al
defence line directly in touch with the enemy, the Imperial Carriage
Park, a vast grass-grown area with but half a dozen yellow-roofed
buildings in it, makes the western approaches very difficult to
attack, since they are easily swept by our rifle-fire; and that the
northern side is so filled with buildings belonging to the Chinese
Government (which it now seems cannot be destroyed), that I do not
apprehend attacks here. The only real dangers to the British Legation
in any case are these two corners to the north and the southwest....

Passing over to the Su wang-fu, you realise the extraordinary
difference between the danger points along the British Legation
northern and western barricades, and little Colonel S----'s command.
Here you are in direct touch with the enemy, for the snipers of
forty-eight hours ago have been strongly reinforced, doubtless
attracted by the possibility of loot.

[Illustration: Map of the siege.]

Soldiers and all sorts of banditti must have joined hands with the
Boxers, for it is clear that every hour is mysteriously adding more
and more men round our lines. You can hear the men talking, and you
can see bricks moving but fifty or sixty yards from where you are
squinting through a loophole as fresh barricades, that are gradually
surrounding us in a vise which may yet crush us to death, are silently
built. The forty or fifty Japanese, and the few volunteers who are
with them, have now been reinforced by all the Italians, who have been
given a big strip of outer wall and a fortified hillock in Prince Su's
ornamental garden--a hillock which commands a great stretch of
territory, as territory goes in our wall split area. For here in the
Su wang-fu the number of walls and buildings is terrible, and Heaven
only knows how seventy or eighty men can even make a pretence of
holding such positions. First there is the great outer wall eighteen
feet high and three feet thick. Then from this outer wall, other thick
walls run inwards at right angles, splitting up the place into little
squares, in which as likely as not there will be a group of houses
with great dragon-adorned roofs. Further towards the centre of the Fu
is Prince Su's own palace and his retainers' quarters; to the south of
this is an ornamental garden full of trees, a vast and mournful
enclosure, standing in which the crack of outpost rifles can only be
distantly heard. Moving across to the southern side--that is, the side
near the Fren