The Devil Soldier (23 page)

It is all the more disappointing, therefore, that Forester should have proved ultimately disloyal to Ward. Following Ward’s death Forester made several attempts to revise the history of his commander’s operations to his own benefit, attempts that contrasted sourly with his
own faithful service during Ward’s lifetime. Although Forester swore under oath in 1875, for example, that he had joined Ward’s force in 1861, he subsequently wrote a series of articles for
Cosmopolitan
magazine in which he described the actions of Ward’s force from early in 1860, including a detailed account of the battle of Sung-chiang. Of course, the circumstances of that legendary event were readily available to any foreigner in Shanghai who cared to seek them out. But in Forester’s version he himself not only was present at the battle but played an important part. And in Forester’s accounts of the force’s subsequent engagements, Ward was often portrayed as an absentee commander wrapped up in the distractions of Shanghai, and Burgevine as little more than a functionary. Thus it was Burgevine—hard-drinking, impetuous, violent—who in the end proved the more reliable of Ward’s two lieutenants, while the calculating Forester emerged as a somewhat superior officer but a decidedly inferior comrade.

While Ward was alive, however, Forester’s talents were put to good use, and in the early spring of 1861 the reorganization of the force along the lines of Chinese-Western cooperation moved smoothly—so smoothly, in fact, that the British authorities soon determined it necessary to take active measures against it. By early April the Chinese Foreign Legion was drilling at Sung-chiang, Ward having raised between five hundred and a thousand Chinese recruits as well as some two hundred Western officers. Once again, many of these Westerners were English deserters—particularly drillmasters from the Royal Navy and Marines and artillery instructors from the army—who were weary of the low pay, cramped quarters, and bad food that marked their national service. The participation of such men in anti-Taiping activities might well jeopardize the already fragile truce Admiral Hope had established with the rebels; recognizing that this danger would almost certainly prompt visits to Sung-chiang by the British authorities, Ward protected his activities with strict security in the town and his camp. Written passes bearing his signature were the sole means of entrance into either of these areas by any military personnel, and Ward kept his British deserters constantly ready to abandon Sung-chiang and move farther in country in the event of the expected British raid.

It finally came in the third week of April.

* * *

As commander of the British navy’s China Station, Admiral
Hope had important affairs to attend to in all five of the treaty ports as well as Hong Kong. These caused his frequent absence from Shanghai, but he took a keen interest in the port’s affairs at all times, paying particular attention to the rate of desertion aboard British ships. By mid-April this rate was rising alarmingly, and Hope gave orders to Commander Henry W. Hire—captain of HMS
Urgent
and the senior naval officer in Shanghai during the admiral’s absences—to confront the Chinese authorities on this subject. If Hire could get no satisfaction from those gentlemen, Hope said, he was himself to arrest the British deserters and the men who were enticing them to serve in both the imperial and the rebel causes. “I trust to your zeal and ability,” Hope told Hire, “to carry out the object I have in view of stopping the desertion at Shanghai.” Hire would not disappoint his commander.

On April 18 one of Hire’s subordinates, a Captain Aplin of HMS
Centaur
at Nanking, captured twenty-six Englishmen who were serving in the Taiping armies. “Most of the men,” wrote a diplomatic officer who witnessed the arrests,

assert that they were enticed into drinking shops at Shanghai by regular crimps, where they were drugged, and when senseless were conveyed to certain boats in waiting.… Only two or three confess to voluntary enlistment without any stipulation.… The men were in a most miserable condition, getting no pay, but plenty of rice and spirits. They were allowed to plunder wherever they went, but seem to have had little success. They made no secret of such crimes as rape and robbery, and even hinted at darker deeds. Most of them had been present at a fight near Sung-chiang, where their leader, named Savage, was wounded, and an Italian killed. An American named Peacock, at present living in Soochow, is Captain over all; he is of high rank among the Taipings, and has the power of life and death.

