Yet for many of them such a death was all too merciful. No race on earth is capable of such awful cruelty, such hellish devices of torture, as the Chinese. And the unfortunate missionaries, the luckless wounded soldiers who fell into their hands, experienced treatment before which the worst deviltries of the Red Indian seemed humane. Occasionally some of these fiends were captured by the Allies; often only the instruments, but sometimes the instigators of the terrible outrages on Europeans, the mandarins who had spurred on the maddened Boxers to their worst excesses. For these no fitting punishment could be devised, and a swift death was too kind. But in the latter days of the campaign too many suffered an unmerited fate. The blood heated by the tales of Chinese cruelty at the outbreak of the troubles did not cool rapidly. The murders of the missionaries and civil engineers, of the unhappy European women and children, could not be readily forgotten. The seed sown in those early days of the fanatical outburst bore a bitter fruit. The horrors that war inevitably brings in its train were aggravated by the memory of former treachery and the difficulty of distinguishing between the innocent and the guilty. A very slight alteration of dress sufficed to convert into a harmless peasant the Boxer whose hands were red with the blood of defenceless Europeans, or of Chinese Christians whose mangled bodies had choked the river. The echoes of a greater struggle at the other side of the globe filled the ears of the world when the defenders of Tientsin were holding fanatical hordes of besiegers at bay. And so, few in Europe realised the deadliness of the fighting around the little town where hundreds of white women and children huddled together in terror of a fate too dreadful for words. The gallant sailors and marines who guarded it knew that on them alone depended the lives and honour of these helpless ones. Day and night they fought a fight, the like of which has scarcely been known since the defenders of the Residency at Lucknow kept the flag flying in similar straits against a not more savage foe. Outmatched in armament, they opposed small, almost out‐of‐date guns to quick‐firing and large‐calibre Krupps of the latest pattern. Outnumbered, stricken by disease, assailed by fierce hordes without and threatened by traitors within, they held their own with a heroism that has never gained the meed of praise it deserved. From the walls of the Chinese city, a few thousand yards away, and from the ample cover across the narrow river, shells rained on the unprotected town, and its streets were swept by close‐range rifle fire. All national rivalries forgotten, Americans, Russians, British, French, Germans, and Japanese fought shoulder to shoulder against a common foe. Admiral Seymour’s heroic column, baffled in its gallant dash on Pekin, and battling savagely against overwhelming numbers, fell slowly back on the beleaguered town.