There has not been a sign or a word from the relief column for many hours. The fleeing Chinese soldiery we witnessed in such numbers yesterday entering the city have stopped rushing in, and now from the Tartar Wall the streets below in the outer city seem quite silent and deserted. Last night, too, it was seen that the line of the enemy's rifles packed against us was so continuous, and the spacing so close, that one continuous flame of fire ripped round from side to side and deluged us with metal. So heavy was this firing, so crushing, that it was paralysing. Any part broken into would have been irretrievably lost. The bullets and shells struck our walls and defences in great swarms sometimes several hundred projectiles swishing down at a time. There must have been ten or twelve thousand infantry firing at us and fifteen guns. Where I lay, with a post of sixteen men, there were more than five hundred riflemen facing us, at distances varying from forty feet to four hundred yards. Every ruined house outside the fringe of our defence has now been converted into a blockhouse by the persistent enemy. Every barricade we have built has a dozen other barricades opposing it in parallels, in chessboards, in every kind of formation; and from these barricades the fire poured in since the 10th--that is, for sixty long hours--has only ceased at rare intervals. Our stretcher-parties have been very busy, but how many men we have lost since the armistice was deliberately broken no one knows. Yesterday a French captain, a gallant officer, who feared nothing, was shot dead through the head, making the ninth officer killed or severely wounded since the beginning. Yesterday, also, the new Mongol market defences trembled on the brink hour after hour, and with them the fate of three thousand heads. New Chinese troops armed with Mannlicher carbines, the handiest weapons for barricade fighting, had been pushed up behind a veil of light entrenchments to within twenty feet of the Mongol market posts, and their fire was so tremendous that it drove right through our bricks and sandbags. God willed that just as the final rush was coming a Chinese barricade gave way; our men emptied their magazines with the rapidity of despair into the swarms of Chinese riflemen disclosed; dozens of them fell killed and wounded, and the rest were driven back in disorder. Ten seconds more would have made them masters of our positions. The closeness of this final agony was such that squads of reserves, who had not fired a shot during the siege, voluntarily went forward to the threatened points and lay there the whole night. At last it has been driven home on all that our fate hangs in the balance, and has hung in the balance for weeks. But it is too late now. If a single link in our chain is broken there will be a _sauve qui pent_ which no heroism can stop. XXIX THE NIGHT OF THE THIRTEENTH 14th August, 1900. * * * * *