The nights were made hideous for foreign residents by the whizzing of overhead shells and the buzzing of bullets constantly about them. Several Chinese were shot dead in the streets of the British Concession, and others more or less seriously wounded, and the wonder {99} was not that any one was killed but that so many escaped with their lives in the midst of such danger. It was the common belief among the Chinese that the bullets had eyes. "See," they would yell, "'tis a heavenly inspiration that the shells do not touch us ... they have eyes ... they will not strike us!" And among Revolutionary admirers this was a common belief of the common people. They had never seen modern warfare before. The Imperialists were now forging ahead towards the Han. Their task seemed an altogether impossible one. It took them three weeks to do it, and it needed only a stroll out each morning to see the truckloads of dead being taken along the railway line northward to realise at what cost their slow progress was being made. General Huang Hsuin[2] was now directing military operations against them. Each day junkloads of men were coming down from Hunan to join the Revolutionists--trained troops from the Hunan Army--and from them great things were expected. Everywhere one went he heard the boom of cannon, the whizz of shell, the ping of rifle shot. There was no escape. Foreigners were not allowed out of the Concessions, found it unsafe to go outside their houses, suffered shocks so great that all were on tenterhooks of excitement. Never before in any country were foreigners living as neutral parties to a war so near. But there is so much of general interest in the Revolution that much space cannot be devoted in this volume to battlefield descriptions. China was making history. Wars have often been described in history, but a Revolution such as this war was heralding had never been known. It was moving, and moving at one stroke, a quarter of the whole human family. The battlefield was spread from Kilometre Ten to Hanyang on the left bank of the river, from the Kinshan Forts to Wuchang on the right side. One could hardly {100} believe it possible that in a fortnight such utter devastation could be wrought. Villages near by, with their inhabitants either routed or perished in the ruins, were burned to the ground; fields of crops were all trampled down, rice-beds were dug out for trenches, and now all was destruction for miles around in the country. Little black patches told the sad story of where a band of happy thriving villagers, once living at peace, was now deserted and devastated.