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Intercorporeality
 FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN INTERACTION

General Editor: N. J. Enfield, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,

Radboud University, Nijmegen, and the University of Sydney
This series promotes new interdisciplinary research on the elements of human
sociality, in particular as they relate to the activity and experience of commu-
nicative interaction and human relationships. Books in this series explore the
foundations of human interaction from a wide range of perspectives, using
multiple theoretical and methodological tools. A premise of the series is that a
proper understanding of human sociality is only possible if we take a truly inter-
disciplinary approach.

Series Editorial Board:

Michael Tomasello (Max Planck Institute Leipzig)
Dan Sperber (Jean Nicod Institute)
Elizabeth Couper-​Kuhlen (University of Helsinki)
Paul Kockelman (University of Texas, Austin)
Sotaro Kita (University of Warwick)
Tanya Stivers (University of California, Los Angeles)
Jack Sidnell (University of Toronto)

Recently published in the series:

Exploring the Interactional Instinct
Edited by Anna Dina L. Joaquin and John H. Schumann

Relationship Thinking
N. J. Enfield
Talking About Troubles in Conversation
Gail Jefferson
Edited by Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gene Lerner, and Anita Pomerantz
The Instruction of Imagination
Daniel Dor
How Traditions Live and Die
Olivier Morin
The Origins of Fairness
Nicolas Baumard
Requesting Responsibility
Jörg Zinken
Accountability in Social Interaction
Jeffrey Robinson
Distributed Agency
N. J. Enfield
 Intercorporeality
Emerging Socialities in Interaction
z
Edited by
CHRISTIAN MEYER
JÜRGEN STREECK
J. SCOT T JORDAN

1
 1
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ISBN 978–​0 –​19–​021046–​5

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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Charles Goodwin
who inspires us
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

List of Contributors xi

Introduction— Christian Meyer, Jürgen Streeck,

and J. Scott Jordan xv

PART ONE Fundamental Intercorporeality

1. Intercorporeality and Interaffectivity—​Thomas Fuchs 3

2. Intercorporeality as a Foundational Dimension of Human

Communication—​Jens Loenhoff 25

3. Feeling Our Way: Enkinesthetic Enquiry and Immanent

Intercorporeality—​Susan A. J. Stuart 51

4. Haptic Sociality: The Embodied Interactive Constitution

of Intimacy Through Touch—​Marjorie Harness Goodwin 73

PART T WO Extended Intercorporeality

5. Children’s Expressive Handling of Objects in a Shared

World—​Mats Andrén 105

6. The Cultural Organization of Intercorporeality: Interaction,

Emotion, and the Senses Among the Wolof of Northwestern
Senegal—​Christian Meyer 143
viii Contents

7. Taking the World by Hand: How (Some) Gestures

Mean—​Elena Cuffari and Jürgen Streeck 173

8. Intercorporeality at the Motor Block: On the Importance

of a Practical Sense for Social Cooperation and
Coordination—​Thomas Alkemeyer, Kristina Brümmer and
Thomas Pille 203

9. Intercorporeal Phantasms: Kinesthetic Alignment with Imagined Bodies

in Self-​Defense Training—​Anja Stukenbrock 237

PART THREE Intercorporeality Beyond the Body

10. Sensible Objects: Intercorporeality and Enactive Knowing Through

Things—​Tomie Hahn and J. Scott Jordan 267

11. More than a Body: A Material Engagement Approach —​L ambros

Malafouris and Maria Danae Koukouti 289

12. Challenges of Conducting Interaction with Technologically

Mediated Bodies—​Elizabeth Keating 303

13. Achieving Intersubjectivity in Augmentative and Alternative

Communication (AAC): Intercorporeal, Embodied, and Disembodied
Practices—​Peter Auer and Ina Hörmeyer 323

14. Wild Meaning: The Intercorporeal Nature of Objects, Bodies,

and Words—​J. Scott Jordan and Chris Mays 361

Index 379
 Acknowledgments

The ideas for this book were first seeded in 2005–​2006 when Jürgen Streeck
and J. Scott Jordan met as Fellows of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research
(ZiF) at Bielefeld University where they were co-​members of the research group
Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines, directed by Ipke Wachsmuth
and Günther Knoblich. They soon discovered their shared interest in the abil-
ity of humans and other animals to anticipate one another’s actions, an ability
that forms an essential foundation for intersubjectivity, and they agreed that this
ability is not amenable to individualistic accounts of mind and action that con-
tinue to inform much research and theorizing in social and cognitive psychol-
ogy, neuroscience, linguistics, and other disciplines. This shared interest and
dissatisfaction led us to organize a series of symposia: Projection and Anticipation
in Social Interaction (2006) and The Enculturated Body: Time-​Scales of Meaning
in Embodied Communication (2007), both at ZiF, and, joined by Christian Meyer,
The Body Shop—​A Symposium about the Senses in Human Interaction (2011) at the
Moody College of Communication, The University of Texas at Austin. The phe-
nomena and conception of intercorporeality, as proposed by Maurice Merleau-​
Ponty, played an increasingly important role in the discussions at these symposia,
and we became increasingly confident that intercorporeality could indeed serve to
integrate otherwise disconnected attempts to work out how embodied minds/​
mindful bodies managed to make common sense with one another in social
interaction. The 2007 and 2011 symposia received additional support from the
Mind Science Foundation of San Antonio, Texas. The editors wish to express
their gratitude to all of the institutions and individuals that have made these sym-
posia and conversations, and thus this book, possible. Charles Goodwin, to whom
it is dedicated, is the visionary who first imagined the synthesis of knowledge
that Intercorpeality reaches for, and the synthesis of our proliferating insights into
the actual processes by which human beings make and understand their worlds
together in moment-by-moment interaction. He models how to let this knowl-
edge grow through the incessant and rigorous practice of a seeing and feeling
mind fully open to the world and the knowledge and souls of others.
 Contributors

Thomas Alkemeyer is Professor of Sociology and Sociology of Sport at the Carl

von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. His research interests include
sociological practice theories, sociology of the body, practices of subjectivation,
and cultural studies.

Mats Andrén works as associate lecturer at the Child Studies unit at the
Department of Thematic Research at Linköping University, Sweden. His main
research interests are bodily expression, social interaction, and children’s
development. He is member of the board of the International Society for Gesture
Studies.

Peter Auer received his academic training at the universities of Cologne,

Manchester, and Constance, and now holds a chair of German linguistics
at the University of Freiburg (Germany). He has done extensive research on
bilingualism, phonology and dialectology, prosody, interaction—​ including
“atypical interaction”—​and on spoken language from a syntactic point of view.

Kristina Brümmer is a research assistant at the Carl von Ossietzky University

in Oldenburg, Germany and affiliated with the Institute of Sport Science and
the Working Group “Sociology and Sociology of Sport.” Her research interests
include sociological practice theories, sociology of sport and the body, practices of
subjectivation in high performance sports, sport, and technology.

Elena Cuffari is an assistant professor of philosophy at Worcester State University.

She is interested in how people experience and modify meaning, how bodily and
social coordination processes are involved in such experiencing and modifying,
and in possibilities for more ethical and just meaning co-​creation.

Thomas Fuchs is a psychiatrist and philosopher who holds the Karl Jaspers
Professorship of Philosophy and Psychiatry and is Head of the Section
“Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy” at the Psychiatric
Department at the University of Heidelberg. His major research areas lie in the
xii Contributors

fields of phenomenological psychopathology and psychology, as well as embodied

and enactive cognitive science.

Tomie Hahn is an ethnomusicologist and performer. She is an associate professor

in the arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and affiliated with
the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic. Her work primarily focuses
on issues of embodiment, transmission of embodied cultural knowledge, the
senses, and identity.

Marjorie Harness Goodwin is distinguished professor of anthropology at UCLA.

She investigates the embodied resources through which people construct
meaning and social organization in everyday life. Her interests include children’s
peer groups on the street and playground, and the ways in which family members
constitute their social relationships through situated, embodied practices of care
and creativity.

Ina Hörmeyer studied German linguistics, philosophy, and general linguistics

in Münster and Freiburg. She received her PhD from the University of Freiburg
where she examined the use of electronic communication aids and bodily
resources in augmentative and alternative communication.

Elizabeth Keating is a professor in the department of anthropology at the

University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include social impacts
of technology, virtual work teams, cross-​cultural communication, computer-​
mediated communication, and the role of language in social stratification.

Maria Danae Koukouti studied social anthropology at Cambridge (Wolfson

College). Her research interests are in visual anthropology, materiality, and the
anthropology of self and the body.

Jens Loenhoff studied sociology, philosophy, psychology, and communication

science. He is professor of communication studies at the Faculty of Humanities
at the University of Duisburg-​Essen. His research interests are communication
theory, history of ideas, intercultural communication, semiotics, and philosophy
of language.

Lambros Malafouris received his PhD at Cambridge and is a teaching and

research fellow at Keble College and the Institute of Archaeology at the University
of Oxford. His research interests lie broadly in the archaeology of mind and the
philosophy of material culture.

Chris Mays is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada,

Reno. His current research examines the implications of complexity and systems
theory in rhetoric and writing studies.
 Contributors xiii

Christian Meyer has received training in sociology and anthropology and is now
a professor of general and cultural sociology at the University of Constance.
His research interests focus on culture and interaction, practice theory, and
qualitative methods.

Thomas Pille works at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany,
and is affiliated with the Institute of Sport Science and the Working Group
“Sociology and Sociology of Sport.”

