Empress and Mrs. Conger, The: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds

12 - Survival

12 Survival The risks Sarah ran to bring supplies back from the American compound were not slight. Sarah and Edwin went together one morning to gather what they could from the legation. An intrepid photographer, Sarah was walking around the ruined courtyard taking pictures, when “a shell from the big gun on the wall to the west end of [the gateway],” which she had just been snapping with her camera, hit the building “with a thud,” puncturing the roof. “We looked around a little more,” she wrote, “then ducked our heads & passed out & across the street.”1 “Not an hour later,” Sarah wrote in her diary, “a friend came in and said, ‘Mrs. Conger, here are the pieces of a shell that went through the roof and into the room where you and Mr. Conger were working this morning.” Shrapnel from the explosion had damaged several other rooms. Had the Congers worked a little longer that morning, they might have been killed.2 Yet she kept going back. To get to there, Sarah had to go either along the Jade Canal side of the legation, exposing herself to sniper fire, or west and south through the congeries of shattered Chinese houses between the British and Russian legations, through the latter, 150 The Empress and Mrs. Conger across barricaded Legation Street, and finally into the courtyard of the American compound—not an easy trip for a fit young man like Wang, let alone a fifty-seven-year-old woman. And once there, she would have been greeted by a depressing sight. “[Edwin] says it is the most desolate place imaginable,” Cecile Payen recorded. While barricades were being built up, existing buildings themselves were being blasted to pieces, so that by mid-July, the United States compound was rendered hardly fit to be lived in. Not only had the little compound’s exterior suffered under the constant barrage of shells and bullets, but its use as a billet for the United States Marines was damaging its interiors. Sarah could not help noticing that “our dear home and the beautiful trees are a wreck. The dining-room has been turned into a drying-room for the hospital laundry and our other rooms into sleeping quarters for the marines.”3 There is evidence that not all the Congers’ belongings were destroyed in bombings; many survived, but simply disappeared in the frenzy of looting that overtook Beijing. As Sarah wrote to Laura a year later, with cooler perspective, “I do not grieve over anything—Let them go—no grieving will bring them back—I am thankful.” It probably gave her pause, however, to consider that a fair amount of the looting that was going on was, according to Mary Pierce, not committed by Chinese. Many Chinese families had abandoned their homes in the areas around the fighting, leaving everything behind. “Since then,” Mary noted, “the foreigners (including some missionaries) have been as unnecessarily destructive as the Chinese and have looted these Chinese houses, many of which were full of beautiful curios and Chinese comforts of all kinds.”4 Had the American legation been similarly pilfered? “Fill your house with gold and jade,” warned the Daodejing, “and it can no longer be guarded.”5 The danger that her parents were in, and her own precarious situation, did not improve Laura Conger’s already fragile state of nerves. Sarah and Edwin were worried, and they were not the only ones. Wang, too, was disturbed by her worsening condition. When he saw she was about to lose the one thing that still gave her pleasure, her pony, he acted, though in doing so he broke that cardinal rule of any siege— whatever could be used for food had to shared out equally to everyone, with no one made a favorite. 151 Survival When the last of the sheep had been eaten, the first pony was killed and butchered to serve as food—a turning point that was as much of a shock to people in 1900 as it would be today. “We are now really eating the horse-meat,” Robert Coltman recorded on July 7. “A number of people who were using it assured us it was very good, but our prejudices prevailed some time.”They tried cooking and preparing the meat in various ways, mostly to disguise its strong flavor or tenderize the toughness. It was fried with bacon (of which the Americans seem to...