The Devil Soldier (19 page)

All of this was unknown to Ward and the Foreign Arms Corps, who attacked in the predawn darkness of August 2. The approach to the city was made successfully: Leaving Burgevine in command of a second wave, Ward and Vincente took an advance party to Ch’ing-p’u’s southern gate and there erected scaling ladders. As the men began to make their way up the wall, there was still no sign of resistance from the garrison, and it appeared momentarily that Ward would be able to repeat his Sung-chiang triumph by seizing one gate and from that vantage point raking the city’s interior with rifle and cannon fire.

But then the trap was sprung. Savage and his Taipings had been alerted to Ward’s advance and were lying in ambush. A devastating barrage of musket fire ripped into the Foreign Arms Corps’s storming party as it reached the top of the wall, while other defenders began to pelt the men still on the scaling ladders and the ground below with heavy rocks and bricks. Ward himself received five wounds quickly, the worst to his face: A Taiping musket ball hit him in the left jaw and exited through his right cheek. According to Charles Schmidt, Vincente—immediately behind Ward—caught his commander as the latter fell backward, then somehow managed to get Ward back to the ground outside
the city. “There he [Vincente] stood in the midst of a perfect hail storm of stone, firing away like a fury, whilst his companions were dropping on all sides of him, killed by the unerring aim of the rebels on the walls.”

Unable to speak and bleeding profusely, Ward began to write out orders. Barely ten minutes had elapsed since the Taipings had opened fire, yet already half of Ward’s force had been killed or wounded. Recognizing the disaster for what it was, Ward ordered a general retreat toward Kuang-fu-lin and then Sung-chiang. The Taipings from Ch’ing-p’u gave chase but did not press the advantage, and the remnants of the Foreign Arms Corps struggled back into the safety of Sung-chiang’s walls, their wounded commander being carried for the last few miles in a sedan chair.

Despite his physical condition, Ward went quickly to Shanghai to enlist more men, buy more artillery, and try to shore up the damage done to his reputation among the Chinese by the defeat at Ch’ing-p’u. He arrived to find the Western communities gleeful over his misfortune. “The first and best item of intelligence we have to give our readers,” reported
the
North China Herald
on August 4,

is the utter defeat of Ward and his men before Ch’ing-p’u. This notorious man has been brought down to Shanghai, not as was hoped, dead, but severely wounded with a shot in his mouth, one in his side, and one in his legs.… He managed to drag his carcass out of danger, but several of his valorous blacks [Manilamen] were killed or wounded.… It seems astonishing that Ward should be allowed to remain unpunished, and yet not a hint is given that any measures will be taken against him.

The
Herald
’s complaint was justified: Even Britain’s Consul Meadows had come to the conclusion that, given existing circumstances, Ward could not be stopped. During the week Ward spent in Shanghai following the first attempt on Ch’ing-p’u, Meadows wrote a long and angry letter to Minister Frederick Bruce, detailing his many frustrations in trying to put an end to the Foreign Arms Corps’s activities. Meadows had quickly learned that he would not get any help in this effort from
the Americans:
Consul Smith had written him on July 13 to say that while some Americans had gone up-country illegally, their actions were simply a matter of the neutrality laws having “been overlooked inadvertently, but I hope and believe that there is a disposition on the part of our citizens to observe the laws.” Meadows had next attempted to convince the senior British naval officer in Shanghai to go upriver with a party of marines and arrest the Westerners at Sung-chiang, but, as Meadows complained to Minister Bruce, the officer “took no notice of my written request for assistance, and when I spoke to him, a day or two later on the subject, he stated that his instructions did not allow him to do police work.”

From the Chinese authorities Meadows got no satisfaction whatsoever, and he subsequently came “to the conclusion that it is impossible to enforce the Neutrality Ordinance so long as the Intendant [Wu Hsü] himself is the chief instigator of British subjects to violate it.” Furthermore, there was, said Meadows,

good reason to believe that the Taipings finding themselves attacked by men furnished with superior weapons and able to use them, have resorted to the same means of defense, and that there is a body of foreigners now in their employ. The pusillanimous and unpatriotic step taken by the Intendant and other Imperial Authorities seems not unlikely to end in large numbers of the most lawless and, in many cases, ruffianly foreigners being taught the means of maintaining themselves in a career of violence and depredation in the interior of the country, beyond the controul [
sic
] and even beyond the ken of the foreign authorities.

