"From this moment I am with you and with the foreign people, until the Empress is overthrown. Let us get to your legation."
"Was it any one you knew?" asked Rob, not yet comprehending.
China, in her ignorant self-confidence, and goaded to desperation by foreign aggressions, was defying the world. Not only was she killing missionaries, together with their converts, wherever found, and putting to shameful death such of her own people, from highest mandarin to lowest coolie, as dared lift a hand to save them or speak a word in their behalf, but by imperial order Chinese troops were preparing to attack foreign ministers in their own legations. Thus China deliberately was about to commit the gravest of international crimes. For some time the foreign ministers, foreseeing the dangers of the apparently uncontrollable Boxer uprising, had been calling upon their respective governments for protection. In response an ever-increasing fleet of war-ships was gathered off the mouth of the Pei-ho, which was as near as they could approach to Pekin. From those ships which first arrived a mixed force of marines, four hundred in all, and representing eight nations, was sent to the capital to act as legation guards, and the train that brought them was the last to reach Pekin for many weeks.
These marines arrived on the first day of June, and forty-five of them immediately were detailed to protect the great northern cathedral, while twenty more were sent to the compound of the American Methodist Mission. A week later the Empress Dowager returned to Pekin from her summer palace in the Western Hills. From that moment the situation grew so rapidly worse that the ministers again telegraphed the foreign fleet to send at once a strong force for their further protection.
In response to this urgent request Captain McCalla, the senior American naval officer with the fleet, declared that he should start for Pekin the next day. The British admiral, Seymour, promptly proposed to join him, and other commanding officers entered so heartily into the project that on the following morning, when the expedition started by rail from Tongku, the nearest landing-point, it comprised 2066 troops. Of these 112 were Americans, 915 British, 450 Germans, 312 Russians, 158 French, 54 Japanese, 40 Italians, and 25 Austrians.