need to resort to force. I soon found
that this was unnecessary.

Boldly walking forward, we pushed right up to the Chinese barricades.
Nothing surprised us so much as to see the great access of strength to
the Chinese positions since the early days of the siege. Not only were
we now securely hedged in by frontal trenches and barricades, but
flanking such Chinese positions were great numbers of parallel
defences, designed solely with the object of battering our sortie
parties to pieces should we attempt to take the offensive again.
Lining these barricades and improvised forts were hundreds of men, all
with their faces bronzed by the sun, and with their heads encased in
black cloth fighting caps. Relieving the sombre aspect of this
headgear were numbers of brightly coloured tunics, betokening the
various corps to which this soldiery belonged. What a wonderful sight
they made! There were Tung Fu-hsiang's artillerymen, with violet
embroidered coats and blue trousers; dismounted cavalry detachments
belonging to the same commander in red and black tunics and red "tiger
skirts"; Jung Lu's Peking Field Force; Manchu Bannermen; provincial
levies and many others. All these men, standing up on the top of their
fortifications, made a most brilliant picture, and we looked long and
eagerly. I wish some painter of genius could have been there and
caught that message. For there were skulls and bones littering the
ground, and representing all that remained of the dead enemy after the
pariah dogs had finished with them. Broken rifles and thousands of
empty brass cartridge cases added to the battered look of this
fiercely contested area, and down the streets the remains of every
native house had been heaped together in rude imitation of a fort,
with jagged loopholes placed at intervals of eight or ten inches,
allowing any number of rifles to be brought into play against us under
secure cover. The men who had manned these defences had left their
rifles where they were, and by peering over we could see that the
majority of these fire-pieces were tied into position by means of
wooden forks so as to bear a converging fire on the exposed points of
our defences. Only then did I realise how much a protracted resistance
places an attacking force on the defensive. We were afraid of one
another. Sauntering about, some of the enemy were willing to enter
into conversation. A number of things they told filled us with
surprise, and made us begin to