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.