But while Meadows’s assessment was undoubtedly correct, he ignored the hard realities and choices facing the imperial authorities in Shanghai. Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps was the only even marginally effective instrument with which to challenge Taiping authority in the interior (certainly, the British and the other foreign powers were as yet unwilling to share such a responsibility). In addition, those Westerners who, like Meadows, persistently cried that Ward’s activities would bring
Taiping retribution down on Shanghai took no stock of the fact that the port was
the Chung Wang’s goal regardless of what Ward did. Shanghai’s resources were vital to the survival of the rebel movement, and whatever the opinions of the learned British consul, it was that fact—and not the operations of the Foreign Arms Corps—that was drawing the rebel army inexorably to the coast.

While in Shanghai during the first week of August, Ward received some inadequate medical attention, purchased two powerful eighteen-pounder guns along with a dozen other new pieces of artillery, and—driven by desperation—enlisted a group of Greek and Italian reinforcements. “Being,” as the journalist Andrew
Wilson understated it, “an irrepressible sort of element,” Ward then returned to Sung-chiang, gathered up all the able-bodied members of the corps, and marched once more on Ch’ing-p’u. This time, however, he settled in for an artillery bombardment and siege.

That Ward should have been able to recoup his position to such an extent while suffering from severe wounds is indicative of tremendous powers of physical endurance. In these, he was typical of many of the Western officers in his corps. Nearly all these men received multiple wounds during their encounters with the Taipings, and many operated effectively in spite of them. There is no doubt that they were assisted by liberal doses of strong liquor; yet their stamina was still remarkable. Ward’s investiture of Ch’ing-p’u on August 9 was undertaken while he was still unable to speak as a result of the shattering of his jaw and before his other wounds had healed or even been properly attended to. The loss of blood just a week earlier had been severe, and the pain must still have been immense, yet Ward was able to design an attack that came close to forcing Savage and the city garrison to surrender.

Any chance of such a result, however, was destroyed when Savage’s immediate superior, Chou Wen-chia, contacted the Chung Wang in Soochow and told him of Ch’ing-p’u’s plight. This second entrance of “devil soldiers” into the Kiangsu fighting alarmed the rebel commander, who quickly mustered between ten and twenty thousand men. “We set off from Soochow by boat,” the Chung Wang recalled, “arriving the following day, and went into action immediately. The foreign devils came
out to give battle and the two sides met and fought from early morning until noon, and the devils were severely beaten.” Ward had no hope of success against such a powerful rebel army, led by the most talented of Taiping commanders. The defeat was particularly disastrous, as Charles
Schmidt wrote, because

the rebels took all the large guns, vessels of war, stores, and money, and, by surrounding the imperial camp, killed nearly 100 Europeans, wounded nearly as many of the same, and caused a very great number of Chinese soldiers on board the vessels to jump over board and drown themselves, while the Imperial Chief Li [Heng-sung] barely escaped being taken prisoner. In this expedition Vincente also barely escaped being taken, having to cut his way through the rebels who had surrounded him.

Despite overwhelming odds against them, the Foreign Arms Corps managed to fight their way back to Sung-chiang. The Chung Wang followed close on their heels, and the gates of Sung-chiang had no sooner admitted the battered members of the corps than it was the Taipings’ turn to pen Ward up. (During this action, the Englishman Savage was gravely wounded.) Ward’s physical condition was now rapidly deteriorating and demanded more attention than could be given at Sung-chiang. At the insistence of Burgevine and the other officers of the corps, Ward was secretly lowered over the Sung-chiang walls to a riverboat waiting in one of the canals and was taken to Shanghai.

