The Devil Soldier (20 page)

In fact, the interests of foreign trading governments in China had not changed, whatever the details of their dealings with Peking and Nanking. The overarching goal was to force China to comply with the advantageous (for the Westerners) terms of the Treaty of Tientsin. Obviously, it would be impossible to enforce those terms if the authority of the Manchu government collapsed completely and if the Taipings extended their ban on opium to the treaty ports. It therefore became necessary to “pitch into” both the imperialists and the rebels. Such an activist policy certainly did not imply support for either party in the Chinese civil war, but neither did it represent a more genuinely “neutral” stance than had characterized Western policy since the Opium War. Thus the belligerent shift in tactics during August 1860—propelled not only by the intransigence of the war party that surrounded Hsien-feng in Peking but also by the steady advance of the Taipings toward Shanghai—did not imply any fundamental change in objective.

On August 16
the Chung Wang himself moved to the village of Ssu-ching, along the line of advance from Sung-chiang to Shanghai, and consolidated his somewhat scattered forces. As he continued the advance east he was joined by the Kan Wang, bitter over the Westerners’ continued refusal to reply to his overtures as well as by reports that regular foreign soldiers were setting up defensive positions not only around the settlements in Shanghai but along the walls of the Chinese city. It seemed clear that the common worship of Shang-ti would not prove a sufficient force to unite the rebels and the foreigners, yet the Chung Wang and the Kan Wang continued to order their troops not to harm any foreign nationals or destroy any foreign property, under pain of death.

The Chung Wang’s communications to the Chinese residents of Shanghai, by contrast, had a strident and threatening character. “How
is it,” the rebel general asked in a proclamation posted in the port by rebel spies,

that you Shanghai people alone withstand all reason, and still listen to impish mandarins who do you nothing but injury? Your offences have now reached the climax that compels me to set troops in motion for your extermination.… I issue this Proclamation strongly to command and advise you; you know that an egg can’t oppose a stone; make up your minds speedily, and submit yourselves.… I will establish my will firm as a mountain, and my commands shall be as flowing water. Immediately after I have informed you by this, my soldiers will arrive; they are not going to wait for you; don’t say that I gave you no warning.

These words put panic in the hearts of many Chinese but prompted a typically pugnacious response from the foreign settlements. The Chung Wang’s omission of any reference to foreigners in the proclamation was taken as a slight rather than diplomatic intention, and
the
Herald
gave answer: “The ‘Faithful King’ will however find that we are not going to be ignored. Should he fulfil his threats, and march against Shanghai, he will meet with certain substantial proofs of our existence,—striking evidence of our prowess. John Bull at last is thoroughly aroused.” With callous condescension, editor Compton added that “[a] Rebel is easier to hit than a pheasant or a snipe.”

On the evening of August 17 the horizon to the west of Shanghai began to glow with the fires of burning villages, and the port’s defenders knew that the rebel assault so long anticipated was about to commence. Early on the morning of the eighteenth the Taipings occupied the historic town of Hsu-chia-hui, or Siccawei, just west of the port, where Jesuit missionaries had long before established an important Catholic community. Rumors that a French priest was killed by the rebels at Siccawei (never fully substantiated) spread throughout Shanghai, steeling the resolve of the defenders. For his part, the Chung Wang quickly scattered the few imperial Chinese units sent against him, then—ever anxious to avoid giving offense to the Westerners—left the main body
of his army behind and approached Shanghai with three thousand of his Kwangsi bodyguard.

At the city walls he found his worst fears confirmed. From the grandstand of the racetrack on the western edge of the British settlement to the west gate of the Chinese city, British troops and Sikh auxiliaries from India stood at the ready, supported by the Shanghai Volunteer Corps; the south gate of the Chinese city was held by Chinese imperialists, American artillery, and still more Britishers; and the eastern side of the port was garrisoned by the French. Most of the British soldiers were equipped with their army’s new Enfield rifle, a weapon with impressive range and accuracy, while their artillery units were well-stocked with “canister,” explosive shells packed with small iron balls. As the Chung Wang’s men advanced they made contact with scattered imperialist contingents, who quickly retreated toward the west gate of the Chinese city. The Taipings followed in pursuit, then began to learn the hard lessons about Western weapons that the Manchus had absorbed during the Opium War.