J. Scott Jordan received his PhD in cognitive psychology and the neurophysiological
basis of perception at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, Illinois. He is
currently the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Illinois State University
in Normal, Illinois. His research interests include the relationship between event-
related brain potentials, memory, and attention; and the relationship between
action planning and spatial perception, as well as embodied communication in
humans and machines.

Jürgen Streeck is a professor of communication studies, anthropology, and

Germanic studies at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests
include embodiment in interaction, communication, and language, workplace
communication, and oral poetry.

Susan A. J. Stuart is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

Her current interests lie in the field of enkinesthesia, intersubjectivity, proto-​
moral activity, and experience, metaphysics, phenomenology, and existential
crisis.

Anja Stukenbrock received her PhD at the University of Heidelberg and finished
her habilitation at the University of Freiburg. She has held professorships at
the Universities of Duisburg-​Essen and Jena and is currently a professor of
German linguistics at the University of Lausanne. Her research areas include
conversation analysis, grammar and interaction, multimodality, mobile eye-​
tracking, linguistic nationalism, language, and trauma.
 Introduction
Christian Meyer, Jürgen Streeck, and J. Scott Jordan

The tr aditional view of the human body as a signaling device by which cogni-
tive states, intentions, and mental imagery are expressed, with verbal and “nonver-
bal” communication as distinct channels, has been giving way to a multitude of
holistic and multimodal approaches to communication and social action. Common
to these new approaches is the conviction that meaning is grounded in embodied
experience, that individual action emerges as the product of interaction between
organisms and their others, and that embodied understandings are often precon-
ceptual, cannot be encoded in language, yet are nevertheless real. Thus we have
witnessed the detection of a “neuronal mirror mechanism” in rhesus monkeys
by neuroscientists (Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004), the formulation of “social
intelligence” (Goody 1996) and “cooperative foraging” (Sterelny 2012) theorems
in philosophy and evolutionary anthropology, research on “distributed cognition”
in anthropology and cognitive science (Hutchins 1995, 2006), the positing of
“shared intentionality” in evolutionary psychology and anthropology (Tomasello
2008, 2014) and philosophy (Gilbert 1990; Bratman 1992), and the postulation of a
“human interaction engine” (Levinson 2006).
However, beginning as early as the late 1930s, but especially since the 1950s,
anthropologists and behavior researchers from other disciplines had already
relied on film and, later, video technology to identify, observe, and describe the
numerous behavioral processes in which an interacting human body resonates,
entrains, or even merges with another. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead
(1942) used film to show what they perceived as the distinct Balinese pattern of
anticlimactic interaction in teasing sequences between mothers and infant sons.
The collaborative project The Natural History of an Interview, which took place at
Palo Alto in 1955–​1956 and involved Bateson, the anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell,
the psychiatrist Frida Fromm-​Reichman, and the linguist Norman McQuown
among others (McQuown 1971; see Leeds-​Hurwitz 1987) revealed the microcoor-
dination of movement that is in play, e.g., when interaction participants change
posture together. This research on a few minutes of quasi-​psychotherapeutic
interaction led to the development of the methods of context analysis by Albert
xvi Introduction

Scheflen (1973), Adam Kendon (Kendon 1990), Fred Erickson (Erickson and
Shultz 1977), and Ray McDermott (McDermott and Roth 1978). In the 1970s,
conversation analysts, notably Charles Goodwin (1979), showed how verbal
utterances, including their syntactic format, hitherto seen as paradigmatic pro-
ductions by individual speakers, when spoken in the presence of others are in
fact the result of ongoing interaction in which the parties’ eyes and their track-
ing of each other’s eye-​movements are central components. These are exam-
ples of intercorporeal processes—​that is, activities in which the single body’s
agency is subsumed by the production of a We, and would be pointless with-
out the simultaneous participation of an other. This kind of “we-​ relation”
(Schutz and Luckmann 1973, 61 et seq.) has been addressed in the past, partly in
relation to child development, partly to face-​ to-​
face interaction, and called
alternatively “bi-​personality” (Christian and Haas 1949), “great-​we” (Vygotsky
1998, 235 et seq.), and “primordial sharing situation” (Werner and Kaplan 1963,
42 et seq.).

Shifting Models of Communication

and Interaction
At the present time, research on embodied interaction and communication not
only attracts the attention of linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, and com-
munication scholars, but also scholars in disciplines like neuroscience, cognitive
psychology, philosophy, education, and even archeology. Collectively, interaction
researchers strive to move away from the vision of interaction, intersubjectivity,
and social process that is embodied in this iconic diagram 1 from Saussure’s Cours
de Linguistique Generale (1972 [1916], 14):

Figuratively speaking, completing this diagram by drawing out the moving

bodies underneath the talking heads, and explaining how the rapport achieved
between them supports the understanding achieved by the talking heads, is the
concern of everyone who studies embodied communication. Yet, how these bod-
ies and their relations are drawn, and whether anything else beyond the body is
 Introduction xvii

included in the diagram, are issues of some consequence for research. Saussure’s
talking heads are connected by wire, and communication is construed as transfer
of mental content. This vision extended not only to talk, but to action more gener-
ally: many theories of action start from individual intention and take interaction,
coordination, and similar phenomena as its product. But how do we describe, talk
about, and explain the overt and covert actions and the tacit practices of a We in
situations as the one described above?

A New Paradigm
The alternative view offered is one that starts from “people waltzing, paddling a
canoe, playing a piano duet, or making love,” as Clark (1996, 3) put it, and if we
were to draw the underlying model of much contemporary research, the result
would look much more lively, fleshy, and dynamic than Saussure’s diagrammatic
figures. As Behnke (1997, 198) puts it, “my body is something I do” and “I do
not do it alone.” I do not perform my body alone, but within an encompassing
“inter-​kinesthetic field” (Behnke 2008). This field includes not only the pres-
ences, movements, and micromovements of other (inanimate or animate) bod-
ies in my peripersonal space, but also the sedimented traces of such presences
and movements in the architectures and the artifacts around my body. My I is
entangled right from the beginning in a corporeal culture that is not necessar-
ily of my own making, even though I may perpetuate it through my own way of
making a body, the way(s) in which I have learned to make a body, with varying
degrees of consciousness or self-​awareness of what it is that I do. As a matter of
fact, the human species evolved as an apprentice in environments that have been
shaped by appropriative action, objectivations, and forms of cognitive extension
(cf. Sterelny 2012; Jordan and Mays, this volume).
Intercorporeality, as we view it, is a useful and indispensable concept for the
study of embodied interaction. It fills a gap in the current nomenclature of inter-
action studies. This gap has become apparent especially in the study of forms
of interaction in which several individuals take turns with one another or even
coalesce in using their bodies as agents, media, or objects of action—​often sup-
ported and sustained by media and other artifacts—​as well as of particularly
complex and fast-​paced forms of social interaction—​sports, manual cooperation
(e.g., in music-​making, blacksmithing, and milling [see Meyer, this volume]),
and other sorts of everyday activity. Established terms like “coordination,” “align-
ment,” and “intersubjectivity,” as well as “routine” and “joint intention,” are
unable to grasp the shared, embodied and, at the same time, spontaneous and
creative (that is, situationally adjusted) character of these activities.
In the eyes of the editors, a completed diagram of interacting, communicat-
ing bodies to replace Saussure’s wired heads would look more like a Baroque
xviii Introduction

painting—​t hink Rubens, with people’s limbs and flesh entangled and pushing
and pulling one another, or the Roman sculpture of Laocoon and his sons, des-
perately battling the lethal entanglement of snakes. Or, to take a more modern
example, like Paul Himmel’s photography series “Ballet Serenade” of 1951–​1952.
Close observation of the kind that these artists cultivated reveals vast differ-
ences in the control humans may have over their bodies—​d ifferences in agency
and patiency, as well as differences in states of awareness concerning the body’s
doings. Yet much contemporary research on embodied interaction that works
on the basis of video footage continues to use language that figures the body
as a tool or instrument, and the intentional mind as its master. Ironically, in
attempts to explain more exalted forms of sociality (e.g., movement synchrony
and other forms of microcoordination) many researchers continue to invoke
models in which fundamentally autonomous individuals control their separate
bodies and move them in order to achieve coordination, synchrony, understand-
ing (notable exceptions are Zlatev et al. 2008 and Foolen et al. 2012). In this
fashion, the social character and qualities of the bodies are treated as unlikely
outcomes of the parties’ incessant efforts to overcome their isolation. Among
other problems, this model raises the question of who, and what, the implied
subject or agent controlling and using each body is. If the body is an instru-
ment that can be put to social uses, then who is the user who controls it? It is
difficult to avoid dualist language in accounts of intelligent human action, but
it is essential if we ever want to fully understand how embodied human beings
communicate.

