and cartridges there were by the thousand, seven big guns with the breach-blocks gone, boxes of unopened field-gun cases, piles of 2¼ gun shells alongside the heavy pieces, pieces of bone, bloody bandages, and much else all too eloquent of the carnage and the battle. One man volunteered to show us where the corpse of a villager lay; he said the body had been hit fair by a big shell and now there was little left to show for what had been a soldier doing his duty for a cause of reform; when we came to the place a pool of blood and a few bones were all that the canine scavengers had left. [Illustration: THE HANDY MAN ASHORE. Residents in the British Concession owe much to the bluejackets. They are seen here carting bricks in rickshaws, with which to build barricades.] Farther on an old woman sat upon a heap of rubbish, which had been her home for forty years. She was ill-clad, cold, had had no food for four days, and thought that she, too, would die. Her husband, poor old man, had been killed by stray shots before the Imperialists made their rush; her sons, four of them--peaceable men, she said, who offered no resistance--were killed cruelly at sight; their wives had been carried off. "But I am not alone," she added; "others in the {141} village suffered the same fate. Our young boys had their queues taken off to make them into rebels so that the soldiers would have an excuse to shoot them. And our 'little babies'"--the poor old lady was now wiping her eye--"our girls of fourteen and fifteen were carried off across the river. I wonder whether I shall see them again." I wondered, too, as I watched the old woman weeping. And the farther I went the more was I impressed with the cruelty of this war towards the civilian rather than to the military part of the community. The devastation was terrific.