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Indiscreet Letters From Peking: Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation

History

Indiscreet Letters From Peking: Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation

Beijing (China) -- History -- Siege, 1900 -- Personal narratives; Putnam Weale, B. L. (Bertram Lenox), 1877-1930 -- Correspondence

To-day I saw it all beautifully, with the aid of the best glasses we
have got. First came bodies of infantry trotting hurriedly in their
sandals and glancing about them. In the dust and the distance they
seemed to have lost all formation--to be mere broken fragments. But
once a man stopped, looked up at us, a mere dot in the ruined streets
hundreds and hundreds of yards away, and then savagely discharged his
rifle at us. He knew we were on the Tartar Wall, and so sent his
impotent curses at us through a three-foot steel tube.... Behind such
men were long country carts laden with wounded and broken men, and
driven by savage-looking drivers, powdered with our cursed dust and
driving standing up with voice and whip alone. The teams of ponies
were all mud-stained and tired, and moved very slowly away; and their
great iron-hooped wheels clanked discordantly over the stone-paved
ways. Sometimes a body of cavalry, with gaudy banners in the van and
the men flogging on their steeds with short whips, have also ridden by
escaping from the rout. Infantry and horsemen, wounded in carts and
wounded on foot, flow back into the city through the deserted and
terror-stricken streets, and it is we who shall suffer. So much of
this has been understood by everybody, that an order has been
privately given that no one is to be allowed on the Tartar Wall,
excepting the regular reliefs. There is in any case no time for most
of us to creep up there and look on the city below; we are tied to the
barricades and trenches down in the flat among the ruins, chained to
our posts by a never-ending rifle-fire.




XXVIII

THE THIRTEENTH


13th August, 1900.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is the 13th, that fateful number, and there are some who are
divided between hope and fear. Is it good to hope on a 13th, or is it
mere foolishness to thing about such things? Who knows?--for we have
become unnatural and abnormal--subject to atavistic tendencies in
thought and action.... Most people are keeping their thoughts to
themselves, but actions cannot be hidden. You would not believe some
of the things....

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Opening the text

History

Indiscreet Letters From Peking: Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation

Beijing (China) -- History -- Siege, 1900 -- Personal narratives; Putnam Weale, B. L. (Bertram Lenox), 1877-1930 -- Correspondence

To-day I saw it all beautifully, with the aid of the best glasses we
have got. First came bodies of infantry trotting hurriedly in their
sandals and glancing about them. In the dust and the distance they
seemed to have lost all formation--to be mere broken fragments. But
once a man stopped, looked up at us, a mere dot in the ruined streets
hundreds and hundreds of yards away, and then savagely discharged his
rifle at us. He knew we were on the Tartar Wall, and so sent his
impotent curses at us through a three-foot steel tube.... Behind such
men were long country carts laden with wounded and broken men, and
driven by savage-looking drivers, powdered with our cursed dust and
driving standing up with voice and whip alone. The teams of ponies
were all mud-stained and tired, and moved very slowly away; and their
great iron-hooped wheels clanked discordantly over the stone-paved
ways. Sometimes a body of cavalry, with gaudy banners in the van and
the men flogging on their steeds with short whips, have also ridden by
escaping from the rout. Infantry and horsemen, wounded in carts and
wounded on foot, flow back into the city through the deserted and
terror-stricken streets, and it is we who shall suffer. So much of
this has been understood by everybody, that an order has been
privately given that no one is to be allowed on the Tartar Wall,
excepting the regular reliefs. There is in any case no time for most
of us to creep up there and look on the city below; we are tied to the
barricades and trenches down in the flat among the ruins, chained to
our posts by a never-ending rifle-fire.




XXVIII

THE THIRTEENTH


13th August, 1900.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is the 13th, that fateful number, and there are some who are
divided between hope and fear. Is it good to hope on a 13th, or is it
mere foolishness to thing about such things? Who knows?--for we have
become unnatural and abnormal--subject to atavistic tendencies in
thought and action.... Most people are keeping their thoughts to
themselves, but actions cannot be hidden. You would not believe some
of the things....

Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.

Indiscreet Letters From Peking: Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation

Indiscreet Letters From Peking: Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation

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