The Concept of Intercorporeality

In this book, we appropriate and present Merleau-​Ponty’s conception of inter-
corporeality (intercorporéité) as an alternative—​that is, as a radical and coherent
conception of the human body as being constituted by its corporeal relations and
interactions with other human or animate bodies—​a conception, that is, in which
the body is never alone in the first place, or only in conditions of deprivation that
we recognize as inhumane. Intersubjectivity—​the phenomenon of understand-
ing, of sharing minds—​is always—​and always in specific ways—​embedded and
experienced in concrete, intercorporeal action. As Sheets-​Johnstone writes

the sense-​makings that begin in infancy and that ground our ongoing sense
of ourselves and others as animate forms are the foundation of what is
commonly called an intersubjective world, but what, given its anchorage in
tactile-​kinesthetic life, is more properly termed an intercorporeal world. This
world is rich in affective, cognitive, and moral implications precisely because
it is anchored for all of us in bodily being. (Sheets-​Johnstone 2002, 139)
 Introduction xix

The purpose of this book is to reintroduce Merleau-​Ponty’s concept and to show

how it—​or a particular concrete interpretation of it—​c an help our research
and explanation of the relationships among intersubjectivity, embodiment,
and corporeal co-​presence. Our perspective comes close to one recently artic-
ulated by a group of philosophers and cognitive scientists (De Jaegher and
Di Paolo 2007; Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009; see also Fuchs, this volume),
who have turned to Merleau-​Ponty’s work in support of their conception of
the human body as the active center of cognition, social understanding, and
culture making. For the enactive approach, “cognition is embodied action”
(De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007, 486), and “enactive intersubjectivity” involves
“mutual incorporation,” a process “in which the lived bodies of both partici-
pants extend and form a common intercorporality” (Fuchs and De Jaegher
2009, 465). We believe that this view explicates a conception that has also, if
often more implicitly, informed much empirical research on human face-​to-​
face interaction.
Merleau-​Ponty introduced the concept intercorporéité in counterdistinction
to—​and ultimately as a foundation for—​the phenomenological notion of intersub-
jectivity which, in his view, centered too much on the constitution of the interactive
other in the consciousness of ego (see, e.g., 1968, 180). Intercorporeality initially
refers to pre-​predicative, pre-​reflective, and pre-​ conceptual planes of engage-
ment. The concept, sometimes also described as carnal intersubjectivity, draws on
Husserl, who had argued that our given bodily existence is the foundational condi-
tion of the very possibility of intersubjectivity. Referring to Husserl (especially his
Ideas II [1989]; cf. Zahavi 2003, 104). Merleau-​Ponty (1962, 106) asserts that the
human body has the power of “double sensations”:

When I touch my right hand with my left, my right hand, as an object,

has the “strange property” of being able to feel too. The two hands, how-
ever, are never simultaneously touching and being touched. When the
two hands are pressed together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt
together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambig-
uous set-​up in which both hands can alternate the rôles of touching and
being touched. (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 106)

In similar manner, a handshake in the interaction with another person “is

reversible, I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching”
(Merleau-​Ponty 1968, 142). Merleau-​Ponty thus believed that it is through the
corporeal experience of the animate, acting other that we acquire a sense of being
a living self: we experience ourselves as the source of our changing affective
responses to the predictable and unpredictable actions of others. In our engage-
ments with other bodies, we are able not only to embody the other while the
xx Introduction

other simultaneously embodies us—​a state he called “compresence”—​but also to

embody ourselves in analogous fashion to how we embody the other:

The reason why I have evidence of the other man’s being there when
I shake his hand is that his hand is substituted for my left hand, and
my body annexes the body of another person in that “sort of reflection”
it is paradoxically the seat of. My two hands “coexist” or are “compre-
sent” because they are one single body’s hands. The other person appears
through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one
single intercorporeality. (Merlau-​Ponty 1964, 168)

This compresence is the reason

why I am able to understand the other person’s body and existence “begin-
ning with” the body proper, the reason why the compresence of my “con-
sciousness” and my “body” is prolonged into the compresence of my self
and the other person. (Merleau-​Ponty 1964, 175)

The existential given of being a body—​this, my body—​can be extended—​pro-

longed—​not only as conjectural interpretation, but as real experience, into alter’s
body. And while ego extends into alter, alter simultaneously extends into ego. This,
in our view, is the central and seemingly paradoxical property of intercorporeality:
that as humans we are able not only to embody the other while the other simulta-
neously embodies us, but also embody ourselves in the same way as we embody
the other. Our body can be a subject or object for us in the same way as the other
can be one. When alter and ego shake hands, I, as a subject, shake your hand and
let my hand, as an object, be shaken by you at the same time, while you, as a sub-
ject, shake my hand and let your hand, as an object, be shaken by me at the same
time. In intercorporeal interaction, therefore, a double embodiment is created in
which object and subject are able to temporarily merge, since the body is both sub-
ject and object anyway, “because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and
because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and
my body touching, there is overlapping encroachment, so that we must say that
the things pass into us as well as we into the things” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 123).

The Human Inclination for Intercorporeality

With his concept of intercorporeality, Merleau-​Ponty emphasizes the fact that
even after we have learned as infants to clearly distinguish between ourselves
(our own bodies) and alter (the bodies of others), we are still able and even fated
to continue experiencing the bodily presences and sensations of others when we
 Introduction xxi

share the same sensory and corporeal space. Examples of this kind of intercorpo-
reality are ubiquitous and include, along with the hands shaking or dapping one
another, people waltzing, paddling a canoe, playing a piano duet, or making love,
as well as the most basic forms of human interaction including eyes meeting
(Meyer, this volume), bodies embracing (Goodwin, this volume), lips kissing, or
voices uttering and being heard in turn.
The aim of the concept of intercorporeality is thus to enlarge ego’s reflexive
circle so as to include alter ego (just as well as the environment that is populated
by things), so that, say, two shaking hands are compresent or coexistent as one and
the same interbody belonging to both co-​participants in interaction (see Stuart,
this volume). As alter ego does (and experiences) the same, the two hands shaken
and shaking in a greeting constitute an “interbody” at the crossing of two reflexive
circles; and for a moment, both hands belong to both egos at the same time. The
result, according to Merleau-​Ponty, is a co-​perception at the interface of two (or more)
interacting bodies. This co-​perception is constitutive for all kinds of intercorporeal
encounters—​not only in regard to the sense of touching, but equally to all the other
modalities, as for example in the experience of seeing someone seeing (looking): “I
see that this man over there sees, as I touch my left hand while it is touching my
right” (Merleau-​Ponty 1964, 170).
Merleau-​Ponty’s theoretical point to start from self-​perception to explain—​as
its extension—​t he perception of (and intercorporeality with) the other has been
criticized (notably by Joas 1996). Joas suggests to instead adopt a position inspired
by George H. Mead who insisted that the organism is already “tied into the struc-
ture of social interaction, even if at that point it does not yet have an awareness of
the boundaries between itself and the social or physical world” (Joas 1996, 183).
In other words, the individual and its perceptions is only a function of intercor-
poreality, and by no means its starting point, since “the relation of the actor to his
body is itself already shaped by intersubjective structures” (1996, 184). However,
since within the phenomenological movement, Merleau-​Ponty was the first to
address questions of child development, individuation and socialization (from
1933 on—​see Merleau-​Ponty [1934] 1996; cf. Lefort 2010, 38), we think that this
critique—​justified as it might be in regard to other phenomenologists—​misses
the point in the case of Merleau-​Ponty.

Intercorporeality in Infants
Findings in developmental psychology (e.g., Condon 1971; Stern 1977; Nadel 1986;
and Trevarthen 1998) support such a position. In infant interaction “dances”
(Stern) we find what we might consider to be the most “outspoken,” the least
inhibited intercorporeal dialogues. When we watch infants interacting with oth-
ers, we observe what Trevarthen has called primary intersubjectivity: forms of
xxii Introduction

resonance, motor mimicry, and entrainment that precede self-​other and subject-​
object differentiations. These moments show how we—​ as human beings—​
move from a stage of undifferentiation to cognizing the world as separate from
us. Through the experience of the animate, acting other, we gain a sense of a
living self. Trevarthen’s influential work on primary, secondary, and tertiary
intersubjectivity (Trevarthen 1979; Trevarthen and Hubley 1978)2 is grounded
in the frame-​by-​frame, close-​up analysis of recordings in which infants, includ-
ing neonates, interact with adults. Assuming that children are born with “innate
intersubjectivity” (Nagy 2008)—​that is, preadapted to social interaction by their
“innate sensitivity to kinematic, energetic, and physiognomic parameters of oth-
ers’ movements” (Trevarthen 1998, 23), Trevarthen articulates a theory of pri-
mary intersubjectivity as “intersubjective control by rhythmic expression” (23).
Primordial intercorporeality occurs through the dimensions of time, form, and
intensity of motor behavior, and changes in emotional and motivational states are
conveyed by

fine and rapid … glides and leaps of pitch or volume of voice, eyebrow
flashes, prebeat syllables, suffix morphemes, rhythmic details and embel-
lishments, rapid hand gestures, quick head moves, shifts of gaze … that
appear in abundance in all spontaneous conversational communication.
(Trevarthen 1993, 151)

In this way, a kind of intercorporeally based proto-​conversation is brought about

by “reciprocity in rhythmic timing” and “mimetic sympathy” (Trevarthen 1998,
36). The interpersonal transfer of movement parameters like timing and intensity
“permits the intercoordination of inner psychological states between subjects” and
“enables them to ‘resonate with’ or ‘reflect’ one another” (Trevarthen 1993, 126).
Thus, as the infant habitualizes social movement patterns, it simultaneously inte-
riorizes the corporealities, action potentials, and promises for the intercorporeality
of and with others (Trevarthen 1998). Fuchs, in this volume, elaborates on these
findings, suggesting the concept of interaffectivity as basis for a primary or intuitive
empathic understanding. Moreover, as Fuchs says, the sharing and understanding
of each other’s feelings is also based on an intercorporeal memory or implicit relational
knowledge acquired in early childhood. It conveys a basic sense of social attunement
or a social musicality. Basic empathy as mediated by embodied interaction may sub-
sequently be extended by higher-​level cognitive capacities including perspective-​tak-
ing and imaginary transposition. In this way, intercorporeality and interaffectivity
can be seen as the basis of social cognition.
While primary intersubjectivity is a matter of face-​to-​face interaction, second-
ary intersubjectivity emerges when infant and adult, roughly around the ninth
month, begin to turn their attention to objects. Secondary intersubjectivity is
 Introduction xxiii

the product of a shift from mutual to joint attention and begins when the parties
mutually recognize their orientation to objects and the world and understand one
another in terms of their actions with objects. It is, in brief, mediated by things.
Only tertiary intersubjectivity, eventually, is mediated by language and symbolic
systems.

