Chapter V: At Tong-Tchow

Tong-Tchow, which occupies two or three kilometres along the bank, is one of those immense Chinese cities--more densely populated than many of the capitals of Europe--whose very name is almost unheard of with us. To-day, needless to say, it is but the ghost of a city, and as one approaches it it does not take long to perceive that it is now empty and in ruin.

We approach slowly. At the foot of the high black crenellated walls, junks are crowded all along the river. On the bank the same excitement as at Taku and at Tien-Tsin is complicated by some hundreds of Mongolian camels crouching in the dust.

There are soldiers, invaders, cannons, materials of war. Cossacks who are trying captured horses go and come at full gallop among the various groups, with great savage cries.

The various national colors of the European Allies are hoisted in profusion; they float from high up on the black walls pierced by cannon balls, from the camps, from the junks, from the ruins. And the continual wind--the implacable icy wind carrying the infected dust that smells of the dead--plays upon these flags, which give an ironical air of festivity to all the devastation.

I look for the French flags so as to stop my junk in our neighborhood and to go at once to our quarters. I can try our country's rations there this evening; furthermore, not being able to continue our trip on the river, I must procure for to-morrow morning a cart and some saddle horses.

Stopping near a place which seems to belong to us, I ask some Zouaves the road to our quarters; they promptly, eagerly, and politely offer to accompany me. Together we go on toward a great door in the thick black wall.

At this entrance to the city they have, by means of ropes and boards, established a cattle-yard for the purpose of supplying food for the soldiers. Besides a few live animals there are three or four on the ground, dead from the bovine pest, and some Chinese prisoners have this moment come to drag them to the river, the general rendezvous for dead bodies.

We enter a street where our soldiers are employed at various kinds of work in the midst of heaps of rubbish. Through the broken doors and windows of the houses the wretched interiors are visible; everything is in fragments, broken, destroyed as though for pleasure. From the thick dust raised by the north wind and by our own footsteps rises an intolerable odor of the dead.

For two months the rage for destruction, the frenzy for murder, has beset this unfortunate "City of Celestial Purity," invaded by the troops of eight or ten different countries. She felt the first shock of all these hereditary hatreds. First the Boxers came her way. Then the Japanese,--heroic little soldiers of whom I do not wish to speak ill, but who destroy and kill as barbarian armies were wont to do. Still less do I wish to speak ill of our friends, the Russians; but they have sent here their Cossack neighbors from Tartary, and half-Mongolian Siberians, all admirable under fire, but looking at war in the Asiatic fashion. Then there are the cruel cavalrymen of India sent by Great Britain. America has let loose her soldiers. And when, in the first desire for vengeance for Chinese cruelties, the Italians, the Germans, the Austrians, and the French arrived, nothing was left intact.

Our commander and his officers have improvised lodgings and offices in some of the larger Chinese houses, hastily repairing the roofs and walls. In strong contrast to the rudeness of these places are the sumptuous wood carvings and the tall Chinese vases found intact among the ruins.

They promise me carriages and horses for to-morrow morning to be ready at sunrise on the bank near my junk. When all is settled there is about an hour of daylight left, so I wander about the ruins of the city with my armed followers, Osman, Renaud, and Chinese Toum.

As one gets farther away from the quarters where our soldiers are, the horrors increase with the solitude and the silence.

We come first to the street of the China merchants, great warehouses where the products of the Canton manufactories were stored. It must have been a fine street judging from the carved and gilded but ruined façades which remain. To-day the yawning shops, almost demolished, seem to vomit onto the highway their heaps of broken fragments. One walks on precious enamel decorated with brilliant flowers, for it literally covers the ground so that one crushes it in passing. There is no knowing whose work this was; it was already done when our troops arrived. But it must have taken whole days of furious attack with boots and clubs to reduce it all to such small bits; jars, plates, cups, are ground to atoms, pulverized, together with human bones and hair. At the back of these warehouses the coarser wares occupied a sort of interior court. These courts with their old walls are particularly lugubrious this evening, in the dying light. In one of them we found a mangy dog trying to drag something from underneath a pile of broken plates--it was the body of a child whose skull had been broken. The dog began to eat the flesh that was left on the legs of the poor dead thing.

There was no one to be seen in the long devastated streets where the framework of the houses, as well as the tiles and the bricks, had tumbled down. Crows croaked in the silence. Horrible dogs who feed on the dead fled before us, hanging their tails. We had glimpses of Chinese prowlers, wretched-looking creatures, trying to find something to steal, or of some of the dispossessed timidly creeping along the walls attempting to find out what has become of their homes.

