ter than it breaks out with even greater violence in another, and
we are hurried in small reinforcements from point to point. And from
the positions on the Tartar Wall, which are now also dusted by a
continually growing fire that would sweep our men off in a cloud of
sandbags and brick-chips, the enemy's attacks can be best understood.
The growing number of rifles being brought to bear on us; the violence
and increasing audacity; the building of new barricades that press
closer and closer to our own, and are now so near that they almost
crush in our chests--are all clear from the reports sent down. The
relief columns on the Tientsin road are driving in unwieldy Chinese
forces on top of us, and this native soldiery is falling back on the
capital to be remarshalled after a fashion--placed on the city walls
or flung against us in a despairing attempt to kill us all, and remove
the Thing which is making the relieving columns advance so quickly.
Crazy with fear, and with ghosts of the chastisement of 1860 etched on
every column of dust raised by their retreating soldiery, the Chinese
Government is acting like one possessed.

To-day I saw it all beautifully, with the aid of the best glasses we
have got. First came bodies of infantry trotting hurriedly in their
sandals and glancing about them. In the dust and the distance they
seemed to have lost all formation--to be mere broken fragments. But
once a man stopped, looked up at us, a mere dot in the ruined streets
hundreds and hundreds of yards away, and then savagely discharged his
rifle at us. He knew we were on the Tartar Wall, and so sent his
impotent curses at us through a three-foot steel tube.... Behind such
men were long country carts laden with wounded and broken men, and
driven by savage-looking drivers, powdered with our cursed dust and
driving standing up with voice and whip alone. The teams of ponies
were all mud-stained and tired, and moved very slowly away; and their
great iron-hooped wheels clanked discordantly over the stone-paved
ways. Sometimes a body of cavalry, with gaudy banners in the van and
the men flogging on their steeds with short whips, have also ridden by
escaping from the rout. Infantry and horsemen, wounded in carts and
wounded on foot, flow back into the city through the deserted and
terror-stricken streets, and it is we who shall suffer. So much of
this has been understood by everybody, that an order has been
privately given that no one is to be