Sensational incidents during the day that Hanyang fell, with picturesque incidents and all the gore that the newspaper-reading public calls for were provided under the eyes of every one. Junkloads of helpless, bullet-driven men were drifting down the river in a ghastly succession. Have you ever seen a boat drifting on a rapid river? Have you ever watched a Chinese junk, ungainly and ugly perhaps, just going helplessly with the tide? And have you ever seen a cargo of human freight not knowing what to do to reach the shore or any place of safety? That morning the men had been riddled by bullets as they attempted to make away in the boats. They had had machine-gun fire rained into them, and, scampering like a lot of frightened birds in their cage, had crept all over to the covered end in their frenzy, hoping that the wood cover would save them. Tighter and tighter they pressed against each other. They trampled on each other, threw their rifles out into the river, their cartridge-cases, their general impedimenta, and then settled down {132} to die as the boat slowly drifted down-stream. And there, when they were found, these thirty, forty, fifty men were sitting huddled grimly together, their glassy eyes staring upwards into the unknown. Mercilessly, with hideous brutality, they had been slaughtered as they sat, and now were in the sitting posture, dead, wedged in tightly one against the other. Some had fallen outward to the side of the boat, and their bodies now were hanging limply, swaying to and fro with the dull motion of the junk. Some, shot through the head, through the heart, through the limbs, had sunk exhausted to the bottom of the boat, where the water was fast rushing in through the splintered bulwarks, and lay, face down, in the water, drowned as they lay. Another boatload, equally helpless and void of all hope but the river, had their wounded at the bottom, some of the less seriously wounded putting their hands through the holes into the water and endeavouring vainly to get a motion on the boat. When these junks, after terrific labour, were brought into the side {133} of the British Bund, the sight will never be forgotten--men, bleeding from the throat, from the side, limping as they dragged a shattered leg behind them up the steps, to fall exhausted at the top and carried away to the hospitals. 'Twas a bloody conflict that ended the fall of Hanyang. [Illustration: THE IMPREGNABLE HANYANG HILL, Shown in the background. It is the main strategic point on the Yangtse. At one time it bristled with revolutionary field-guns.]