A study of the map of the field will show immediately that the position of the Concessions was, to say the least, eminently dangerous. The main battery behind the Concessions had guns pointing towards Wuchang, naturally drawing the Wuchang fire, shells from which dropped more often {120} in the Concession than out of it when the aim was taken for Coffin Hill battery; it also had guns pointing to Hanyang, drawing that return fire, which had the gravest probability of falling over the Concession border. I should think that a mild estimate of shells dropped in the Concessions during that week would be one hundred. But there was another danger: in their flanking movement the Revolutionists were endeavouring to shell the Coffin Hill battery, meaning at once that their shells were fired, not by the sides of the Concessions but bang into them. There was another danger still: the Imperialists, if they were driven back, would undoubtedly make for the Concessions, and flee through them. "It's not human nature," as the British Acting-Consul said a day or two before to a British subject, "to expect the Revolutionists not to chase them." It may easily be left to the reader to answer for himself whether a complement of five hundred troops--the maximum of a defence force that could be mustered from the gunboats that moment in the port--could hold the port against this grave possibility. It was surely not too much for international subjects to ask of their Consuls that troops be sent for and that a fair defence scheme be inaugurated forthwith for the protection of their lives and their property. Again, however, I should like to say that I am not writing in any carping spirit. I am among those who, far from anathematising or criticising, and remembering that it is the easiest thing in the world to ridicule, realise that at such times of crisis in China each Consul should be supported by every loyal subject. But it certainly seemed to me that the consular body--not one individual only, but the whole body--by its continued inaction rendered foreigners in Hankow a bad account of what they were there for. One could easily write up what the soldiery might have done if they once had run riot in the Concession, and such an eventuality {121} to those who know their China is not without the range of what easily could have transpired; but it would be sensational and probably useless.