Intercorporeality in Adults
However, forms of primary intersubjectivity, acquired at the beginning of life,
remain functional throughout the life-​span, as several chapters of this book
demonstrate (Stuart, Goodwin, Stukenbrock), even though in later years human
beings become capable of more easily withdrawing and shutting themselves
away from others. This individual solipsism, as we argue in this book, is an
achievement or inhibition (Kinsbourne and Jordan, 2009), not the natural state
of human existence. This position is not new, and it has been supported by a
great deal of empirical research. Studies in this vein illustrate the specificity
and heterogeneity of the processes involved, which accordingly speak to the
scattered interests of diverse disciplines. Intercorporeality was a core feature of
some of the first interactional phenomena and processes that were subjected
to close, film-​based scrutiny during the 1950s (Condon 1971; McQuown 1956;
Scheflen 1964): all of them involved coordination between bodies. Scheflen
studied how participants in psychotherapy form postural configurations which
frame (Bateson 1972) phases of activity and embody the parties’ working consensus
(Goffman 1959, 9–​10) as well as alliances between pairs of participants (“withs”;
see Goffman 1971) or antagonisms of the moment. The key to how a posture
signifies is its relatedness to the simultaneous postures of others. Postures
are elements of interpersonal, relational, co-​embodied systems (Bateson 1972).
This is most apparent when postures are shifted: they are shifted together. In
other words, through individual repositionings, the shared interactional system
adjusts or recalibrates itself. While such shifts at first always look like unpredict-
able happenings in which two people reveal that they are really one, connected
by some supraindividual force, close inspection of these moments usually shows
that they involve sequential interaction in which one party proposes or preen-
acts a shift and is then, in a second step, joined by the other when he completes
the change in posture (Kendon 1990). One upshot of this perspective has been
greater appreciation of the degree to which anticipation is involved in social inter-
action. Simultaneity of behavior in social interaction is often the result of small-​
scale anticipations and projections, leaving us with the task of explaining what it
is that allows some units of action to have their course be anticipated so that an
organized We can arise from unnoticed interactions at the boundary of self and
other. Socialized bodies are good at intuitively anticipating each other’s moves.
xxiv Introduction

Parallel findings have been made in investigations of speaker-​listener interac-

tion. It has been shown that listeners’ body-​parts, including eyelids and brows,
torso, and fingers frequently synchronize for periods of time with incoming
speech; in other words, minimal acts such as blinking or fidgeting are timed and
patterned to coincide with tone-​group boundaries and pitch accents. They track pro-
sodic units of speech. How speakers manipulate rhythmic and other prosodic fea-
tures of speech and how listeners track these patterns so that a shared movement
and vocal rhythm comes into existence, and how breaks in such emerging struc-
tures reset interactions, has been the subject of a considerable body of research
by interactional linguists and conversation analysts (Barth-​Weingarten, Reber, and
Selting 2010; Couper-​Kuhlen and Selting 1996; Deppermann and Günthner 2015).
In each case, human bodies present themselves as capable of precise microtuning
with other human bodies; bodies, in their unattended play, show themselves to be
intercorporeal to the core, composed of abilities to resonate with others.
Gradually we are also being introduced to worlds of sensory communication
that are unfamiliar to many of us, the visual world of the deaf, the tactile and
auditory world of the blind, and the tactile communication of members of deaf
communities who are losing their eyesight (Edwards 2012), and we are learning
about differences in the ways the senses (touch, gaze) are recruited for face-​to-​
face interactions across societies. Video technology and slow motion have enabled
us to note with precision what is available to interaction participants’ senses from
moment to moment—​to reconstruct the emergence of meaning from the first-​
person perspective of the participants.
While research in conversation analysis has focused on the dynamic and
projective formats of society’s members’ communicative acts (i.e., on ways in
which units of language and embodied action as sociocultural, historically con-
stituted resources, facilitate interactional cooperation), other groups of research-
ers have given greater weight to the body’s social sensibilities and ability to
resonate. According to the enaction approach, “social understanding … arises
in the moment-​to-​moment interaction of two subjects” and includes “compo-
nents such as bodily resonance, affect attunement, coordination of gestures …
and others” (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009, 466). Fuchs and De Jaegher illustrate
mutual incorporation and participatory sense-​making with the example of the
feed-​forward mechanisms in a tennis-​match, where a return requires that the
player incorporate the incoming ball’s trajectory—​and thus the act of the other
player—​from the very beginning into the design of the return. Froese and Fuchs
(2012) conclude from such observations:

Our lived and living bodies can become extended such that they are essen-
tially intertwined with those of others in a way that prevents any concep-
tual or ontological reduction to the isolated individual bodies. (Froese and
Fuchs 2012, 214)
 Introduction xxv

Intercorporeality and Resonance

If Merleau-​Ponty is right in his assumption that ego and alter co-​perceive their
bodily stances in social situations in the form of compresence mediated by
our intercorporeality, then an ongoing co-responsivity and mutual adjustment
between alter and ego would be the consequence. Merleau-​Ponty has put this pro-
cess as follows: “The gesture which I witness outlines an intentional object. This
object is genuinely present and fully comprehended when the powers of my body
adjust themselves to it and overlap it” (Merleau-​Ponty 1962, 185).
Drawing directly on this idea by Merleau-​Ponty and on elaborations made
by Schmitz (1989), Fuchs (2000, 2002, this volume) has introduced the con-
cept of resonance to refer to the understanding of different ways of intercorporeal
adjustment. In particular, Fuchs distinguishes between two forms of intercor-
poreal resonance: mimetic and complementary resonance. Mimetic resonance is
based on the similarity and co-​perception that one living body establishes with
another one. When we experience another body and its expressive repertoire,
we are also able to empathize and “feel with it” and to express all this with our
own body. In the cases of complementary and agonistic resonance, in contrast,
instead of establishing a doppelgänger relation to alter, the co-​body becomes a
counterpart. Some emotional expressions, for example, do not trigger mimetic
reactions (as in pain), but complementary ones (e.g., anger and rage often pro-
duce fear or shame). Dominance displays, in turn, either generate submission or
some kind of resistance or counteraggression.3 Intercorporeality, as Fuchs (2000)
understands it, is therefore incomplete when only considered from its mimetic
side: the complementary side, even struggles for power and dominance, are inter-
corporeal as well.
In his philosophical anthropology, Arnold Gehlen has equally referred to the
concept of resonance, arguing that not through intellectual reflection, but by
resonating as a living body with their animated environment—​including gods,
animals and machines, and particularly their forms of movement, rhythms, and
action circles—​human beings come to a self-​understanding which helps them
outbalance their constitutive lack of instincts. Resonance, for him, is thus a form
of inner sense for the internal constitution of human beings (Gehlen 1980).
The concept of resonance thus also emphasizes that people tune in with
their social, cultural, and ecological environment (see Strecker 2000; Meyer and
Girke 2011). Whereas concepts like communication or coordination tacitly imply
a conscious conduct of humans in responding to each other, resonance stresses
the elusive power that is exerted in communication and that is not easily con-
trolled or even consciously registered by us. Resonance accords with a view that
social life is emergent and constantly needs mutual adaptation. Resonance is a
seemingly noncoercive force, a seductive power of culture and communication,
which affects the body, the emotions, and the mind. Audiences for example do
xxvi Introduction

not merely strive to literally understand speakers, but are instead caught up in
dense fields of concomitant associations and implications as well as their own
bodily responses. Within a framework informed by Merleau-​Ponty’s point of
view, social relations are, first and foremost, created through processes of inter-
corporeal resonance, which form the basis for any further personal exchange of
stances, representations, ideas, and opinions.

Fields of Intercorporeal Reciprocity

Much insight into the possibilities of carnal intersubjectivity has come from
research on hand gestures (see Streeck and Cuffari, this volume). When we study
gestures “in the wild” (cf. Hutchins 1995), we detect myriad ways in which ges-
tures encode embodied knowledge of a common world, knowing how of various
degrees of specificity. Gestures are coupled with shared worlds and therefore
capable of evoking familiar actions, objects, and other material experiences, and
they depend on such shared knowledge of the jointly inhabited world for their
intelligibility. Gesture, the most complex of the bodily modalities of expression,
always shows the body to be socialized, and how its skills interpenetrate one
another, rather than being separated into different modules.
Adult interaction, notably in public settings, commonly is intercorpore-
ality once removed: bodies are co-​present and perceive and resonate with one
another, but they do not directly impact or manipulate one another. Intimate
interaction involving touch is difficult to study, because the experience of touch
is more often than not private, limited to those who participate in it (but see
Goodwin, this volume). Technically, intimate corporeal interaction is difficult to
film. Culturally, intimate interaction is typically protected from public scrutiny.
We consequently rely on memory and literature, not on scientific research, to
capture, reflect on, and think through those interactions in which every bit of
the self’s corporeal experience is constituted by the corporeal actions of another
and in which other’s actions and experiences are in turn constrained and shaped
by the corporeal actions of self during which the satisfaction that is gained is
the result of the quality of intercorporeal tuning. While we may experience this
structure of intercorporeality in doings such as sexual interaction, cuddling, or
Greco-​Roman wrestling, it can also serve as a model for lesser forms of corporeal
engagements such as a successful handshake or an agreed-​upon completion of
an action-​sequence in our public social lives. Fully fleshed out forms of intercor-
poreal reciprocity provide a yardstick by which to assess the degree to which other
forms are removed from immediate engagement and supported by the distance
senses (vision, hearing).
The manifold uses of touch as a vehicle of affect, but also of social control,
have recently come into view in research on family communication (Cekaite
 Introduction xxvii

