The Devil Soldier (14 page)

Establishing credit accounts at such large Shanghai mercantile
houses as H. Fogg and Company and Jardine-Matheson, Ward next went shopping for provisions, equipment, and weapons. The last of these was no easy proposition, even given the large amounts of money Ward was free to spend. The Chinese desire for firearms and simultaneous ignorance of modern developments in weaponry meant that even eighteenth-century muskets—some still operating on the flintlock principle—could bring high prices from the Taipings and their imperialist enemies. Ward was interested primarily in superior small arms, in revolvers and repeating rifles that were true percussion pieces. (True percussion involved the use of percussion caps in the ignition of charges and often of paper cartridges instead of loose powder—all of which produced a drastically increased rate of fire.) These items were both scarce and expensive, and in finding them Ward made use of many Shanghai middlemen. Charles Hill, the man who had brought “the Troy dredging machine” to China, was also well-connected in the arms trade and disposed to help Ward. Others followed his lead, among them
Albert L. Freeman (later an administrator of Ward’s estate), who was an agent for H. Fogg and Company and who during this period had contact with Ward, in his own words, “almost daily …, having many business transactions with him.” Yang Fang had also built up an arsenal inside the Western settlements, although it is unclear whether any of these arms were of use to Ward. In all likelihood they were the kind of obsolete equipment that could be sold for quick and dramatic profit to the rebels and the imperialists.

Although artillery was available for private purchase in Shanghai, Ward’s main energies in the early days went into securing the up-to-date small arms that he prized. For his officers, Ward preferred revolvers made by the famed American Samuel Colt. By the late 1850s Colt—who had financed his early gunsmithing activities by staging lucrative demonstrations of the effects of nitrous oxide on the human body—had built an expansive factory in the United States and had even opened a smaller operation in London. His revolvers were known and valued in every part of the world, and adventurers such as Ward had played no small role in building that popularity. The highest-selling models were the Colt Dragoon—a heavy, .44 caliber six-shooter that came with either a seven-and-a-half- or an eight-inch barrel—and the Old Model Navy Pistol.
Introduced in 1851, the .36 caliber Old Model Navy was lighter than the Dragoon (weighing only two pounds, ten ounces), fired more reliably, and was the most sought after “belt pistol” in the world—as well as the preferred weapon of duelists. Colt revolvers were amazingly accurate pieces, more accurate than many rifles, and a man armed with two Colts as well as extra cylinders for fast reloading was a dangerous adversary, capable of holding off or even defeating large groups of lesser-armed opponents.

For his enlisted men, Ward sought the repeating, breech-loading rifles built by another American, Christian Sharps. Later famous as “
The
Buffalo Gun,” the Sharps repeating carbine was an advanced but solidly built and eminently reliable weapon. It took paper cartridges, which were cut open and prepared for ignition by closure of the knife-sharp breechblock, saving time and trouble. In 1848, 1852, and 1859 Christian Sharps had refined and repatented his .52 caliber weapon, which had a barrel length of thirty inches and could be fired by an average rifleman at a rate of ten rounds per minute. Superior shooters could achieve fifteen and even twenty rounds per minute: Just a dozen such men armed with Sharps rifles could produce a withering fire. Sharps had also contracted with the British government to produce some 6,000 carbines for the British army in 1855, and over the next nine years all but 2,400 of these pieces either were destroyed or found their way into private hands. British arms were among the most sought after weapons in Shanghai, and it is not unlikely that Ward would have come across some of these missing Sharps products, as well as less exceptional but still adequate rifles produced by British manufacturers.

Repeating carbines were not always available in the numbers Ward required, however, and he often had to settle for muzzle-loading muskets. In doing so, he was careful to seek models that bore the
TOWER
imprint on their locks: the proof of British government–supervised manufacture. Among the other long arms available in Shanghai were Prussian muskets and rifles, although only a few of these employed Johann Dreyse’s famous “needle” firing system, which was shortly to help the Prussians overcome the Danes, the Austrians, and the French in a succession of wars. Ward’s officers were also supplied with swords,
and before long his troops were learning how to handle the peculiarly effective Chinese “stinkpots.”

