Even the good Sisters had to organize a kind of race for the women and children, who were stupefied from fear and suffering. It was these sublime women who decided when it was necessary to change positions according to the direction from which the shells came and who chose the least dangerous moment to fly, with bowed heads, across a court, and to take refuge elsewhere. A thousand women without wills or ideas of their own, with poor dying babies clinging to their breasts, followed them; a human eddy, advancing, receding, pushing, in order to keep in sight the white caps of their protectors. They had to run when, from lack of food, they could scarcely stand, and when a supreme lassitude impelled them to lie down on the ground to await death! They had to become accustomed to detonations that never ceased, to perpetual noise, to shot and shell, to the fall of stones, to seeing one of their number fall bathed in his own blood! Hunger was the most intolerable of all. They made soup of the leaves and young branches of the trees, of dahlia roots from the gardens and of lily bulbs. The poor Chinese would say humbly, "We must keep the little grain we have left for the sailors who are protecting us, and whose need of strength is greater than ours." The bishop told of a poor woman who had been confined the previous night, who dragged herself after him imploring: "Bishop, bishop, give me a handful of grain so that my milk will come and my child may not die!" All night long the feeble voices of several hundred children were heard in the church moaning for lack of food. To use the expression of Monsignor Favier, it was like "the bleatings of a flock of lambs about to be sacrificed." But their cries diminished, for they were buried at the rate of fifteen in a single day. They knew that not far away in the European legations a similar drama was being enacted, but, needless to say, there was no communication between them; and if any young Chinese Christian offered to go there with a message from the bishop asking for help, or at least for news, it was not long before they saw his head, with the note pinned to his cheek, reappear above the wall at the end of a rod garnished with his entrails. Not only did bullets rain by the hundreds every day, but the Boxers put anything that fell into their furious hands into their cannon,--stones, bricks, bits of iron, old kettles. The besieged had no doctors; they hopelessly, and as best they could, bound up great horrible wounds, great holes in the breast. The arms of the voluntary grave-diggers were exhausted with digging places in which to bury the dead, or parts of the dead. And the cry of the infuriated mob went on, "Cha! Cha!" (Let us kill, let us kill!) to the grim sounds of their iron gongs and the blasts of their trumpets.