wn with _mitrailleuses_.
There was a cul-de-sac, which was horrible, it was reported. The
machine-guns had played for ten or fifteen minutes in that death-trap
without stopping a second until nothing had moved. The incident was
only a day or two old, yet everyone had heard of it. People exclaimed
that this was going too far in the matter of vengeance. But everything
had been allowed to go too far....

We rode out at a canter, and wondered more and more as we rode at the
solitude, where so few hours before there had been such a deafening
roar. We plunged straight into the maze of narrow streets, and then
suddenly, before we were aware of it, our mounts were swerving and
snorting in mad terror! For corpses dotted the ground in ugly
blotches, the corpses of men who had met death in a dozen different
ways. Lying in exhausted attitudes, they covered the roadway as if
they had been merely _tired to death_. It was awful, and I began to
have a terrible detestation for these Asiatic faces, which, because
they are dead, become such a hideous green-yellow-white, and whose
bodies seem to shrivel to nothing in their limp blue suitings. Such
dead are an insult to the living.

We picked our way on our trembling mounts, trying vainly to push
through quickly to escape it all. But it was no good. We had stumbled
by chance on the actual route taken by an avenging column, and the men
who had been mad with lust to loot the Palace, and had been turned off
almost as an afterthought to relieve co-religionists, had vented their
wrath on everything. The farther and farther we penetrated the more
hideous did the ruins and the corpses become. There was nothing but
silence once again--death, ruin, and silence; and at last we came on
such a mountain of corpses that our ponies suddenly stampeded and went
madly careering away. Frightened more and more by the sound of their
galloping hoofs, the animals soon laid their legs to the ground and
bolted blindly. Vainly we tugged at our bridles; vainly we tried every
device to bring them to a halt. But again it was no good. It had
become a sort of mad gallop of death; the animals had to be allowed to
rid themselves of their feelings.

Eventually we pulled up far away to the west of where we had started.
We were now near the districts which had only the day before been
proclaimed highly dangerous to everyone until clearing operations had
swept them clean of lurking Boxers or disbanded soldiery. But now
att