descended to
the street. There had been no firing for about two hours. The lantern
was re-lit, and Chung, who knew the way best, took it and went ahead.
I still wore the soldier's dress; if met and challenged, I proposed to
make it appear, as best I could, that I was making the Chinamen
conduct me to one of the camps, or if I failed in this to sell my life
dearly with the rifle.

Our path lay right across the town, and the dead lay thickly in nearly
every street in the quarters we traversed, where, of every age, sex,
and condition, they had been promiscuously butchered by the hundred.
Here and there the miserable survivors--survivors only for the
present--were searching, with low wailings and lamentations, for those
they had lost, with the aid of their coloured lanterns, which gave a
look of indescribable ghastliness to the mutilated forms they bent
over to examine. To my last day I shall remember, with unfading
horror, the aspect of those remnants of mortality, in all the
hideousness stamped upon them by the unnamable atrocities practised
during that diabolical orgy of murder and mutilation, rape, lust, and
rapine. This is war! Away, in the splendid pavilion of the vanquished,
the conquering marshal, surrounded by his generals and officers, was
installed in triumph, secure of his country's applause and his
emperor's favour; but here, amid these desolated homes, these
mutilated heaps of death, was the night side, the shadow, of their
glory. And this was but the first day of _four_! It must be admitted
that the Chinese drew it upon themselves, that everywhere else the
Japanese behaved with admirable clemency and moderation; but after
making every allowance, their conduct in this instance, and
particularly that of the high commanding chiefs in never seeking to
put a stop to the devilish excesses perpetrated before their eyes on
unoffending non-combatants, is richly deserving of everlasting infamy.

Many of the poor wretches thus cowering about ran away upon
perceiving, as they thought, an armed Japanese soldier, but in one
instance I had reason to be thankful that I was not alone. A
middle-aged man and two younger ones were carrying away, in one of the
streets we traversed, the half-naked body of a woman, which had been
split open from the abdomen to the chest. The elder man glared upon
me, in the dim light, with the expression of a tiger, and drawing a
long curved knife from his breast, and pointing at me, shouted
so