The corps’s losses at Ch’ing-p’u had been undeniably serious and produced a profoundly negative effect on Ward’s reputation in Shanghai. Yet the young American had come out of the fiasco in comparatively fortunate shape, given the severity of his strategic error in pressing the attack: For while the initial assault on Ch’ing-p’u was a logical move, it was also an obvious one, and the second attempt, rooted as it was in pride, was altogether unsound. Once it had become apparent that the Taipings were committed to holding Ch’ing-p’u, Ward would have served his own and the imperial cause better (if less dramatically) by consolidating his position at Sung-chiang and making sure that city could
continue to serve as a base of operations from which to relieve the pressure on Shanghai. Because of the limited size of Ward’s force, such relief could only have been achieved by striking not at points where the Taipings anticipated attacks and were gathered in strength (such as Ch’ing-p’u) but at less predictable and less fortified spots along their routes of advance and supply. And while the capture of Ch’ing-p’u might have augmented the prestige of the Foreign Arms Corps, it was certainly not worth risking the unit’s very existence. Only Shanghai itself was of ultimate value to the rebels; had Ward shown patience and built his strength slowly in Sung-chiang, the role he could have played in denying the port to the Chung Wang would have been that much more significant.

These were all lessons that Ward would absorb over the long months of recuperation and rebuilding that lay ahead. For the moment, his ill-considered determination to take Ch’ing-p’u forced him to work for the defense of Shanghai not from the strategic bastion of Sung-chiang but from within the port itself, and not as the independent commander of his own free-lance army but as one among many Westerners who rallied in mid-August to meet the advance of the Taipings.

On reaching Shanghai, Ward took refuge in the rooms of Albert Freeman, the agent for H. Fogg and Company who had regularly helped him secure arms and supplies. Severely weakened and in great pain, Ward nonetheless continued to write out instructions for the resupply of his men at Sung-chiang, as well as orders for Burgevine, who was in command of the garrison. On August 12 the Chung Wang completed his investiture of Sung-chiang, although it remains uncertain whether he actually took the city. He later claimed to have done so, and some Chinese sources support this assertion, saying that the Foreign Arms Corps abandoned the defense of Sung-chiang and only returned after the Chung Wang had moved west toward Hankow late in August. But other Chinese scholars—along with numerous Western writers—claim that Burgevine was able to hold off repeated rebel assaults and that the Chung Wang, anxious to move on to Shanghai, eventually gave up the siege. In any event, Burgevine was able to keep the corps together and
fighting, either within the walls of Sung-chiang or in the nearby countryside. And from his sickbed in Freeman’s rooms in Shanghai, Ward kept in close touch with the force, although the effort and anxiety sapped his strength badly.

The Chung Wang, meanwhile, pressed on to Shanghai, mystified and not a little troubled about what his reception from the Westerners in the port would be. During his weeks of relative inactivity in Soochow in June, the rebel general had received several Western missionaries and what he asserted were official French emissaries in audience. From these meetings he had formed the impression that his entrance into Shanghai would be welcomed in the settlements, provided he guaranteed the safety of foreign nationals and their property. But the appearance of Ward’s “foreign devils” in the military service of the imperial government had caused the Chung Wang to doubt this rather blithe assumption, as had the fact that his attempts to communicate with the Western diplomatic community in Shanghai had gone unanswered. Demonstrating the extent of the Taipings’ concern that good relations with the foreigners be established, the Kan Wang, the rebel prime minister, had journeyed from Nanking to Soochow in July and addressed a communication to Consul Meadows, urging a meeting. But Frederick Bruce, hewing to the increasingly unrealistic policy of strict neutrality, ordered Meadows not to answer the communication.

The Western powers, especially the British and the French, were about to enter the most contradictory phase of their almost comically complex dealings with the Chinese empire during the 1850s and ’60s. Mid-August saw Britain’s Lord Elgin leading the Anglo-French task force on its punitive mission to the forts at Taku in the north, where British and French soldiers were shortly to engage in an unrestrained slaughter of imperial Chinese soldiers preparatory to a march on Peking to force compliance with the Tientsin treaty. But in regard to Shanghai, Bruce and his French counterpart had already decided that if the Chung Wang approached the port, regular British and French forces, along with whatever other Western soldiers were available and the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, would man the walls of the city and repel the rebel advance. More than one Western resident of Shanghai was confused by
this apparent contradiction, and when New Englander A. A.
Hayes approached an acquaintance of his in the Royal Engineers to ask about it, he received an answer that was perhaps as good as any: “My dear fellow,” the officer replied, “we always
pitch into the swells
. At the north the imperialists are the swells, but down here, by Jove! the rebels are, don’t you know?—so we pitch into them both.”