allowed on the Tartar Wall,
excepting the regular reliefs. There is in any case no time for most
of us to creep up there and look on the city below; we are tied to the
barricades and trenches down in the flat among the ruins, chained to
our posts by a never-ending rifle-fire.

XXVIII

THE THIRTEENTH

13th August, 1900.

* * * * *

It is the 13th, that fateful number, and there are some who are
divided between hope and fear. Is it good to hope on a 13th, or is it
mere foolishness to thing about such things? Who knows?--for we have
become unnatural and abnormal--subject to atavistic tendencies in
thought and action.... Most people are keeping their thoughts to
themselves, but actions cannot be hidden. You would not believe some
of the things....

There has not been a sign or a word from the relief column for many
hours. The fleeing Chinese soldiery we witnessed in such numbers
yesterday entering the city have stopped rushing in, and now from the
Tartar Wall the streets below in the outer city seem quite silent and
deserted. Last night, too, it was seen that the line of the enemy's
rifles packed against us was so continuous, and the spacing so close,
that one continuous flame of fire ripped round from side to side and
deluged us with metal. So heavy was this firing, so crushing, that it
was paralysing. Any part broken into would have been irretrievably
lost. The bullets and shells struck our walls and defences in great
swarms sometimes several hundred projectiles swishing down at a time.
There must have been ten or twelve thousand infantry firing at us and
fifteen guns. Where I lay, with a post of sixteen men, there were more
than five hundred riflemen facing us, at distances varying from forty
feet to four hundred yards. Every ruined house outside the fringe of
our defence has now been converted into a blockhouse by the persistent
enemy. Every barricade we have built has a dozen other barricades
opposing it in parallels, in chessboards, in every kind of formation;
and from these barricades the fire poured in since the 10th--that is,
for sixty long hours--has only ceased at rare intervals. Our
stretcher-parties have been very busy, but how many men we have lost
since the armistice was deliberately broken no one knows. Yesterday a
French captain, a gallant officer, who feared nothing, was shot dead
through the head, making the ninth officer killed or severely wounded
since th