The sun is already low, and the wind is rising as it does every night. We shiver with the sudden cold. Empty houses fill the shadows.

These houses are all of considerable extent, with recesses, a succession of courts, rock work, basins, and melancholy gardens. Crossing the threshold, guarded by the ever-present granite monsters worn by the rubbing of hands, one finds oneself in an endless series of apartments. The intimate details of Chinese life are touchingly and graciously revealed by the arrangement of potted plants, flowerbeds, and little balconies where bindweed and other vines are trained.

Here, surrounded with playthings, is a poor doll, which doubtless belonged to some child whose head has been broken; there a cage hangs with the bird still in it, dried up in one corner with its feet in the air.

Everything is sacked, removed, or destroyed; furniture is broken, the contents of drawers thrown about the floors, papers, blood-stained clothing, Chinese women's shoes spattered with blood, and here and there limbs, hands, heads, and clumps of hair.

In certain of the gardens neglected plants continue to blossom gaily, running over into the walks amongst the human remains. Around an arbor which conceals the body of a woman, twines pink convolvulus in blossoming garlands. The blossom is still open at this late hour of the day and in spite of the cold nights, which quite upsets our European ideas of convolvulus.

In one of the houses back in a recess in a dark loft, something moves! Two women cower pitifully! Finding themselves discovered, they are seized with terror and fall at our feet, trembling, weeping, clasping their hands, and begging for mercy. One is young, the other older, and they look alike. Mother and daughter! "Pardon, sir, pardon; we are afraid," translates little Toum naïvely, understanding their broken words. Evidently they expect the worst of us--and then death. For how long have they lived in this hole, these two poor things, thinking with each step that resounds on the pavement of the deserted court that their end has come? We leave them a few pieces of silver, which perhaps humiliates without helping them, but it is all that we can do, and then we go.

Another house, a house of the rich this one is, with a profusion of potted plants in enamelled porcelain jars in the sad little garden. In an apartment that is already dark (for decidedly night is coming on, the uncertainty of twilight is beginning), but where the havoc is less extensive, for there are great chests and beautiful arm-chairs still intact, Osman suddenly recoils with terror before something which emerges from a bucket placed upon a board. Two torn thighs, the whole lower part of a woman thrust into this bucket with the feet in the air! Undoubtedly the mistress of this elegant home. Her body? Who knows what has been done with the body? But here is the head, under this arm-chair, near the skeleton of a cat. The mouth is open, showing the teeth, and the hair is long.

In addition to the broad, almost straight streets whose desolation is visible from one end to the other, there are little tortuous streets leading up to gray walls. They are the most desolate to enter at this twilight hour, with only the cry of the crow as an accompaniment. Little stone gnomes guard their mysterious doors, and their pavements are strewn with human heads with long queues. One approaches certain turns in the streets with a heavy heart. It is over, and nothing in the world would tempt us to enter again at this hour one of those frightfully still houses where one meets with so many gruesome encounters.

We had gone far into the city before night came on, and the silence had become intolerable. We return to the region where the troops are quartered, cut by the north wind and chilled by the cold and gloom; our return is rapid; broken china and other débris impossible to define crackle under our feet.

The banks are lined with soldiers warming themselves and cooking their suppers over bright fires, where they are burning chairs, tables, and bits of carved wood or timbers. Coming out of the Dantesque streets, it all bespeaks joy and comfort to us.

Near our junk there is a canteen, improvised by a Maltese, where intoxicants are sold to soldiers. I send my men to get whatever liquors they want for our supper, for we need something to warm and cheer us if possible. We celebrate with smoking soup, tea, chartreuse, and I don't know what besides, in our little matting-covered dwelling, tied up this time on the pestilential mud and enveloped as usual by cold and darkness.

At dessert, when the hour for smoking arrives in our sarcophagus, Renaud, to whom I have given the floor, tells us that his squadron is encamped on the borders of a Chinese cemetery in Tien-Tsin, and that the soldiers of another European nation (I prefer not to say which) in the same vicinity spend their time ransacking the graves and taking from them the money which it is the custom to bury with the dead.

"To me, colonel" (I am colonel to him, as he is ignorant of the naval appellation of _commandant_, which, with us, goes with five gold stripes), "to me it does not seem right. Even though they are Chinese, we ought to leave their dead in peace. What disgusts me is that they cut their rations up on the planks of the coffins. And I say to them, 'Put it on the outside if you will, but not on the inside, which has touched the corpse.' But these savages, colonel, laugh at me."