The Devil Soldier (24 page)

In the wake of Ward’s release, Commander Hire expressed the belief that he had, “by seizing Ward …, in a great measure struck a severe blow at the head of the crimping system in Shanghai.” Other British officers and officials shared his confidence that the incident had severely discouraged the members of the Chinese Foreign Legion, an impression strengthened by the capture, on April 28, of thirteen foreigners near Sung-chiang by British troops. Accused of being in the imperial service, the men were returned to their various consulates for deportation, but at least one was subsequently released, and before long the British authorities were forced to accept the fact that none of their moves had in any way slowed Ward down. British soldiers and sailors continued to desert and join the Chinese Foreign Legion, and proof that the unit was still active in the interior came when Burgevine took some sixty-five Westerners and joined General Li Heng-sung’s Green Standard braves in yet another unsuccessful assault on Ch’ing-p’u on May 11. (The affair was a further lesson in Green Standard unreliability: As the
Herald
reported, Burgevine’s contingent “saw nothing of the 20 gun-boats and 9,000 men who were to have cooperated with them until they met them on their return about 3 miles from the city.”)

Consul Medhurst and Captain Roderick Dew, who had succeeded Commander Hire as commander of British naval forces during Admiral Hope’s absences from Shanghai, now decided to put an end to all these activities. They ordered a thorough search of the foreign settlements for Ward and Burgevine, one that turned up no sign of the two men or of Ward’s supposed Shanghai headquarters. But roughly a week later Consul Medhurst received information from an informer, who, as Medhurst told Frederick Bruce, “to save himself betrayed his comrades”:

He deposed among other things that the accounts of the legion were to be settled on a particular day and hour in the Taki hong, a house in the settlement through which the Taotai conducts his business with our Commissariat, and on Captain Dew and myself going there with an armed party, we found the soi disant “Captain” of the legion deep in accounts with the purser of the hong, and we discovered upstairs eighteen stand of musketry with a quantity of ammunition and other munitions of war. All these were seized and brought away together with the “captain,” the purser, and a man pointed out as compradore to the legion. The captain claiming to be an American was handed over to his Consul, and the other men being Chinese and in the Taotai’s own employ I sent to him with a letter repeating my complaints against the Authorities for lending themselves so persistently to the system of foreign enlistment. He replied that he would enquire into the charge against the men and that as the arms belonged to him he would like to have them returned. I have of course not obliged him in this particular, and I only mention this fact as well as that of his employment of Taki to shew the duplicity of which he has been guilty throughout.

In fact, the mysterious Westerner Medhurst and Captain Dew had captured turned out to be none other than Burgevine. On May 18 the Carolinian was confined in the house of the American marshal (the American settlement still had no jail), and Consul William L. G. Smith tried the case at ten o’clock that morning. Burgevine was officially charged with violating the neutrality laws and enticing British sailors to desert. But once again the Western authorities were frustrated in their attempts to deal a mortal blow to the Sung-chiang force. One officer of the Shanghai Municipal Police testified that he had seen Burgevine at Yang Fang’s but also said that he had not at the time seen anyone he could identify as a British deserter. And while one such deserter was called to testify that he had served in the Ward force, he denied that Burgevine had either enticed or recruited him. In the end, Burgevine was released for lack of evidence, the whole affair producing nothing more than a cost to the American consulate of $17.50 for marshal’s and clerk’s fees.

Medhurst now became determined to find Ward, and on the day after Burgevine’s trial British search parties again spotted and captured their quarry. The British were taking no chances this time: Ward was imprisoned on board one of their warships. Edward
Forester, commanding the Foreign Legion garrison at Sung-chiang, was now in a tight spot. He had good reason to suppose that the British would march on the town and seize the rest of the legion’s Western officers. As for Ward, Forester later recalled that there “seemed no hope of release or even of trial. The arrest had been an arbitrary one and the physical power was in the hands of the admiral.” Hope—knowing better than to trust the Chinese to deal with the problem of Ward—evidently intended himself to make sure that the young mercenary left China this time.

In addition, while Ward was in captivity, Hope directed a strong force of British soldiers, sailors, and marines to march on Sung-chiang and demonstrate to those Westerners still at large the cost of their continued defiance. Apprised of the British move by Yang Fang, Forester “put the mud forts which we were occupying—about a mile east of Sung-chiang—in the best possible state of defense, and then sent word that I would defend my position at all hazards. The British, about eight hundred in number, marched entirely around our fort and, without firing even so much as a volley, returned to their ships.” The British expedition up-country was apparently intended as a show of force, but it had little if any effect on the members of the legion.

In Shanghai, meanwhile, Yang Fang was making plans with Burgevine and Vincente Macanaya for Ward’s escape from the British warship, since it seemed impossible that the British would repeat the error of releasing him into any other nation’s custody. Although kept under close guard, Ward was confined in a comfortable cabin rather than the brig and was allowed daily visitors. One of these was Vincente, who managed to communicate to Ward that he should be prepared at an appointed hour during a coming night to jump through one of the large windows in his cabin (such ample openings being typical of British warships of the day). He would be picked up by Vincente, who would be waiting in the waters below in a sampan, a small river skiff propelled by a single scull. Ward could then be taken to safety at Sung-chiang.

