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
Japanese Secretary of Legation, who has been evolved into an
engineer-in-chief and overseer of native labour, and thus at every
hour of the day the distribution of the barricaders is known. Amid
these crowds of native refugees, who number at least a couple of
thousand people, two or three Japanese occasionally wander to see that
all's well, and give the babies little things they have looted from
Prince Su's palace to play with. Content to be where they are and
assured that the European will not abandon them, these natives exhibit
in a strange manner that inexplicable thing--Faith. Poor people--they
little know! Is it always thus with faith?
So the Su wang-fu, which is but the northwestern part of our lines, is
now a city in itself, inhabited by the most unlikely people in the
world. Three days have sufficed to give it an entity of its own. The
nature of the defence and the fighting value of the Japanese as
compared to the Italians, are fitly illustrated by the distribution of
forces which little Colonel S---- has already made. The Italians hold
perhaps a hundred feet of the outer wall and one hillock of some
importance. The Japanese have at least a thousand feet of loopholed
and unloop-holed wall, and are quite ready to take another thousand if
some one would be kind enough to give it to them. In posts of three
and four men, distant sometimes hundreds of feet apart, the little
Japanese takes his two hours on and his four hours off night and day
without a murmur or without ever a break. Only at one place are there
more than three or four little men together. At the eastern end of the
Fu there is a big post grouped round the fortified Main Gate, where
there are actually eight or nine men under the command of a Japanese
naval lieutenant.
But the genius who has organised all this system, the little Japanese
colonel, does not waste time walking around. He is at work at an
eternal map decorated with green, blue and red spots, which show the
distribution of his forces and their respective strength and fighting
value. Somehow I could not tear myself away from this quarter. It was
so orderly....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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