Pierre Loti: When the Allies Entered Peking, 1900
...Toward the end their cemetary was the "contested region," after they had little by little lost much ground, and they trembled for their dead; the enemy had advanced to its very border; they watched and they killed at close quarters over the sleeping warriors so hastily put to rest. If the Chinese had reached this cemetery, and had scaled the last frail trenches of sand and gravel in sacks made of old curtains, then for all who were left there would have been horrible torture to the sound of music and laughter, horrible dismemberment---nails torn off, feet torn off, disemboweling, and finally the head carried through the streets at the end of a pole. They were attacked from all sides and in every possible manner, often at the most unexpected hours of the night. It usually began with cries and the sudden noise of trumpets and tom-toms; around them thousands of howling men would appear---one must have heard the howlings of the Chinese to imagine what their voices are; their very timber chills your soul. Gongs outside the walls added to the tumult. Occasionally, from a suddenly opened hole in a neighboring house, a pole twenty or thirty feet long, ablaze at the end with oakum and petroleum, emerged slowly and silently, like a thing out of a dream. This was applied to the roofs in the hope of setting them on fire. They were also attacked from below; they heard dull sounds in the earth, and understood that they were being undermined, that their executioners might spring up from the ground at any moment; so that it became necessary, at any risk, to attempt to establish countermines to prevent this subterranean peril. One day, toward noon, two terrible detonations, which brought on a regular tornado of plaster and dust, shook the French Legation, half burying under rubbish the lieutenant in command of the defenses and several of his marines. But this was not all; all but two succeeded in getting clear of the stones and ashes that covered them to the shoulders, but two brave sailors never appeared again. And so the struggle continued, desperately, and under conditions more and more frightful. ...
Pierre Loti was a French naval officer and novelist who entered Beijing at the end of the Boxer Rebellion and later described what he saw in Les Derniers Jours de Pekin (The Last Days of Peking, 1902).
Translated text taken from:
Tappan, E. M. ed. (1914). Pierre Loti: When the Allies Entered Peking. In The world's story: a history of the world in story,
song, and art, vol. 1 China, Japan, and the islands of the Pacific. Retrieved from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/
1900Loti-peking.asp
...Toward the end their cemetary was the "contested region," after they had little by little lost much ground, and they trembled for their dead; the enemy had advanced to its very border; they watched and they killed at close quarters over the sleeping warriors so hastily put to rest. If the Chinese had reached this cemetery, and had scaled the last frail trenches of sand and gravel in sacks made of old curtains, then for all who were left there would have been horrible torture to the sound of music and laughter, horrible dismemberment---nails torn off, feet torn off, disemboweling, and finally the head carried through the streets at the end of a pole. They were attacked from all sides and in every possible manner, often at the most unexpected hours of the night. It usually began with cries and the sudden noise of trumpets and tom-toms; around them thousands of howling men would appear---one must have heard the howlings of the Chinese to imagine what their voices are; their very timber chills your soul. Gongs outside the walls added to the tumult. Occasionally, from a suddenly opened hole in a neighboring house, a pole twenty or thirty feet long, ablaze at the end with oakum and petroleum, emerged slowly and silently, like a thing out of a dream. This was applied to the roofs in the hope of setting them on fire. They were also attacked from below; they heard dull sounds in the earth, and understood that they were being undermined, that their executioners might spring up from the ground at any moment; so that it became necessary, at any risk, to attempt to establish countermines to prevent this subterranean peril. One day, toward noon, two terrible detonations, which brought on a regular tornado of plaster and dust, shook the French Legation, half burying under rubbish the lieutenant in command of the defenses and several of his marines. But this was not all; all but two succeeded in getting clear of the stones and ashes that covered them to the shoulders, but two brave sailors never appeared again. And so the struggle continued, desperately, and under conditions more and more frightful. ...
Pierre Loti was a French naval officer and novelist who entered Beijing at the end of the Boxer Rebellion and later described what he saw in Les Derniers Jours de Pekin (The Last Days of Peking, 1902).
Translated text taken from:
Tappan, E. M. ed. (1914). Pierre Loti: When the Allies Entered Peking. In The world's story: a history of the world in story,
song, and art, vol. 1 China, Japan, and the islands of the Pacific. Retrieved from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/
1900Loti-peking.asp