This successful operation bred greater conviction among Britain’s naval officers that an activist approach to the desertion problem was the
correct one. On April 22 Commander Hire, accompanied by consulate interpreter Chaloner
Alabaster, had an interview in Shanghai with Hsüeh Huan, at which Wu Hsü was present. Hire demanded that Hsüeh surrender all Englishmen in his service, but both Hsüeh and Wu predictably declared that they had no such employees. They admitted to hiring Tardif de Moidrey and another French officer as artillery instructors and said that they had heard that the rebels were making use of British deserters. But they were not doing the same. Hire assured Hsüeh that he had it on good authority that Englishmen in the imperial service were drilling at Sung-chiang, upon which Hsüeh urged Hire to go to Sung-chiang and arrest any such men. “Some questions,” noted the interpreter, Alabaster, “were then asked relative to Colonel Ward, the Commissioner saying he had employed him for two months last year but had then dismissed him and on being told that the Colonel declared himself to be still in H[is] E[xcellency’s] employ said he thought he was dead, he had heard he was wounded at Sung-chiang some long time ago while he was in his employ and thought he had died.” Wu Hsü “also expressed great horror” on being told of Ward’s enlistment activities, and, when both the taotai and Hsüeh promised to cooperate in capturing the deserted Englishmen and their new commanders, Hire said that he would consider it “a decided breach of faith” if they failed to do so.

The following day Commander Hire proceeded up the Huang-pu River and then Sung-chiang Creek in a gunboat, again accompanied by Alabaster as well as a detachment of Royal Marines. Startled by the appearance of regular British troops, the imperial Chinese soldiers manning Sung-chiang’s gates allowed them admittance. The commander of these Green Standard braves, one of Sung-chiang’s mandarins, was then sought out in his yamen. Hire presented the man with a notice that the British soldiers found posted on a column outside the yamen. Written and signed by Ward, the document prohibited entrance into Sung-chiang by any soldiers of the Chinese Foreign Legion without a pass. The nonplussed mandarin—who was placed in the unenviable position of lying to protect a group of foreign mercenaries who had consistently berated him and ignored his authority—denied that there were any foreigners in Sung-chiang. There had been in the past, Alabaster remembered
the mandarin saying: “[F]oreigners constantly came and forced themselves into his presence but they were not in any way in his employ.” Unsatisfied, Hire declared that he would search the town and demanded that the mandarin accompany him.

Scouring the imperialist military camp, Hire found no evidence of activity by foreigners, but then several of his marines, posted at the west gate of the town, intercepted a Chinese who bore a pass into the “barracks” of the Chinese Foreign Legion—a pass that was written and signed by Ward. Confronted with this man and this document, the mandarin “suddenly remembered the existence of such a place, still however denying that he had anything to do with the foreigners or that there were any there.” Hire was next taken to a building that he was told was Colonel Ward’s residence, and his men commenced turning the apparently abandoned place upside down: “Some empty beer bottles [were] found, and a trap door seemingly leading to the roof at length discovered. This was at once burst open tho with some difficulty, it being nailed down and piled over with lumber of all sorts, and a long suite of rooms discovered full of European stores, wines and evidently used by foreigners that day as some plates and dishes had been shoved away unwashed.”

Hire presumed following the discovery of this shielded sanctum that although he was only a step behind the fleeing Ward, it was a long step. After happening on a roster of names of Westerners serving in the Foreign Legion, the commander decided to return immediately to Shanghai: Ward’s best hope of evading capture while simultaneously avoiding an accidental run-in with the rebels would be to hide himself among the thousands of fugitives and refugees in the port’s foreign settlements.

On returning to Shanghai, Hire subsequently wrote, he “waited on the American Flag Officer asking his assistance toward the detention of Ward, to which he unhesitatingly replied that [Ward] was not an American Subject, or entitled to protection as such. I then requested him to give me that in writing, which he did.” Disavowed, now, by both the Chinese and the Americans, Ward apparently had no protectors, and his arrest seemed an act free from international complications. Hire returned
to the
Urgent
and “ordered the Master at Arms to go on shore and bring Ward onboard.” The commander then went out to dine and on returning found that Ward had been apprehended and confined on board the
Urgent:
“I informed him that he must consider himself my prisoner for the present.”