In short, what had only recently been a collection of much (and in some cases properly) maligned vagabonds had by mid-June 1860 become a mercenary force that caused the foreign authorities in Shanghai appreciable anxiety, not only because they posed a threat to Western neutrality in the Chinese civil war but also because they were armed to the teeth with weapons that could give a large detachment of regular Western troops a very respectable fight. And there was little reason to doubt that if foreign diplomats and soldiers attempted to terminate Ward’s activities, such a conflict would take place: Many of Ward’s men had been cruelly treated by their countrymen before arriving in Shanghai. The example of Ward’s American recruits is typical. Under American maritime law, a ship’s master was required to pay a seaman three months’ wages if he discharged the man in a foreign port. But if the seaman deserted, the master incurred no such obligation. Because of this, any troublesome or supernumerary sailor was generally beaten into forced desertion or taken ashore by his officers, encouraged to drink himself into oblivion, then charged with desertion when he failed to return to his ship on time. In 1830 the desertion law had been slightly amended, and the U.S. consular service had become responsible for paying the three months’ severance pay. But this was only in cases where the seaman in question agreed to be discharged. Those men who desired to keep their posts but were marked for elimination by their captains continued to face beatings and trickery.

Naturally, men who were considered undesirable for any reason by their ship’s masters were also scorned by the foreign community in Shanghai: Ward and his new contingent were marked as outcasts before they even took the field. Insofar as the citizens of the settlements could ignore the well-armed mercenaries, they did so. But as Ward’s ranks swelled to nearly a hundred men, such ignorance became an increasingly difficult proposition. A. A.
Hayes, the Harvard-educated New Englander who was a junior partner for the Olyphant Company and who knew Ward in Shanghai, remembered that in the early days “[t]he English pronounced Ward a freebooter and a dangerous man.… Nor were we
Americans, I am bound to say, highly impressed at the outset by what we heard of our countryman.… He was regarded by most people as an outlaw, by many as a desperado.”

Ward established his training camp at the town of Kuang-fu-lin, a muddy, insect-infested patch of ground some twenty miles west-southwest of Shanghai. Here the process of disciplining the contingent and preparing it for battle began, with results that could only be described as indifferent. Andrew
Wilson—an English journalist and former editor of Hong Kong’s
China Mail
who was later attached to Ward’s force for two years and wrote an invaluable study of its operations—left a description of the Westerners Ward employed that throws light on the problem of discipline as well as on Ward’s attempts to cope with it:

As a rule they were brave, reckless, very quick in adapting themselves to circumstances and reliable in action; but, on the other hand, they were troublesome when in garrison, very touchy as to precedence, and apt to work themselves about trifles into violent states of mind. Excited by rebel sympathisers [
sic
] at Shanghai, and being of different nationalities, one half of them were usually in a violent state of quarrel with the other; but this, of course, was often an advantage to the commander.

While Ward understood that such men needed careful preparation before they could face the Taipings, the men themselves would hardly have been likely to acknowledge such a need. Even worse, Ward’s Chinese backers could not be made to see it. Having hired foreigners and supplied them with up-to-date weapons, Wu Hsü and Yang Fang evidently believed that the only thing left to do was find the rebels and defeat them. Ward’s attempts to gain time to prepare what became officially known as the Shanghai Foreign Arms Corps met with an increasingly impatient response from the holders of the purse strings, and Ward knew that if Wu and Yang issued an ultimatum, he would have no choice but to engage the Taipings before he was ready.

The Foreign Arms Corps’s Kuang-fu-lin camp was located near the headquarters of an imperial officer who was to work in close conjunction
with Ward during the years to come: Li Heng-sung. Described by one of Ward’s successors as a “useful puppet,” Li was a typical Chinese commander in that he had purchased his first commission. He subsequently displayed above-average determination, however, and was promoted for his courage in fighting the rebels in the Shanghai area. The Manchu military forces were divided, at their highest level, into eight armies, each of which was known by the pattern of its banner. Just below these “bannermen” in the imperial military hierarchy was the Army of the Green Standard, a national unit which, like the Banners, had once been an impressive force but was by 1860 a largely ineffective relic. Li Heng-sung’s troops were Green Standard “braves” (as most Chinese soldiers were known), and despite the fact that he seems to have been a fairly capable commander and was, in Dr.
Macgowan’s opinion, “highly esteemed” by Ward, Li’s actions were consistently hampered by the unreliability of his troops. In their very first encounters with the rebels, Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps acted in conjunction with Li’s braves, and before long the foreigners had learned for themselves the minimal value of imperialist assistance.