2012, 2015; Tulbert and Goodwin 2011; Goodwin this volume). What comes into
view in these studies is the normative cultural patterning of forms of intercor-
poreal engagement and experience. Hugs are subjected to precise interactional
management in which the voice is as relevant as the hands and arms, and they
serve as a standard or currency to measure degrees of social and affective com-
mitment. Accordingly, bodies develop society-​specific sensory abilities to gauge
(and respond to) affect in others.
Another field of interaction has only recently come into the focus of close-​up,
naturalistic research: sports. Team sports and dyadic competitive sports in par-
ticular offer rich sites for the study of fast-​paced and yet meticulously coordinated
bodily activities under conditions of mental stress, physical strain, environmental
noise, pressure for action, and high risk, while making the complexities of these
processes easily accessible for study in comparison to other fields such as war
or disaster management. As the collection of studies in Meyer and Wedelstaedt
(2017) shows, the meticulous ways of intercorporeality in sports include differ-
ent responsive forms of retrospection, prospection, and anticipation, as well as
temporal mergings and decouplings of bodies with objects and/​or other bodies
in space. Furthermore, in sports individual participants, as in acrobatics, some-
times have to place their bodies as objects at the disposal of their teammates.
Interaction in sports is not only distinguished from other fields by the special
role that the body plays, but also by conditions for communication that are far
from ideal if we insist on a communication model that starts from Saussurian
talking heads who take turns in exchanging encoded meaning. But if we conceive
communication as intercorporeality the reality of sports becomes translucent at
once. In addition, sports also bring the role to light that material artifacts and
environments play in intercorporeal activities. An interesting phenomenon that
transcends the animate–​nonanimate (or subject-​object, agent-​patient) divide and
that still awaits further exploration is surfing: When we ride on sea waves, due to
our intercorporeal competences, we are able to bodily adjust to a moving natural
environment, exploit its powers, and anticipate its course.

Dimensions and Resources of Intercorporeality

All animals possess the ability to anticipate the consequences of their own motions
and, to some extent—​as in hunting—​the motions of others. But as socialized
human persons we inevitably—​and often unwittingly—​anticipate each other to
perform culturally familiar, conventionally meaningful acts. The existence of
these meanings is not contingent on the existence of linguistic categories for
them. We are born into a world made up of other bodies and their habits and
responses to us, as well as by material-​cultural environments, which, over time,
inculcate their constraints on our muscles, joints, and skins. These incorporated
xxviii Introduction

constraints that we share with others in our society provide us with a measure
of common embodied sense, a shared world to which we belong. The structur-
ing by artifacts that intervene between us and others, and the habituation of our
bodies’ motions through their use, is an essential level of participatory sense-​
making, while our constant contact with animate counterparts (human persons
or animals in graded animation) provides the basis for intercorporeal sense-​mak-
ing. In other words, our fine-​t uned interactional abilities are the product of both
“muscle memory” (Noland 2009) and interactional “muscular bonding” McNeill
1995), or better, of “inter-body memory” and reverberations of an “intrabodily”
and “interbodily resonance” (Froese and Fuchs 2012) within one “space of mus-
cular sensation” (Wittgenstein 1975, 102). Thus the picture that emerges when we
think of interaction in terms of intercorporeality is one of human bodies in joint
and mutually anticipated motion (that Husserl called protention); of bodies that
co-​perform actions in which they voluntarily and reflexively switch their parts as
subject and object; and of bodies that co-​perceive not only the situation at hand,
but also the embodied experiences of one another and the surrounding world
that they presently inhabit together.
The spatio-​temporal embeddedness of situations influences the social actions
conducted and a specific, shared sense of the here and now is created in social
interaction among co-​participants. Essentially, three different dimensions have
been addressed, but never systematically integrated: the interactional creation of
a joint sense (1) of time, (2) of space, and (3) of agency (person).

(1) In some interactions the creation of a joint sense of time (entrainment)

is of crucial importance. This is the case for example in music where a
“mutual tuning-​in” (Schutz 1964; cf. Haviland 2011) is essential for being
able to play together. The same is true for other realms, in which activities
have to be very precisely timed and coordinated among co-​participants in
order to be conducted successfully (one might think of sports and many
kinds of collaborative work—​c f., e.g., Alkemeyer 2006). Of course, the
conducting of ordinary conversations is another example for an activity
in which precise timing (such as the accurate placing of pauses and of
turn onsets) is essential for the avoidance of social conflict (cf. Jefferson
1973; Ford and Thompson 1996; Cowley 1998). Conversations have a
certain rhythm that is established within the course of the activity itself
and orients the doings of the participants (Auer et al. 1999; Uhmann
1996). In his “enchronic perspective” on human communication, Enfield
(2013, 29) has reminded us that in interaction, joint temporality is
normatively laden, since by co-​interactants “sequences of interlocking or
interdependent communicative moves are taken to be co-​relevant, and
causally and conditionally related.”
Another random document with
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indeed, most unexpected. Before this matter had been settled
the German Minister was killed. Suddenly meeting this affair
caused us deep grief. We ought vigorously to seek the murderer
and punish him.' No more. The date July 18; the murder June
20!

"Yet even in this decree there was a complete 'volte-face.'

Missionaries who were by the decree of July 2 'to be at once
driven away to their own countries' were by the decree of July
18 'to be protected in every province,' 'to be protected
without the least carelessness.' The truculence and
belligerence of the decrees issued when our troops had been
driven back had disappeared; the tone now was one of
justification and conciliation. Only one interpretation was
possible—that the Chinese had been defeated. Confirmation came
the same day. A messenger sent out by the Japanese
successfully passed the enemy's lines and brought us the news
that we had so long awaited. … By the same messenger a letter
was received by the French Minister. … The same messenger also
brought to the Belgian Minister a despatch from his Consul at
Tien-tsin. … Days followed quietly now, though 'sniping' did
not cease. Several casualties occurred among the garrison. A
Russian was killed and an Austrian wounded; an Italian wounded
and also a Japanese. In the Fu it was still dangerous for the
Christian refugees to move about, and several were hit and two
killed. But the Yamên became more and more conciliatory, until
we could gauge the advance of the reliefs by the degree of
apology in their despatches. But all supplies were rigorously
cut off, and the sufferings of the Christians were acute. …

"On the 22nd Sir Robert Hart received a despatch from the
Tsung-li-Yamên. They naïvely remarked that it was now one
month since they had heard from him, and his silence gave them
concern for his welfare. Moreover, a report had just reached them
that his house had been burned, but they expressed the hope
that he and al his staff were well. Another despatch requested
his advice upon a Customs question that had arisen in
 Shanghai. Sir Robert Hart wrote a dignified reply. For more
than a month, he said, he had been a refugee in the British
Legation with all his staff, having had to flee from his house
without warning; that all Customs records and papers, and
every paper and letter of value that he had accumulated during
a lifetime, had been destroyed; that not only his house, but
some 19 other buildings in the occupation of his staff had
been burned with all their contents; that the acting postal
secretary had been killed by a shell, and two other members of
his staff—Mr. Richardson and Mr. Macoun—had been wounded by
bullets. …

"Meanwhile, the armistice continued, if armistice it can be

called where true armistice there was none. Desultory firing
continued, and sniping was still the chief pastime at the
Chinese outposts. Friendly relations were, however, opened
with some Chinese soldiers in the Fu. A Japanese Volunteer
established a bureau of intelligence to which the enemy's
soldiers had access. One soldier was especially communicative,
and earned high reward for the valuable information that he
conveyed to us. For a week from July 26 to August 2 daily
bulletins based upon this information of the advance of the
relief column were posted on the bell tower of the British
Legation.
{127}
An unbroken series of victories was attending our relief
forces. … Letters were given to the soldier to take to the
General of the relief column, and a reward offered if an
answer should be brought next day, but no answer was ever
brought. Our informant had brought the armies along too
quickly. He was compelled to send them back. Accordingly on
the 31st he made the Chinese recapture Chang-chia-wan, killing
60 of the foreigners; advancing upon Matou he killed 70
foreigners more, and drove them back to An-ping. Next day he
drove the foreigners disastrously back to Tien-tsin with a
loss of 1,000. The day was equally disastrous to himself. Our
informant had killed the goose that lay the golden egg. For a
messenger arrived on that day with letters from Tien-tsin,
dated July 30, informing us that a large force was on the
point of leaving for our relief. … Meanwhile, while our
informant was marching our relief backwards and forwards to
Tien-tsin, Prince Ching and others were vainly urging the
Ministers to leave Peking, but whether they left Peking or not
they were to hand over the Christian refugees now under the
protection of the Legations to the mercies of the Government,
which had issued a decree commanding that they be exterminated
unless they recanted their errors. In other communications
Prince Ching 'and others' urged that the foreign Ministers
should telegraph to their Government 'en clair' lying reports
of the condition of affairs in Peking.