Ward had been picked up on the Shanghai waterfront and was kept closely guarded during the night of April 24. Having the Foreign Legion’s commander in his custody, Hire was anxious now to ascertain the whereabouts of Ward’s Shanghai headquarters, said to be the center of the legion’s enlistment activities but as yet not proved to exist. Dispatching agents on this mission, the commander himself sought the advice of Consul Medhurst and ex-Consul Meadows as to the eventual disposition of Colonel Ward. Both officials told Hire that “it would be best to get this ruffian Ward from the Colony” (the fact that Shanghai was not a possession of the British Crown was momentarily forgotten by all three men), and, as a first step toward this goal, Hire demanded another interview with Wu Hsü.

Before confronting the Chinese authorities, Hire returned to the
Urgent
to interrogate Ward. The principal area of uncertainty was the soldier of fortune’s nationality: Without hard knowledge on this subject, it would be difficult to force any government to accept and punish the prisoner. Hire demanded to know what country Ward hailed from, to which the prisoner cagily replied: “I was last employed by Mexico. I have been a citizen of the United States but certainly am not now. I am not an Englishman for I never was in the country but once and have no relatives there, tho I have some in the United States. I do not consider this a fair question and decline to give an answer.”

Ward apparently understood his captors’ predicament: A man without a country could hardly be prosecuted for violating any one nation’s neutrality laws. The heat was further turned up on the increasingly perplexed Commander Hire with the arrival, following the questioning of Ward, of a note from Nicholas Cleary, a Shanghai attorney. Claiming to represent Ward, Cleary demanded that Hire “hand him over to the proper Chinese Authorities at Shanghai for immediate trial upon such charges as you may have to proffer.” The entrance of the “proper
Chinese Authorities” into the legal melee was a new element, and Hire proceeded to Wu Hsü’s yamen.

After presenting evidence of the foreign presence at Sung-chiang, Commander Hire “expressed his regret that he could not feel the same confidence in H[is] E[xcellency’s] good faith he had done at the former interview.” Wu Hsü, in turn, “expressed great indignation at the conduct of the Mandarins at Sung-chiang in concealing this from him.” Upon being informed that Hire had come “to request H[is] E[xcellency] either to punish Colonel Ward himself or to request Captain Hire to deport him,” Wu voiced approval for the latter idea, as “he had never punished foreigners before and at any rate it would be better to deport the Colonel as if he were Chinese all he could do would be bamboo him and let him go, and he would still remain here.” But Hire was subsequently informed by a legal expert that British confinement, punishment, and deportation of Ward were all questionable actions: Whatever country was entitled to exercise such measures, it certainly was not Great Britain. “My mind was then made up,” wrote Hire, “to make the Chinese authorities take possession of Ward and punish him.”

On April 26 the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council wrote to Consul Medhurst to ask that the authorities prevent “the so called Colonel Ward or his agents” from “continuing to entice members of the Municipal Police Force and others from their duty.” For a man who was supposedly “crimping” foreigners into service, Ward was enjoying remarkable popularity. In addition, Commander Hire and Consul Medhurst were losing the elaborate diplomatic game being played around the prisoner on board the
Urgent:
Knowing full well that the British would eventually be forced to return Ward to him, Wu Hsü had already covered himself by protesting that if they did, there would be little if anything he could do to punish him.

The culmination of the affair came on April 26, when Wu Hsü put before Chaloner Alabaster papers purporting to show that Ward was a Chinese citizen. Apparently anticipating his arrest, Ward had mailed a letter to Consul Smith on April 24 expressing his desire to revoke his American citizenship and become a naturalized Chinese. The papers presented by Wu were, however, almost certainly forged: Peking would
scarcely have approved Ward’s application for citizenship at this juncture, and, even had such approval been forthcoming, there had not been time since his arrest to deliver it. But the British were not prepared to accuse representatives of the imperial Chinese government of falsifying documents, and on that same April 26, Commander
Hire recalled, “an armed party came down to Jardine’s Wharf, two officers came onboard when Ward was delivered up to them and marched by a strong escort of China Men into the Town.”