I have said that the revolutionists’ line was too long to defend, with two principal sieges taking place three hundred miles apart. Peking understood this, and while the rebels reinforced their attack on the right flank at Nanking, the imperialists brought down reinforcements by railway to General Feng Kwo Chang, at Hankau, who at once attacked the rebel left flank in force, aiming to cripple the rebels by taking back the essential Hanyang arsenal. Hei Shan, Meit Zu and Tortoise forts were taken by machine and field gun fire and charges, and General Li’s rebel ranks fell back under severe loss. The retreating ranks didn’t carry their bird cages with them as the gentlemen soldiers of Chifu did in the China-Japan War of 1894! General Feng’s and General Wong’s imperialist troops, after breaking through the Tung Chi (East Messenger) gate and looting, now put the torch to the rest of Hankau, destroying the homes of a million people, and burning a hundred million dollars’ worth of property. Such an uncalled for, accursed outrage, such an unjustifiable act of wholesale arson against non-combatants has never been known. What would history have said had the Germans burned Paris, the British, Pretoria or the Americans, Manila? What should be said when the Manchu imperialists burned Hankau? Why didn’t they rather sell its tiles, its silk, its oils, its mountains of tea? They admitted that they needed money. At least there would have been no world’s loss of property. Hankau belonged to the world as much as to China. The Manchu must yet answer for this arson, for arson and murder are unjustifiable world crimes. Arson makes it harder and costlier for an American, a Briton, a German, a Frenchman, to live, as the wave of cost rolls on, as much as it makes it harder for the Chinese to live. In these days of world conservation, no nation should be allowed to put the firebrand to property because men are fighting or arguing over an idea. Shame on the sack and burning of Hankau by the Manchus. The British, Americans, volunteers and jackies, and other foreigners on the long bund, heaped up breastworks of even rice bags, and swept the riverside and race track on either flank in defense of the palatial foreign concessions. Here a blue-jacket, there a marine, and between an ununiformed volunteer clerk, the boys shouldered their Springfields, Lee-Enfields and Mausers, and held brave guard at the thinnest part of the long-stretched line of the white man’s empire of influence and trade.