Two days after the cessation of hostilities Prince Ching 'and

others' sent a despatch to Sir Claude MacDonald to the effect
that it was impossible to protect the Ministers in Peking
because 'Boxers' were gathering from all points of the
compass, and that nothing would satisfy them (the 'Boxers')
but the destruction of the Legations, and that the Ministers
would be given safe conduct to Tien-tsin. Sir Claude, in
reply, asked why it was that protection could be given to the
Ministers on the way to Tien-tsin and yet could not be given
to them while in the Legations in Peking. Prince Ching 'and
others' replied: 'July 25, 1900. … As to the inquiry what
difference there is between giving protection in the city or
on the road, and why it is possible to give it in the latter,
there is only an apparent discrepancy. For the being in the
city is permanent, the being on the road is temporary. If all
the foreign Ministers are willing to temporarily retire we
should propose the route to Tung-chau and thence by boat down
stream to Tien-tsin, which could be reached in only two days.
No matter what difficulties there might be a numerous body of
troops would be sent, half by water to form a close escort,
half by road to keep all safe for a long way on both banks.
Since the time would be short we can guarantee that there
would be no mishap. It is otherwise with a permanent residence
in Peking, where it is impossible to foretell when a disaster
may occur.' … In the envelope which brought this letter were
two other communications of the same guileless nature. 'On
July 24,' said the first, 'we received a telegram from Mr.
Warren, British Consul-General in Shanghai, to the effect that
while China was protecting the Legations no telegram had been
received from the British Minister, and asking the Yamên to
transmit Sir C. M. MacDonald's telegram to Shanghai. As in
duty bound we communicate the above, and beg you to send a
telegram "en clair" to the Yamên for transmission.' Tender
consideration was shown for us in the second letter:—'For the
past month and more military affairs have been very pressing.
Your Excellency and other Ministers ought to telegraph home
that your families are well in order to soothe anxiety, but at
the present moment peace is not yet restored, and your
Legation telegrams must be wholly "en clair," stating that all
is well, without touching on military affairs. Under those
conditions the Yamên can transmit them. The writers beg that
your Excellency will communicate this to the other foreign
Ministers.'

"Evasive replies were given to these communications. … Our

position at this time compelled us to temporize. We knew from
the alteration in tone of the Chinese despatches that they had
suffered defeats and were growing alarmed, but we did not know
how much longer international jealousies or difficulties of
obtaining transport were to delay the departure of the troops
for Tien-tsin. … Though now nominally under the protection of
an armistice sniping still continued, especially in the Fu,
into any exposed portion of the besieged area. … The Chinese
worked on continuously at their fortifications. … Finding that
the Ministers declined to telegraph to their Governments 'en
clair' that all was well with the Legations, the
Tsung-li-Yamên wrote to Sir Robert Hart asking him to send
home a telegram in the sense they suggested. Sir Robert
replied diplomatically, 'If I were to wire the truth about the
Legations I should not be believed.'
 "A malevolent attempt was next made by the Chinese to obtain
possession of the refugees who were in our safe keeping. On
July 27 they wrote to Sir Claude MacDonald saying that 'they
hear that there are lodged at the Legations a considerable
number of converts, and that, as 'the space is limited and
weather hot, they suggest that they must be causing the
Legations considerable inconvenience. And now that people's
minds are quieted, these converts can all be sent out and go
about their ordinary avocations. They need not have doubts or
fears. If you concur, an estimate should be made of the
numbers and a date fixed for letting them out. Then all will
be in harmony.' The reply of the diplomatic body was to the
effect that while they were considering the two last
letters—one offering safe conduct to Tien-tsin and the other
declaring that the converts might leave the Legations in
perfect security—heavy firing was heard in the direction of
the Pei-tang, which was evidently being attacked in force;
that yesterday and last night a barricade was built across the
North Bridge, from behind which shots are being continuously
fired into the British Legation. The French and Russian
Legations are also being fired upon. As all this seems
inconsistent with the above letters, an explanation is asked
for before further consideration is given to the offer.
Promptly the Yamên sent its explanation. The Pei-tang
refugees, it seemed, who were starving, had made a sortie to
obtain food. And they had fired upon the people. 'A decree,'
it went on to say, 'has now been requested to the effect that
if the converts do not come out to plunder they are to be
protected and not to be continually attacked, for they also
are the children of the State. This practice (of continually
firing upon the converts) will thus be gradually stopped.'
{128}
Such a callous reply was read with indignation, and there was
not the slightest intention on the part of any Minister to
leave Peking. Yet on the 4th of August a decree was issued
appointing Yung Lu to conduct the foreign Ministers safely to
Tien-tsin 'in order once more to show the tenderness of the
Throne for the men from afar.' …

"On August 10, Friday, a messenger succeeded in passing the

enemy's lines, and brought us letters from General Gaselee and
General Fukushima. A strong relief force was marching to
Peking, and would arrive here if nothing untoward happened on
the 13th or 14th. Our danger then was that the enemy would
make a final effort to rush the Legations before the arrival
of reinforcements. And the expected happened. …

"Yesterday [August 13] passed under a continuous fusillade

which increased during the night. Then at 3 on this morning we
were all awakened by the booming of guns in the east and by
the welcome sound of volley firing. Word flew round that 'the
foreign troops are at the city wall and are shelling the East
Gate.' At daylight most of us went on to the wall, and
witnessed the shelling of the Great East Gate. We knew that
the allies would advance in separate columns, and were on the
qui vive of excitement, knowing that at any moment now the
troops might arrive. Luncheon, the hard luncheon of horse
flesh, came on, and we had just finished when the cry rang
through the Legation, 'The British are coming,' and there was
a rush to the entrance and up Canal-street towards the Water
Gate. The stalwart form of the general and his staff were
entering by the Water Gate, followed by the 1st Regiment of
Sikhs and the 7th Rajputs. They passed down Canal-street, and
amid a scene of indescribable emotion marched to the British
Legation. The siege has been raised.

"Peking, August 15. On reading over my narrative of the siege

I find that in the hurry and confusion of concluding my report
I have omitted one or two things that I had wished to say. In
the first place, I find that I have not in any adequate way
expressed the obligation of all those confined in the British
Legation to the splendid services done by the Reverend F. D.
Gamewell, of the American Episcopal Mission [who was educated
 as a civil engineer at Troy and Cornell], to whom was due the
designing and construction of all our defences, and who
carried out in the most admirable manner the ideas and
suggestions of our Minister, Sir Claude MacDonald. To the
Reverend Frank Norris, of the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel, our thanks are also specially due. He
superintended, often under heavy fire, the construction of
defences in the Prince's Fu and in other exposed places,
working always with a courage and energy worthy of admiration.
He was struck in the neck once by a segment of a shell, but
escaped marvellously from serious injury. He speaks Chinese
well, and Chinese worked under him with a fearlessness that
few men can inspire. In the second place, I noticed that I
have not sufficiently recorded the valuable services rendered
by Mr. H. G. Squiers, the First Secretary of the American
Legation, who on the death of Captain Strouts became Chief of
the Staff to Sir Claude MacDonald. He had been for 15 years in
the United States cavalry, and his knowledge and skill and the
resolution with which he inspired his small body of men will
not readily be forgotten. …

"To-day the Pei-tang Cathedral was relieved. Bishops, priests,

and sisters had survived the siege and, thanks to the
wonderful foresight of Bishop Favier, the Christians had been
spared from starvation. Japanese coming down from the north of
the city relieved the cathedral; French, British, and Russians
from the south arrived as the siege was raised. Mines had been
employed with deadly effect. The guards had lost five French
killed and five Italians. Some 200 of the Christians had
perished."

London Times,
October 13 and 15, 1900.

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (June-December).

Upright conduct of the Chinese Viceroys in
the Yang-tsze provinces.
 In his annual message of December 3, 1900, to Congress,
referring to the occurrences in China, the President of the
United States remarked with much justice: "It is a relief to
recall and a pleasure to record the loyal conduct of the
viceroys and local authorities of the southern and eastern
provinces. Their efforts were continuously directed to the
pacific control of the vast populations under their rule and
to the scrupulous observance of foreign treaty rights. At
critical moments they did not hesitate to memorialize the
Throne, urging the protection of the legations, the
restoration of communication, and the assertion of the
Imperial authority against the subversive elements. They
maintained excellent relations with the official
representatives of foreign powers. To their kindly disposition
is largely due the success of the consuls in removing many of
the missionaries from the interior to places of safety." The
viceroys especially referred to in this are Chang Chih-tung
and Liu Kun-yi, often referred to as "the Yang-tsze viceroys."

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (July).

Speech of German Emperor to troops departing to China,
commanding no quarter.

See (in this volume)

GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (OCTOBER 9).

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (July).

American troops sent to co-operate with those of other Powers.
Capture of Tientsin by the allied forces.
Death of Colonel Liscum.
Reported massacre of foreign Ministers and others in Peking.
The long month of dread suspense.
Overtures from Earl Li Hung-chang for negotiation.