“The firing of the Foreigners,” said
the
Herald
, “both from the cannon and rifles was excellent; as soon as canister was useless, the foe were treated to shell thrown time after time into the very middle of their flags.” Raked by this brutal fire, the Taipings were thrown into tremendous confusion; but their commander’s exhortations against harming foreigners were still fresh in their minds, and they did not fight back. In fact, said the
Herald
of that first afternoon, “curious to relate not a shot was fired.” Instead, the Taipings moved in agitation from gate to gate, as if seeking a spot where they would be welcomed into the city by those they still believed to be their spiritual brothers.

At the western perimeter of the British settlement on the afternoon of the eighteenth, A. A.
Hayes was serving with the Shanghai Volunteer Corps when, as he recalled, “a man of slight figure approached me, as I stood at the Maloo Barrier. He had collected a few fighting men, and desired to place them where they would be of some use; and so, amid the roar of artillery, the rattle of musketry, and the shrieks of native fugitives, I first met General Ward. He was a man of excellent address, mild and gentle in manner, and as kind and warm-hearted as possible.
His long hair and slight mustache were dark, and he habitually wore a blue coat tightly buttoned.” Apparently recovered from his wounds sufficiently to serve, Ward had (he later claimed) been approached by the commander of the Volunteer Corps, one Colonel Neale, and asked to assist in the defense. It was Ward’s endless craving for action rather than genuine need that pulled him out of his sickbed: The reluctant Taipings were no match for the Western forces already in place and were quickly halted by the ferocious artillery barrage.

The Western commanders were not, however, happy with the simple checking of the rebel advance. When it became clear, on the night of the eighteenth, that the Taipings were no real threat, parties of British and French soldiers left the defensive perimeter and entered the western, southern, and eastern suburbs of Shanghai. The British contented themselves with merely firing any structures that might give shelter to the Taipings, but the French indulged in the kind of wantonly criminal behavior that was to mark so many of their exploits in China. Plunder and rape joined arson on the list of “defensive measures.” As one
angry Westerner wrote to the
Herald
, the night’s activities amounted to little more than “foul murder.”

On Sunday the nineteenth, the
Herald
reported, the Taiping enemy further “laid himself open to some fine rifle practice,” and while Sunday night was “quiet enough,” Monday brought a new Taiping movement toward the Shanghai racecourse.

Having advanced within a half a mile, they planted their banners on the tops of high graves and mounds, whilst they themselves retreated into two neighboring hamlets. The Volunteers proceeded at once to their posts at the barricades, the Royal Marines manned the several defences of the settlement, a howitzer and rocket party were sent out towards the rebel lines, and the whole settlement was rendered impregnable in less than half an hour. Now the firing and shelling commenced. The Insurgents stood it for several hours like men of stone—immovable, without returning a single shot.

For five more days this extraordinary state of affairs continued. On August 21 the Chung Wang sent an injured, angry letter to the representatives
of Great Britain, the United States, Portugal, “and other countries” (he purposefully excluded the French, who he claimed had betrayed their earlier promise of a welcome in Shanghai). He accused the Westerners collectively of having been bribed by the Manchu “imps” to fight the Taipings, a most serious offense against the T’ien Wang: “I came to Shanghai to make a treaty in order to see us connected together by trade and commerce; I did not come for the purpose of fighting with you. Had I at once commenced to attack the city and kill the people, that would have been the same as the members of one family fighting among themselves, which would have caused the imps to ridicule us.” Despite his hostile reception,
the Chung Wang did not close the door to future good relations:

Should any of your honourable nations regret what has occurred, and hold relations with our friendly state to be best, they need have no apprehensions in coming to consult with me. I treat people according to right principles, and will certainly not subject them to any indignities. Should, however, your honourable nations still continue to be deluded by the imps, follow their lead in all things, without reflecting on the difference between you; you must not blame me if hereafter you find it difficult to pass along the channels of commerce, and if there is no outlet for native produce.

