And then he began to tell me the story of the treachery. 'Twas a sad story, true; but it gave the city away. Coming over to me, with sincerity shining in his eyes, he exclaimed: "Come, you're a journalist; can't you help us? Can't you stop this dreadful carnage? The city has fallen completely. The Imperialists are in control of the hill and the city, with the arsenal, the powder factory, and much else." {145} In a nutshell it may be said that the Revolutionary military cause in this immediate centre was with the fall of Hanyang irretrievably lost. It will be futile in this volume to go into the way the men behaved; they fled, many of them cowards, others struck down still sticking manfully to their duty, others barbarously bayoneted as they endeavoured to hold their guns on the hill and in the valley on the river bank; but that they were shamefully routed was borne out by the fearful misbehaviour of the Imperialists. On they came like a pack of maddened animals for the onslaught. They had no mercy. Every one within {146} reach fell at the point of the bayonet or was shot ruthlessly despite all humane methods brought to bear in surrender in war. The boating community, quietly adopting a neutral attitude, were served in the same heartless manner. Women, children, old men, babies--all were shot, and their corpses floated down-river in their drifting boats. Some of the sights were too terrible to behold. Old men and women were all subjected to the same cruel fate. But leaving for the moment the fighting, we come to the Bund, in the afternoon, to watch the Red Cross Association conducting its errands of mercy. Out on the Bund--some shot through the head, through the limbs, through the body, all showing up in ghastly significance the horror of this war--we see ten, twenty, thirty, forty of the dead laid out for burial. Foreigners and Chinese all lend a hand to tie the bodies in matting, others heave them into the carts, the pavements are littered with the discarded coats and implements of war which the dead still held as evidence of this civil butchery; on a little way farther one finds a group of wounded on the grass plots waiting for the stretcher-bearers to return to take them to the hospitals. One was a mother with a little baby, the baby dying, the mother mortally wounded; others were civilians who had shown no fight; others were trained soldiers; others were recruits who had run at the sound of the machine-guns, shot in the back. Then there is the rumble of the wheels as cartload after cartload of the covered dead are conveyed out of sight, and the police set to work to pick up the blood-stained uniforms, the money-pouches, the little knick-knacks of the Chinese soldier's paraphernalia. All is so sad, so significant.