"On the 26th of June Major Gen. Adna R Chaffee, U. S. V., was
appointed to the command of the American forces in China. He
 embarked from San Francisco on the 1st of July, reached
Nagasaki on the 24th, and Taku, China, on the 28th. … On
reaching Nagasaki he received the following instructions,
dated, … July 19: 'Secretary War directs that you proceed at
once with transport Grant, Sixth Cavalry, and Marines to Taku,
China, and take command of American land forces, which will be
an independent command known as the China relief expedition.
You will find there the Ninth and Fourteenth Infantry, one
battery of the Fifth Artillery, and one battalion of Marines.
Sumner sailed from San Francisco July 17 with Second Battalion
of Fifteenth Infantry and recruits to capacity of vessel.
{129}
Reinforcements will follow to make your force in the immediate
future up to 5,000, and very soon to 10,000. … Reports now
indicate that American Minister with all the legation have
been destroyed in Pekin. Chinese representative here, however,
insists to the contrary, and there is, therefore, a hope which
you will not lose sight of until certainty is absolute. It is
the desire of this Government to maintain its relations of
friendship with the part of Chinese people and Chinese
officials not concerned in outrages on Americans. Among these
we consider Li Hung Chang, just appointed viceroy of Chili.
You will to the extent of your power aid the Government of
China, or any part thereof, in repressing such outrages and in
rescuing Americans, and in protecting American citizens and
interests, and wherever Chinese Government fails to render
such protection you will do all in your power to supply it.
Confer freely with commanders of other national forces, act
concurrently with them, and seek entire harmony of action
along the lines of similar purpose and interest. There
should be full and free conference as to operations before
they are entered upon. You are at liberty to agree with them
from time to time as to a common official direction of the
various forces in their combined operations, preserving,
however, the integrity of your own American division, ready to
be used as a separate and complete organization. Much must be
left to your wise discretion and that of the admiral. At all
times report fully and freely to this Department your wants
and views. The President has to-day appointed you
major-general of volunteers.' …

"In the meantime the Ninth Infantry, from Manila, reached Taku
on the 6th of July. Two battalions of that regiment, under
Colonel Liscum, pressed forward to Tientsin, reaching that
point on the 11th, and on the 13th took part with the British,
French, and Japanese forces in an attack upon the southwest
part of the walled city of Tientsin, which had been rendered
necessary by the persistent shelling of the foreign quarters,
outside of the walls, on the part of the Chinese troops
occupying the city. Colonel Liscum's command formed part of a
brigade under General Dorward, of the British army, and was
assigned to the duty of protecting the flank of the allied
forces. In the performance of that duty it maintained a
position under heavy fire for fifteen hours, with a loss of 18
killed and 77 wounded. Among the killed was the gallant
Colonel Liscum, who thus ended an honorable service of nearly
forty years, commencing in the ranks of the First Vermont
Infantry at the outbreak of the civil war, and distinguished
by unvarying courage, fidelity, and high character. The
regiment was withdrawn from its position on the night of the
13th, and on the morning of the 14th the native city was
captured, and the southeast quarter was assigned to the
American forces for police and protection. …

"At the time of the capture of Tientsin the most positive and
circumstantial accounts of the massacre of all the ministers
and members of the legations in Pekin, coming apparently from
Chinese sources, had been published, and were almost
universally believed. The general view taken by the civilized
world of the duty to be performed in China was not that the
living representatives of the Western powers in Pekin were to
be rescued, but that their murder was to be avenged and their
murderers punished. In the performance of that duty time and
rapidity of movement were not especially important. The
resolution of the commanders of the allied forces,
communicated by Admiral Kempff on the 8th of July, to the
effect that 80,000 men would be required—20,000 to hold the
position from Taku to Tientsin and 60,000 to march to Pekin,
while not more than 40,800 troops were expected to have
arrived by the middle of August, practically abandoned all
expectation of rescuing the ministers and members of the
legations alive, for it proposed that after the middle of
August any forward movement should be still deferred until
40,000 more troops had arrived. On the 11th of July, however,
the American Secretary of State secured, through the Chinese
minister at Washington, the forwarding of a dispatch in the
State Department cipher to the American minister at Pekin, and
on the 20th of July, pursuant to the same arrangement, an
answer in cipher was received from Minister Conger, as
follows: 'For one month we have been besieged in British
legation under continued shot and shell from Chinese troops.
Quick relief only can prevent general massacre.' This dispatch
from Mr. Conger was the first communication received by any
Western power from any representative in Pekin for about a
month, and although it was at first received in Europe with
some incredulity, it presented a situation which plainly
called for the urgency of a relief expedition rather than for
perfection of preparation. It was made the basis of urgent
pressure for an immediate movement upon Pekin, without waiting
for the accumulation of the large force previously proposed."

United States, Secretary of War,

Annual Report, November 30, 1900,
pages 14-16, 19-20.

As mentioned above, in the instructions of the American

government to General Chaffee, the veteran Chinese statesman
and diplomat, Earl Li Hung-chang, well known in Europe and
America, had now been recalled by the Peking government to the
viceroyalty of Chili, from which he was removed six years
before, and had been given the authority of a plenipotentiary
 to negotiate with the allied Powers. He addressed a proposal
to the latter, to the effect that the Ministers in Peking
would be delivered, under safe escort, at Tientsin, if the
allies would refrain from advancing their forces to Peking.
The reply from all the governments concerned was substantially
the same as that made by the United States, in the following
terms: "The government will not enter into any arrangement
regarding disposition or treatment of legations without first
having free communication with Minister Conger. Responsibility
for their protection rests upon Chinese government. Power to
deliver at Tientsin presupposes power to protect and to open
communication. This is insisted on." Earl Li then asked
whether, "if free communication were established, it could be
arranged that the Powers should not advance pending
negotiations," and was told in reply: "Free communication with
our representatives in Peking is demanded as a matter of
absolute right, and not as a favor. Since the Chinese
government admits that it possesses the power to give
communication, it puts itself in an unfriendly attitude by
denying it. No negotiations seem advisable until the Chinese
government shall have put the diplomatic representatives of
the Powers in full and free communication with their
respective governments, and removed all danger to their lives
and liberty."

{130}

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (July-August).

Boxer attack on the Russians in Manchuria,
and Russian retaliation.

See (in this volume)

MANCHURIA: A. D. 1900.

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (August).

Appointment of Count Waldersee to command the allied forces.
 Field-Marshal Count von Waldersee, appointed to command the
German forces sent to China, being of higher military rank
than any other of the commanding officers in that country, was
proposed for the general command of the allied armies, and
accepted as such. Before his arrival in China, however, many
of the American, Russian, and some other troops, had been
withdrawn.

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (August 4-16).

The advance of the allied forces on Peking and the capture
of the city.

The following is from the report of General Chaffee,

commanding the American forces in the allied movement from
Tientsin, to rescue the beleaguered Legations at Peking: "On
my arrival at Tientsin I called on the various generals
commanding troops, and on August 1 a conference of generals
was held at the headquarters of Lieutenant-General Linivitch,
of the Russian army. Present at the conference were the
commanding general of the Russian army and his chief of staff;
Lieutenant-General Yamagutchi and his chief of staff;
Major-General Fukushima, of the Japanese army;
Lieutenant-General Gaselee, of the British army, and his chief
of staff, General Barrow; General Frey, of the French army; the
Germans were also represented by an officer of the German
navy; myself and Major Jesse M. Lee, Ninth Infantry, and
Lieutenant Louis M. Little, of the marines, who speaks French.
The purpose of this conference was to decide whether the
armies were ready to make a movement for the relief of Pekin.
It was disclosed in the conference that the Japanese, whose
forces occupied the right bank of the river in and about
Tientsin, where also were located the British and American
forces, had by various patrols determined that the Chinese
were in considerable force in the vicinity of Pei-tsang, about
7 miles distance up the river from Tientsin, and that they
were strengthening their position by earthworks extending from
the right bank of the river westward something like 3 miles,
and from the left bank east to the railroad embankment was
also being strengthened. The forces were variously estimated,
from reports of Chinese, at from 10,000 to 12,000 men in the
vicinity of Pei-tsang, with large bodies to the rearward as
far as Yangtsun, where it was reported their main line of
defenses would be encountered.

"The first question submitted for decision was 'whether a

movement should be made at once,' which was decided in the
affirmative, two Powers only dissenting, and these not
seriously, as their doubt seemed to be that the force we could
put in movement was not sufficiently strong to meet the
opposition that might be expected. The decision was that the
attack should be made on Sunday, August 5, and as the
Japanese, British, and American forces occupied the right bank
of the river, the Russians the left, the attack should be made
without change of situation of the troops, the British to send
four heavy guns to aid the Russian column. The strategy on the
right bank of the river was left to the determination of the
British, American, and Japanese generals. The force reported
to the conference as available for the movement was: Japanese,
about 8,000; Russian, 4,800; British, about 3,000; American,
2,100; French, 800. With special effort on the part of
Captains Byron and Wood, Reilly's battery was gotten to
Tientsin August 3 and assembled. We were also able to make one
pack train available on the 4th, just in time to march with
the column. The marines and Sixth Cavalry were gotten off the
'Grant' and to Tientsin August 3. The presence of the Sixth
Cavalry at Tientsin, dismounted, enabled me to take all
available men of the Ninth and Fourteenth, also all the
marines except one company 100 strong, left to assist the
civil government of the city. By arrangement prior to my
arrival the officers selected to establish a civil government
for Tientsin were to be allowed a military force, of which the
United States should furnish 100. I was compelled, of course,
to leave the Sixth Cavalry, because the horses had not
arrived. … The troops moved out from the city of Tientsin
during the afternoon and night of August 4 and bivouacked in
the vicinity of Si-ku arsenal, the same that was taken by
Admiral Seymour in his retrograde movement."

The Chinese were driven from the Arsenal by the Japanese,

before whom they also fell back from Pei-tsang, and the first
serious battle was fought at Yang-tsun, on the 6th. Having
rested at Yang-tsun and cared for its sick and wounded, on the
7th, the army moved forward on the 8th, encountered slight
resistance at Shang-shia-wan on the 11th, found Tong-chow
abandoned, on the 12th, and reached Pekin on the 14th, having
suffered more from heat, fatigue, and the want of potable
water on the march, than from "Boxers" or imperial troops.

