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 French Legation and the protected Legation Street--the
Christian refugees are found gathered here in huge droves. In one
building there are alone four hundred native schoolgirls, rows upon
rows of them that never seem to come to an end, sitting on the ground
in their sober blue coats and trousers, peacefully combing each
other's hair, or working on sandbags with the imperturbability of the
Easterner who is placid under death. Farther on, again, you come on
families, sometimes three generations huddling together on a six-foot
straw mat. A mother trying to feed a child from her half-dry breasts
tells you quietly that it is no use, since the meagre fare she is
already getting does not make sustenance enough for her, let alone her
child. Yet everything possible is being done to feed them. All the
able-bodied converts have long ago been drafted off for
barricade-building and loophole-making in the endless walls, and here