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Indiscreet Letters From Peking - Being the Notes of an Eye-Witness, Which Set Forth in Some Detail, from Day to Day, the Real Story of the Siege and Sack of a Distressed Capital in 1900—The Year of Great Tribulation by Unknown
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XIV

THE ULTIMATUM


19th June, 1900.

* * * * *

How foolish we can be! Only last night I was bewailing the dulness and
the dirt of it all, and the general absurdity and discomfort, and now
without one qualm I confess I would willingly exchange yesterday's
uncertainty for to-day's certainty--that we are all going to be made
into mincemeat. But I do not even feel serious or desperate now; it
has got beyond that.

I do not know at what hour the ultimatum came to-day; it may have been
eleven in the morning or one in the afternoon; but one thing I do know
is, that here, at four in the afternoon, the great majority of one
thousand Europeans are shaking, absolutely distraught. It is evident
therefrom that there is something impressive and demoralising to most
people in the idea of finality, and that on the threshold of the
twentieth century, courage, since it is seldom dealt in, is hardly a
great living force. It makes one realise, too, that with all their
faults, the aristocrats of France, who, a hundred years ago, were
condemned to the shameful death of the guillotine and went in their
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