Between June 17 and June 22, 1860, the Taiping troops of the Chung Wang edged closer to Shanghai from the west and the northwest. Governor Hsüeh Huan decided to counterattack at the towns of T’ai-ts’ang and Chia-ting, and ordered Ward—through Wu Hsü—to support the imperialist attack with his one hundred men. Ward complied, and while no record of the precise role that the corps played in these engagements exists, the two towns were retaken from the rebels on June 26. Within days, however, the corps was drawn back to Kuang-fu-lin by a more important development: The city of Sung-chiang, only a handful of miles from Ward’s headquarters, had fallen to the rebels. Almost immediately, Wu Hsü and Yang Fang began to agitate for a Foreign Arms Corps counterattack on this strategic location, generally considered one of the gateways to Shanghai itself.

Ward demanded more time. Sung-chiang was surrounded by a wide, murky moat as well as a four-mile wall. The city’s formidable outer gates were built of strong teakwood banded with iron and were, in at
least some cases, protected by inner gates of similar construction. In all, it was not a job for which Ward’s men—who still lacked artillery and were untrained in siege techniques—were prepared.

But Wu and Yang were growing impatient; they desired some more significant return on their considerable investment than the victories at T’ai-ts’ang and Chia-ting. Fearful that his support would be cut off altogether, Ward agreed to make an attempt on Sung-chiang at the end of June. The result was predictable. The Foreign Arms Corps had no siege equipment, a deficiency Ward hoped to overcome by attacking at night and, with luck, achieving surprise. But the men of the corps—perhaps overly impressed by the part they had played in the two earlier victories—brought large amounts of alcohol with them on the Sung-chiang raid. By the time they were making their way across the flat, grassy terrain outside the city, they were making so much noise that the Taiping sentries were alerted to their approach. The corps suffered heavy casualties and was thrown into flight. “The miserable survivors,” Dr.
Macgowan wrote, “returned as stragglers to Shanghai, utterly disgusted. They were paid off and disbanded.”

For the first time the Western authorities in Shanghai were given good reason to believe that Ward would abandon his mercenary plans and perhaps quit China altogether, and for the first time Ward confounded them by immediately rekindling his dream of building a private army with which to, as he later put it, “flog the chang-maos.” In the face of Ward’s considerable determination, Western merchants and diplomats became ever more hostile, using both the press and their extraterritorial laws to try to ensure that the Foreign Arms Corps did not prompt Taiping interference with the unequal and sinister balance of trade that they had established in China.

Of the many personal traits that served Ward well in China, none was more valuable than his adaptability. He had seen what the majority of his Western mercenaries were capable of in the field: Recalcitrant, belligerent, and besotted, they had come close to destroying Wu Hsü and Yang Fang’s faith in their young commander. In the face of this disheartening spectacle, Ward dismissed almost all the men, retaining
only those who had demonstrated bravery and ability and whose arrogance might be transformed, with time, into something like authority. These few would become officers. But they would need men to command, and it was now necessary to rethink old notions about who in Shanghai would make the best soldiers of fortune. Ward took to the waterfront once again to grapple with this riddle and soon made an acquaintance who facilitated a solution.

Vincente Macanaya was twenty-three in 1860 and one of Shanghai’s large population of “Manilamen”—Filipinos who were handy on board ships and more than a little troublesome on land. Renowned as ferocious fighters, especially at close quarters, the Manilamen were in a class with the famous lascars of Malaysia and the pirates of the Bay of Bengal, groups that were also known to frequent the foreign settlements in Shanghai. As Spain was still in possession of the Philippines, the Manila-men were technically Spanish subjects. But by habit they were generally transients, at ease anywhere between India and Korea where laws were lax. Macanaya himself—who would, after his initial acquaintance with Ward, be known throughout Shanghai simply as Vincente—had been born in Manila and was a seasoned young man of singular courage. As Charles
Schmidt, who served with and knew him well, wrote while Vincente was still alive: