hundred
feet inside these advance positions and armed with a telescope, had
seen two guns being dragged forward. In a few hours at the most, even
allowing for Chinese sloth and indifference as to time, the guns would
be in position, and then the outer wall would be demolished, and
possibly a disordered retirement would be the result. So the little
Japanese colonel took the bull by the horns. Setting all the coolies
he could muster from among the converts, he quickly formed a second
line of defence by loopholing and sandbagging all the chess-board
squares that flank the northern wall. When night came the advanced
positions were quietly abandoned, and as soon as the Chinese scouts,
who always creep forward at daybreak, discovered that our men had
flown, their leaders ordered a charge. A confused mass rushed forward,
penetrated one of the courtyards, and finding it apparently deserted,
incautiously pushed into the next square. Before they could fly, a
murderous fire caught them on three sides and wiped out several dozens
of them, the rifles and ammunition being taken by our men and the
corpses thrown outside. This has apparently had a chilling effect on
the policy of open charges in this quarter, and now the Chinese
commanders are advancing their lines by means of ingenious parallels
and zig-zag barricades, which will take some time to construct.

Meanwhile, the Japanese main-gate fort, at the extreme Japanese east,
with its outlying barricades, is being slowly reached for by the same
means. Two or three times the French, who make connection with the
Japanese lines a hundred feet to the south, have had to send as many
men as they could spare to hold back a sudden rush. Each time the
threatened Chinese charge has not come off, and the incipient attack
has fizzled out to the accompaniment of a diminishing fusillade.

The commanding Italian knoll on the northwest corner of the Su wang-fu
remains firm, but somehow no one has very much confidence in the
Italians, and secondary lines are being formed behind them, towards
which the Italians look with longing eyes. And yet next to the
British Legation posts the Italians are having the easiest time of
all. Lieutenant P----, their commander, is a brave fellow; but he is
brave because he is educated. The uneducated Italian, unlike the
uneducated Frenchman, has little stomach for fighting, and it is easy
to understand in the light of our present experiences why the
Austrians so lon