eyes and dragging legs. The men are half
drunk from lack of sleep and from bad, overheated blood, caused by a
perpetual peering through loopholes and a continual alertness even
when they are asleep. The strain is intolerable, I say, and pony meat
is becoming nauseating, and fills me with disgust.

On top of it all the trenches are now sometimes half full of water,
for the summer rains, which have held back for so long, are beginning
to fall. The stenches are so bad from rotting carcases and obscene
droppings that an already weakened stomach becomes so rebellious that
it is hard to swallow any food at all.

In the morning it is sometimes revolting. For four days I was at a
line of loopholes, with Chinese corpses swelling in the sun under my
nose.... At the risk of being shot, I covered them partially by
throwing handfuls of mud. Otherwise not I myself, but my rebellious
stomach, could not have stood it.

Scorched by the sun by day, unable to sleep except in short snatches
at night, with a never-ending rifle and cannon fire around us, we have
had almost as much as we can stand, and no one wants any more. I
wonder now sometimes why we have been abandoned by our own people.
Reliefs and S---- are only seen in ghastly dreams....

And yet there are others near who must be faring worse than we. Far
away in the north of the city, where are Monseigneur F----'s
cathedral, his thousands of converts, and the forty or fifty men he so
ardently desired, we hear on the quieter days a distant rumble of
cannon. Sometimes when the wind bears down on us we think we can hear
a confused sound of rifle-firing, far, far away. They say that Jung
Lu, the Manchu Generalissimo of Peking, whose friendship has been
assiduously cultivated by the French Bishop, is seeing to it that the
Chinese attacks are not pushed home, and that a waiting policy is
adopted similar to that which the Chinese have used towards us. But no
matter what be the actual facts of the case, the besieged fathers must
be having a terrible time....

Ponies and mules are also getting scarcer, and the original mobs,
numbering at least one hundred and fifty or two hundred head, have
disappeared at the rate of two or three a day as meat. Our remaining
animals are now quartered in a portion of the Su wang-fu, where they
are feeding on what scant grass and green vegetation they can still
find in those gloomy gardens. Sometimes a humming bullet flies low and
maims one of the poor an