Nieh, an intelligent general, with foreign-drilled troops, has indeed
been fitfully ordered by Imperial Edict to "protect the railway," and
to keep communication open, but this order has already come to
nothing, and the position is worse than it was before. His troops,
merely desirous of testing their brand-new Mausers, and as calmly
cruel as only Easterns can be, did open a heavy fire a day or two ago
on some Boxer marauders who had strayed into a station on the
Tientsin-Peking line, and proposed to crucify the native
station-master and beat all others, who were indirectly eating the
foreign devils' rice by working on the railway, into lumps of jelly.
General Nieh's men let their rifles crash off, not because their
sympathies were against the Boxers, but probably because every living
man armed with a rifle loves to fire at another living man when he can
do so without harm to himself. This is my brutal explanation. But in
any case these soldiers have now been marched off in semi-disgrace to
their camp at Lutai, a few miles to the north of Tientsin, and told
never to do such rash and indiscreet things again. That means the end
of any attempts to control. For the Boxer partisans in Peking allege
that the soldiers actually hit and killed a good many men, which is
quite without precedent, and is upsetting all plans. On such occasions
it is always understood that you fire a little in the air, warwhoop a
good deal, and then come back quietly to camp with captured flags and
banners as undeniable evidences of your victory. This has been the old
method of making domestic war in China--the only one.

But all this is many miles from the sacred capital. The cry is still
that we of Peking are safe, and that even if this is to be a true
rebellion we cannot be hurt. The cry, however, is not so lusty as it
was even three or four days ago, and, indeed, has only become an
official cry--that is, one you are permitted to contradict privately