It was an open expression of the threat to trade that Westerners had always feared was inherent in the Taiping movement, and in its wake the door to cooperation between the rebels and the foreigners began to close from the Western side. Frederick
Bruce—the man who had so strongly advocated a neutral course in China, and whose brother Lord Elgin saw British and French troops storm the imperial forts at Taku on the very day that their comrades to the south repulsed the first Taiping advance on Shanghai—now openly expressed both contempt for the rebel movement and an unprecedented respect for local imperial officials in a letter to the British foreign minister, Lord John Russell:

Every day shows more strongly that no principles or ideas of policy animate [the rebellion’s] leaders. Even the extermination of the Tartars, the only principle put forward, seems rather a pretext for upsetting all government and authority, and enabling the stronger to pillage the weaker, than an object necessary in itself, as a step towards establishing a mere national government. The framework of society is entirely broken up in the districts occupied by them, by the flight of the educated and respectable classes, to whom the common people look up with respect as their natural leaders, and who are at once their bulwark against oppression, and the guardians of order and public tranquility.… [The rebels’] system differs in nothing, as far as I can learn, from the proceedings of a band of brigands organized under one head.

The remarkable contradiction not only of his own earlier statements but of his government’s previous position with regard to both the Chinese imperialists and the Taipings contained in Bruce’s
letter was apparent. The attempt to identify the interests of British trade with the welfare of Chinese peasants was a bit of self-service that stood in gross and (as ever) unexplained contrast to Britain’s own aggressive posture in the north, as well as to the British community’s continued condemnation of Ward’s Foreign Arms Corps. One unusually honest letter to the
North China Herald
from a resident of the British settlement put it this way:

The conduct of Ward has been justly censured in the columns of your paper. But in what does our policy differ? The circumstances are somewhat dissimilar, but the principle is precisely the same. His theatre of action was Sung-chiang; ours is Shanghai. His work was to drive the Insurgents out of the city; ours is to keep them out. He was paid for his service; our men, we are informed, are paid likewise for their service. Ward, we believe, is an old servant of the Taotai, and as such, he only continues his service when acting in opposition to the Insurgents; we have no such plea for our conduct.

On August 24 the Chung Wang left Shanghai and was soon taking the main body of his army out of Kiangsu altogether, to participate in the Taiping western campaign. Following his departure, the British
indicated that they were at least beginning to perceive some commonality of interest between themselves and Ward when no less a figure than Frederick Bruce sent a secret communication to the Foreign Arms Corps’s commander (or so Ward later claimed), thanking him for his assistance in the defense of Shanghai. It would be many months, however, before the British would be willing to admit publicly any indebtedness to Ward or to sanction his actions. For the moment, they chose to rely on their own resources in attempting to bring about a satisfactory arrangement of China’s internal distress.

The withdrawal of the Chung Wang from Kiangsu left most of that province in the hands of Taiping units capable of defending what they had taken but not of besting British and French regulars in a major assault on Shanghai. This and other factors—the disaster at Ch’ing-p’u, the unwillingness of Ward and Burgevine to place themselves under the supervision of local imperial officials at Sung-chiang, the pronounced strains placed on Chinese dealings with the Western governments by the existence of the corps, and finally the exorbitant cost of the unit’s maintenance—all influenced
Wu Hsü to decide in mid-September that the time had come for the disbandment of Ward’s force. There was nothing in his attitude to suggest that Wu felt any animosity toward Ward, but, like most Chinese officials, the taotai was jealously concerned with maintaining his sphere of authority, and in the Foreign Arms Corps he had seen a unit with uncomfortably autonomous tendencies. In addition, Ward’s wounds continued, during September, to preclude his active leadership of the force, and Ward was the sole officer of the corps whom Wu came even close to trusting. The thought of Burgevine and the other Western “rowdies” roaming the Sung-chiang area unchecked caused the taotai much concern.