The Imperialists now commenced to draw a cordon around the city of Hankow. They were busy trenching, were busy building up their batteries on the plains from the end of the Sing Sien Road to the banks of the Han, the way to cross which they could not easily determine. No one was allowed out of the city or into the city unless he had his pass and could give reasonable cause for wanting to go either way. Every man, woman, or child without a pass was cruelly turned back, often with a thrust of the bayonet as a warning not to attempt it again. Foreigners who ventured out of the Concessions were deliberately shot at. On November 13th the heaviest bombardment that had yet taken place started suddenly in the late afternoon, but for some time it was a puzzle whether it was meant to be a bombardment of the British Concession or of Hankow native city and Wuchang opposite. Shells were dropping quite as often in British as in Chinese territory. The night was drenching and dreary. Rain {108} poured down and overflowed the flat battlefield behind the Concessions and the native city, and the luck of the Imperialists seemed out. Their spirits in the circumstances were damped by the weather, and the fight they were putting up against the high-spirited Hunanese, now augmenting the Revolutionary forces to the tune of fifteen thousand men, was but weak and half-hearted. The shells could be heard in the peculiar atmospheric deadness, which the forsaken appearance of the river seemed to accentuate, sailing through the air above our heads, the excited natives would yell and swear that they could see them and that they were coming directly to the spot where we were watching in the rain, and then would scamper off. Far away in the Concessions people were wondering why the Revolutionists had started shelling the British. Now the trouble seemed to have come indeed, and many wished they had left the port when they had the chance. Holes were being knocked through heavy walls, shells dropped in the roadway, in people's gardens, in people's bedrooms. A Russian naval officer, in a sick-bed in the Roman Catholic Hospital, wishing that he were well to watch the bombardment, lay probing for the reason the Revolutionists had taken this dislike to the British, and wondering what would happen after the British gunboats had smashed up the place. He could find no satisfactory reason. But suddenly this naval officer heard a crash; like a bolt of lightning a shell had entered the window; he felt the plaster of the walls striking him on the body as he lay there stupefied, watching the ceiling then falling in. It was the thirteenth shell that had come into the hospital compound since the war started, and over it waved peacefully the Red Cross flag.