ve escaped.

And now imagine our excitement and general perturbation. Since the 8th
or 9th, I really forget which date, we have been acting on a more or
less preconcerted plan--that is, as far as our defences are concerned,
as we have been quite cut off from the outer world. The commanders of
the British, American, German, French, Italian, Russian, Austrian and
Japanese detachments have met and conferred--each carefully instructed
by his own Minister just how far he is to acquiesce in his colleagues'
proposals, which is, roughly speaking, not at all. We can have no
effective council of war thus, because there is no commander-in-chief,
and everybody is a claimant to the post. There is first an Austrian
captain of a man-of-war lying off the Taku bar, who was merely up in
Peking on a pleasure trip when he was caught by the storm, but this
has not hindered him taking over command of the Austrian sailors from
the lieutenant who brought them up; and everybody knows that a captain
in the navy ranks with a colonel in the army. There are no military
men in Peking excepting three captains of British marines, one
Japanese lieutenant-colonel and his aide-de-camp, and some unimportant
military attaches, who are very junior. So on paper the command should
lie between two men--the Austrian naval captain and the Japanese
lieutenant-colonel. But, then, the Japanese have instructions to
follow the British lead, and the senior British marine captain has
orders to follow, his own ideas, and his own ideas do not fancy the
unattached Austrian captain of a man-of-war. So the concerted plan of
defence has only been evolved very suddenly, a plan which has resolved
itself naturally into each detachment-commander holding his own
Legation as long as he could, and being vaguely linked to his
neighbour by picquets of two or three men. But about this you will
understand more later on. The point I wish you now to realise is that
the counsels of the allied countries of Europe in the persons of their
Legation Guards' commanders are as effective as those of very juvenile
kindergartens. Everybody is intensely jealous of everybody else and
determined not to give way on the question of the supreme command. Of
course, if the storm comes suddenly, without any warning, we are
doomed, because you cannot hold an area a mile square with a lot of
men who are fighting among themselves, and who have fallen too quickly
into our miserably petty Peking scheme of things