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Page 21
An awful stillness, broken at times by ominous sounds, came over the
town. Lights flitted at times through its dark labyrinths, by whom
borne it was impossible to perceive. The presence of death, in its
most fearful shapes, seemed palpable to the senses, and we, crouching
in the gloom on the roof, to which as the safest place we had
returned, had before our mental vision the mutilated bodies in the
rooms close below us, with the ghastly probability, almost the
certainty, that another hour or two would join us in their horrid
fate. To myself, the reckless, wasted past presented itself, in that
situation of appalling terrors, in all its enormity. There was I,
after throwing away the high advantages of fortune and prosperity, a
ruined and degraded man, about to meet an appropriate ending to such
a career by a bloody death at the hands of some brutal soldier, in an
unknown land, at the ends of the earth, where scarcely a human being
knew a word of my native tongue. If these pages should be read by any
young man embarking without a thought of the future, in the flush of
high spirits and inexperience, upon courses similar to mine, I hope he
will take warning, and stop in time.
It was, I should judge, about ten o'clock when at last we descended to
the street. There had been no firing for about two hours. The lantern
was re-lit, and Chung, who knew the way best, took it and went ahead.
I still wore the soldier's dress; if met and challenged, I proposed to
make it appear, as best I could, that I was making the Chinamen
conduct me to one of the camps, or if I failed in this to sell my life
dearly with the rifle.
Our path lay right across the town, and the dead lay thickly in nearly
every street in the quarters we traversed, where, of every age, sex,
and condition, they had been promiscuously butchered by the hundred.
Here and there the miserable survivors--survivors only for the
present--were searching, with low wailings and lamentations, for those
they had lost, with the aid of their coloured lanterns, which gave a
look of indescribable ghastliness to the mutilated forms they bent
over to examine. To my last day I shall remember, with unfading
horror, the aspect of those remnants of mortality, in all the
hideousness stamped upon them by the unnamable atrocities practised
during that diabolical orgy of murder and mutilation, rape, lust, and
rapine. This is war! Away, in the splendid pavilion of the vanquished,
the conquering marshal, surrounded by his generals and officers, was
installed in triumph, secure of his country's applause and his
emperor's favour; but here, amid these desolated homes, these
mutilated heaps of death, was the night side, the shadow, of their
glory. And this was but the first day of _four_! It must be admitted
that the Chinese drew it upon themselves, that everywhere else the
Japanese behaved with admirable clemency and moderation; but after
making every allowance, their conduct in this instance, and
particularly that of the high commanding chiefs in never seeking to
put a stop to the devilish excesses perpetrated before their eyes on
unoffending non-combatants, is richly deserving of everlasting infamy.
Many of the poor wretches thus cowering about ran away upon
perceiving, as they thought, an armed Japanese soldier, but in one
instance I had reason to be thankful that I was not alone. A
middle-aged man and two younger ones were carrying away, in one of the
streets we traversed, the half-naked body of a woman, which had been
split open from the abdomen to the chest. The elder man glared upon
me, in the dim light, with the expression of a tiger, and drawing a
long curved knife from his breast, and pointing at me, shouted
something to his companions, who perhaps were his sons. Chung at once
interposed, and talked with them rapidly for a few moments, and
naturally his explanation sufficed and we proceeded. I asked Chung
what the man had said:--"There is one of the Japanese devils; let us
rip him up."
But it would only be needlessly harrowing to dwell on the sights of
horror we encountered at every turn. We pressed on, rapidly yet
cautiously, our feet dabbling in blood wherever we trod. As we
proceeded down a street about ten feet broad, we heard in front sounds
as of voices shouting and singing. The avenue we were in took a turn
about fifteen yards in advance of us, and as we hesitated and finally
stopped, there appeared round it a body of men in whom we at once
recognized the Japanese soldiers. There was a low but wide doorway on
our right, and into it we at once slipped with no trifling celerity.
It was intensely dark and offered a good concealment. We could not
afford to extinguish our lantern, and I placed it behind an angle of
the inner wall where it was impossible that its glimmer could be seen
from the street. Crouching in the deep shadow, we anxiously awaited
the passing of the soldiers, whose voices we heard momentarily
approaching, shouting at their full pitch a discordant song,
accompanied by a loud ringing sound which at first I mistook for that
of some instrument. They were soon abreast of us, some twenty or
thirty in number. I scarcely breathed as the ferocious band went
trooping past. Their appearance was ghastly and terrible beyond
conception. They were literally reeking from the shambles of inhuman
butchery; their clothes and weapons were smeared and clotted with
blood; some held human heads aloft on their bayonets; the lanterns
which most of them carried, and swung to and fro as they marched,
threw on their repulsive figures and savage Oriental faces, their
white teeth, oblique eyes, and sallow countenances, a weird, wavering
light, appropriate to their infernal aspect; they looked more like
demons than like men. The foremost, who appeared to be dismounted
dragoons, were clashing their sabres together in a kind of
accompaniment to the yelling chant in which they all joined. On they
went, trampling the dead with whom their bestial ferocity had strewn
the devoted town, the sound of their high shrill voices and the ring
of the clashing steel being audible for some time after they had
passed out of sight. At length it died away and all was still again,
so silent that I seemed to hear the quick and heavy throbbing of my
heart.
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