Returning now to the report of General Chaffee, we take from

it his account of the final movement to the walls of Pekin, of
the forcing of the gates and of the clearing of Chinese troops
from the city: "The Japanese when taking possession of
Tong-Chow in the morning [of the 12th] advanced troops toward
Pekin for a distance of 6½ miles. It was finally agreed that
the next day, the 13th, should be devoted to reconnaissance;
the Japanese should reconnoiter on the two roads to the right
or north of the paved road which is just north of the canal;
the Russians on the paved road, if at all; the Americans to
reconnoiter on the road just south of the canal; the British a
parallel road 1½ miles to the left of the road occupied by the
Americans. On the 14th the armies should be concentrated on
the advance line held by the Japanese, and that that evening a
conference should be held to determine what the method of
attack on Pekin should be. On the morning of the 13th I
reconnoitered the road to be occupied by the Americans with
Troop M, Sixth Cavalry, Reilly's battery, and the Fourteenth
Infantry up to the point specified in our agreement, or about
7 miles from Tong-Chow. Finding no opposition, I directed the
remainder of my force to march out and close in on the advance
guard. This force arrived at midnight. The British
reconnoitered their road with some cavalry. The Japanese
 reconnoitered their front and also the front which properly
belonged to the Russians.

{131}

"For reasons unknown to me the Russians left their camp at

Tong-Chow about the time that my troops were marching to close
on my advance guard. They followed the road which had been
assigned to them, and about nine o'clock heavy firing was
heard in the vicinity of Pekin. It was the next day
ascertained that they had moved forward during the previous
evening and had attacked the 'Tong-pien-men Gate,' an east
gate of the city near where the Chinese wall joins the Tartar
wall. Very heavy artillery and considerable small-arm firing
was continued throughout the night. At the time of the
occurrence I supposed the firing to be the last efforts of the
Chinese troops to destroy the legations. …

"The 14th being the day decided upon for the concentration on
the line 7 miles from Tong-Chow, I made no preparations for
carrying on any operations beyond a small reconnaissance by a
troop of cavalry to my front, which duty I assigned to Captain
Cabell. … My cavalry had been absent not more than an hour,
when Mr. Lowry, the interpreter who had accompanied it, raced
back and informed me that Captain Cabell was surrounded by
Chinese cavalry. I immediately ordered a battalion of the
Fourteenth Infantry to fall in, and we went forward about a
mile and a half and found Captain Cabell occupying some
houses, firing from the roofs on a village in his front. I
insisted on the French troops giving me the road, which they
reluctantly did. Having joined Cabell, I continued the
reconnaissance to my front, wishing to get as near the wall of
the city as I could, but not expecting to move my whole force,
which was contrary to the agreement at Tong-Chow on the
evening of August 12. Without serious opposition we arrived at
the northeast corner of the Chinese city, having brushed away
some Chinese troops or 'Boxers' that fired from villages to
our left and front. About 10 o'clock I saw the advantage of
holding the ground that I had obtained, and directed all my
force to move forward, as I had then become aware of Russian
troops being in action on my right, and could also hear the
Japanese artillery farther to the right. My left flank at this
time was uncovered, except by a small force of British
cavalry. The British troops did not advance from Tong-Chow
until the 14th, owing to the agreement previously referred to.
On that day they marched for the line of concentration and
found my force advancing on Pekin. At noon a British battery
was at work a mile to my left and rear.

"At 11 a. m. two companies of the Fourteenth Infantry, under

the immediate command of Colonel Daggett, had scaled the wall
of the Chinese city at the northeast corner, and the flag of
that regiment was the first foreign colors unfurled upon the
walls surrounding Pekin. The two companies on the wall, with
the assistance of the troops facing the wall, drove away the
Chinese defenders from the corner to the east gate of the
Chinese city, where the British entered without opposition
later in the day. About noon it was reported to me that the
Russians had battered open 'Tung-pien-men gate' during the
night and had effected an entrance there. I arrived at the
gate soon afterwards and found in the gate some of the
Fourteenth Infantry, followed by Reilly's battery. The Russian
artillery and troops were in great confusion in the passage,
their artillery facing in both directions, and I could see no
effort being made to extricate themselves and give passage
into the city. One company of the Fourteenth Infantry deployed
itself in the buildings to the right of the gate and poured
effective fire onto the Tartar wall. Captain Reilly got two
guns through a very narrow passage to his left, tearing down a
wall to do so, and found a position a few yards to the left of
the road where he could enfilade the Tartar wall, section by
section, with shrapnel. The Fourteenth Infantry crossed the
moat and, taking position paralleling the moat, deployed along
a street facing the Tartar wall, and with the aid of the
artillery swept it of Chinese troops. In this way, gradually
working to the westward, the Tartar wall was cleared of
opposition to the 'Bait-men gate' and beyond.

"Orders were sent to the Ninth to follow up the movement of

the Fourteenth Infantry and Reilly's battery as soon as the
wall was cleared of Chinese; also to follow the movement to
the 'Chien-men' gate of the Tartar city. The marines were to
follow the general movement, but later were ordered to protect
the train. At about 3 o'clock p. m. our advance had arrived
opposite the legations, the fire of the Chinese having
practically ended, and we drew over to the Tartar wall and
entered the legation grounds with the Fourteenth Infantry by
the 'water gate or moat,' Reilly's battery passing through the
'Chien-men' gate, which was opened by the American and Russian
marines of the besieged force. The Fourteenth Infantry was
selected on this occasion in recognition of gallantry at
Yang-tsun and during this day. The British troops entered at
the 'Shahuo' gate of the Chinese city, and following a road
through the center of the city to opposite the legations,
arrived there through the 'water gate or moat' in advance of
the United States troops. Having communicated with Minister
Conger, I withdrew the troops from the legation and camped
just outside near the Tartar wall for the night. My casualties
during the day were 8 enlisted men wounded in the Fourteenth
Infantry, 1 enlisted man wounded of Battery F, Fifth
Artillery, and 1 officer and 2 enlisted men wounded of the
marines. …

"I was informed by Mr. Conger that a portion of the imperial

city directly in front of the Chien-men gate had been used by
Chinese to fire on the legations, and I determined to force
the Chinese troops from this position. On the morning of the
15th I placed four guns of Reilly's battery on the Tartar wall
at Chien-men gate and swept the walls to the westward to the
next gate, there being some slight opposition in that
direction, supported by poor artillery. About 8 o'clock a. m.
 the Chinese opened fire on us at Chien-men gate, from the
second gate of the imperial city north of Chien-men gate,
whereupon I directed an attack on the first gate to be made,
and in a short while Lieutenant Charles P. Summerall, of
Reilly's battery, had opened the door of this gate. Our troops
entered, and were met with a severe fire from the next gate,
about 600 yards distant. Fire was directed upon the second
gate with the battery and such of the infantry as could be
elevated on the Tartar wall and side walls of the imperial
city and act effectively. In the course of half an hour the
Chinese fire was silenced, and Colonel Daggett led forward his
regiment to the base of the second gate. Lieutenant Summerall
was directed to open this gate with artillery, which he did.
The course just indicated was pursued for four gates, the
Chinese troops being driven from each gate in succession, the
fourth gate being near what is known as the 'palace grounds,'
which is surrounded by the 'imperial guards.'

{132}

"At a conference that afternoon it was decided not to occupy

the imperial city, and I withdrew my troops into the camp
occupied the night before, maintaining my position on the
Tartar wall at Chien-men gate. The idea of not occupying the
imperial city was not concurred in by the ministers in a
conference held by them the next day. In their opinion the
imperial city should be occupied. It was later decided by the
generals to occupy the imperial grounds, and in consequence of
this decision I reoccupied the grounds we had won on the 15th,
placing the Ninth Infantry within as guard at the gate where
our attack ceased.

"During the 15th and the attack upon the gates referred to our
losses were 2 enlisted men killed and 4 wounded, Ninth
Infantry; 3 enlisted men killed and 14 wounded, Fourteenth
Infantry; 1 enlisted man, Battery F, Fifth Artillery, wounded.
At 8.50 o'clock a. m. of this date Captain Henry J. Reilly,
 Fifth Artillery, was struck in the mouth and almost instantly
killed when standing at my left elbow observing the effect of
a shot from one of his guns by his side.

"At a conference of the generals on the afternoon of the 16th

the Chinese and Tartar cities were divided to the various
forces for police and protection of the inhabitants. The
United States troops were assigned to the west half of the
Chinese city and to that section of the Tartar city lying
between the Chien-men gate and Shun-chin gate of the south
wall of the Tartar city and north to the east and west street
through the Tartar city, being bounded upon the east by the
wall of the imperial city."

United States, Secretary of War,

Annual Report, November 30, 1900,
pages 61-71.

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (August 5-16).

The horrors of the allied invasion.
Barbarity of some divisions of the army in the march
from Tien-tsin to Peking.
Murder, rape, pillage and destruction.

Of the conduct of some divisions of the allied army which

advanced from Tien-tsin, and which represented to "the heathen
Chinee" the civilized and Christian nations of Europe and the
Western world, a writer in "Scribner's Magazine," who
evidently shared the experience and witnessed the scenes of
the march, gives the following account: "The dreary stretches
through which the Pei-ho flows, never attractive to the
Western eye, presented, as the allied armies slowly traversed
them, a scene of indescribable desolation. … In a region which
usually contained a population of many millions, scarcely a
human being, besides those attached to the allied armies, was
to be seen. Towns and villages were completely deserted. In
China an ordinary town will have from one to three hundred