Chinese desperadoes creep as soon as it is dusk. For a few days the
French did not dare to make sorties against such enterprises, but some
of the younger volunteers, discovering that these sappers were only
armed with their tools, have taken to creeping out and butchering in
the bowels of the earth.... This is terribly but absolutely true. Thus
a young volunteer, named D----, found, after watching for two days,
that a number of men crept into a tunnel mouth every night only twenty
feet from his post, and began working on a mine right under his feet.
He de