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Chinese loyalists at heart, had been waiting for. In the early hours of July 29, they sent their men spilling out into the streets. Long swords glimmered in the faint moonlight as the chilling chant of “Kill! Kill!” echoed down the narrow alleys. Most Japanese men had departed, and what followed was not so much a battle as a massacre. Years of pent-up anger was released in an orgy of blood. The Chinese police officers cut off the arms of old women and raped the young ones, before stabbing their genitals with bayonets. They decapitated others and lowered their heads in wicker baskets from the parapets.22 Japanese soldiers rushing to Tongzhou after the massacre encountered a horrific spectacle. “I saw a mother and child who had been slaughtered. The child’s fingers had been hacked off,” said one of them, Major Katsura Shizuo. He went on to describe the grisly scene at a Japanese store near the south gate of the city: “The body of a man, probably the owner, who had been dragged outside and killed, had been dumped on the road. His body had been cut open, exposing his ribs and his intestines, which had spilled out onto the ground.”23 A survivor told the Asahi Shimbun of the torture inflicted on some of the Japanese civilians before they were killed: “I chanced to see a man being dragged along by a wire. At that time I thought that he was only bound with it, but now I know that it was pierced through his nose.”24 After Tongzhou
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