The War of the Dragon Lady by John Wilcox Page A

Chinese City were crowded together in the Legation’s chapel. The elegant front pavilions were stacked with all kinds of luggage, the most notable being provisions and wine; the stable-house was allocated to Norwegians; the rear pavilion was divided into small rooms for miscellaneous use, and in one of the tiniest Mrs Griffith and Alice made their new home, with Gerald, Chang, Simon and Jenkins housed together next door.
    All was activity in the other legations, too. As a squadron of Chinese cavalry, in their black turbans, galloped down Custom Street past the isolated Austrian Legation, guards of all the threatened nationalities were busy strengthening makeshift barricades, laying out primitive firefighting equipment and, near the American and German legations, manning the outposts that had been erected on the Tartar Wall.
    At four o’clock – the hour at which the formal Chinese ultimatum was due to expire – Fonthill and Jenkins stood on the front lawn of the British Legation, once marked out for clock golf, while Simon consulted his watch. At exactly the hour, firing broke out from the outlying Austrian Legation, which, despite Fonthill’s advice, had not been evacuated.
    ‘Well,’ frowned Simon, ‘I’m afraid we are now well and truly under siege. Will we be able to hold out, I wonder?’
    Jenkins sucked in his moustache. ‘We’ll just ’ave to, bach sir. I wouldn’t want to think about the alternative if them yeller bastards break through.’

C HAPTER F OUR
    The ending of the formal ultimatum brought a sense of reality to the besieged foreigners and their dependents within the Legation Quarter. It was as though the defensive precautions already taken under the direction of Fonthill and Captain Strouts had been a game, the withdrawal to a secondary line away from the outer walls merely a harmless diversion to relieve the boredom of waiting for the relief column to arrive. Now, it became clear to Simon on a quick tour with Jenkins that the instructions that had been given for the erection of the fallback defences had been carried out quite inadequately. The barricades mainly consisted of overturned carts, with gaps between them, and the trenches were little more than shallow scoops in the earth. A concerted attack on the Quarter would surely have resulted in these flimsy defences being overrun.
    Luckily, that attack did not come. The lull gave the defenders timeto retreat from the indefensible positions outside the fallback line. After that immediate flurry of firing on the Austrian Legation, no attack was pressed home and Simon’s call to leave the Legation was heeded at last and the defenders were able to scurry back to within the reserve line. Similarly, the other outlying legations – the Dutch, the Belgian, the Italian and the French – were also abandoned, as was the Peking Club and the large offices of the influential trading house, Jardine Matheson. Immediately, most of these buildings were torched by the Chinese and firing broke out, sometimes heavily, around the hastily manned new perimeter of the defences. Nevertheless, the Chinese seemed reluctant to press home any direct attacks.
    ‘This is ridiculous,’ confessed Fonthill to Jenkins at the end of the first day of the siege. The pair had spent the hours helping to direct the reinforcing of the flimsy defences: the piling of rubble upon and in between the upturned carts, the loopholing of these walls, the deepening of the trenches in the open land on the exposed sides of the line, and the making of sandbags from pillowcases and cushions. ‘The trouble is,’ continued Simon, wiping his brow, ‘there doesn’t seem to be anyone in overall charge. It’s like the Tower of Babel, with everyone shouting in different languages. It’s no way to conduct a defence. I have to see Sir Claude.’
    ‘Be careful,’ said Jenkins, ‘don’t get too close to ’im because if ’e turns round too quick, like, ’e’ll ’ave your eye out with the end