The exact date of Ward’s escape—sometime during the last week of May—is unrecorded, but the circumstances were more grist for the popular mill that was turning the Foreign Legion’s commander into a folk hero among the Chinese. At the sounding of four bells (two o’clock in the morning), Ward called on the skills he had learned as a boy on the Salem wharves and leapt through the window of his cabin into the waters of Shanghai harbor. True to plan, Vincente was there and hauled Ward into his sampan while cries of alarm went up aboard the warship. As
Forester wrote, “This was before search-lights on a man-of-war were even dreamed of,” and by the time British launches had been manned and made their way into the dark harbor, they were faced with the sight of some thirty sampans racing in every direction: a diversion that was the final element in Yang Fang’s plan. The British soon became convinced that the search was hopeless. Vincente pulled for the bank of the Huang-pu opposite Shanghai (the western edge of the Pootung peninsula), where Ward debarked and stayed hidden for twenty-four hours. He then journeyed to Sung-chiang by an indirect route. Reaching the garrison without incident, Ward remained there as the British once more turned Shanghai upside down and arrested anyone even suspected of serving or having served with the Chinese Foreign Legion.

Ward was free again—yet the British once more underestimated his determination by believing that they had dealt a death blow to the legion’s activities. On June 8
the
Herald
triumphantly crowed that “[t]he force is now disbanded. Some have probably suffered capital punishment at the hands of the Chinese, some have fallen in action, some are expiating their offences against our laws in common jails, and some few have escaped it is to be hoped with sufficient examples before them never to again engage in such an illegitimate mode of earning a livelihood as enrolling themselves in such disreputable ranks as those of a ‘Chinese Foreign Legion.’ ”

But in fact Ward returned to the task of training his Chinese soldiers and European officers with pointed zeal: Adversity, on this as on many other occasions, seemed only to give him an increased sense of purpose and a rather gleeful delight in frustrating his antagonists. Those antagonists (or at least the ones who wore the Royal Navy’s blue and
gold) were now growing weary, and when word of Ward’s return to the drilling ground at Sung-chiang reached Admiral Hope, he threw up his hands, abandoned the policy of harassing and imprisoning the Foreign Legion’s officers, and—according to
Forester—invited Ward and his two seconds-in-command to attend a conference on board his flagship under a guarantee of safe conduct.

The idea that, at the height of their dramatic game of cat and mouse, Ward, Burgevine, Forester, and Admiral Hope should all have sat clown on board an English warship and discussed their differences like gentlemen has exercised understandable power over the imaginations of many students of the period. But we have no one’s word save Forester’s that the incident occurred. Writing in the
Cosmopolitan
, Forester claimed that

[t]his meeting was destined to have a most important bearing on the future of the Taiping rebellion. The British admiral was brought around to a new view of foreign interference with the Taipings. We gave assurances that we would no longer recruit our army from his man-of-war’s-men and the admiral promised to exert all possible influence with the British minister at Peking, and with the Home Government. From that day on Admiral Hope became our strong friend and rendered us service whenever it was possible.

Always weak on dates, Forester supplied no such specific for this fabled meeting: It might have taken place any time between the late spring and the fall of 1861. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the story, however, is its oblique reference to the shift that was taking place in the British attitude toward the Chinese civil war, for it was that change that would finally transform Britain’s approach to the Chinese Foreign Legion.

Ward had yet to make his way into the dispatches to Washington of either the American minister to China or Consul Smith: The United States was still interested in avoiding complications that might hinder trade. But by May 23 England’s Frederick Bruce thought enough of the
activities of foreigners on either side of the Taiping rebellion to inform Lord Russell, the British foreign minister, of the details:

It will be seen that British subjects in both instances form but a fraction of the hired force. The enlisting agent on the part of the Government seems to be a man called Ward, an ex-Californian filibuster; and on that of the Taipings, a man called Peacock. Both are of United States origin, but Ward, it appears, does not now claim to be an American citizen. The law of the United States is, I believe, very severe against enlistment in the Chinese service; but it appears their authorities find great difficulty in putting the law into operation. Ward, it appears, besides the Foreign Legion, has undertaken to drill a body of Chinese in the employment of the Imperial Government. I look upon it as perfectly hopeless to prevent foreigners entering the service of these parties as long as the pay is sufficient to attract them, and as long as the Chinese think that they will be of use in military operations.

Thus even at the time Ward was making his escape, the senior British official in China was conceding that the policy of forcefully trying to put an end to the Foreign Legion’s activities was doomed. On May 24 Admiral Hope wrote to
Bruce and complained that attempts by Chinese officials in Shanghai to discourage Ward were not “of that efficient character which I have a right to expect, being feigned and in the nature of a blind by delivering up a few with a view to the escape of the remainder.” The British, in short, may have believed in the rectitude of a policy designed to prevent foreign involvement in the rebellion, but the lack of cooperation they experienced indicated that virtually no one else in Shanghai—whether native or foreigner—shared their conviction.

Nor did the Taipings cooperate with Britain’s desire to pursue a neutral, noninterventionist course. On May 27 British interpreter Chaloner Alabaster wrote a memorandum describing a trip up the Huang-pu River that he had just completed in the company of Captain Roderick Dew, the aggressive officer who had raided the “Taki hong” and captured Burgevine. Dew had been ordered by Admiral Hope to proceed
to Ch’ing-p’u, deliver a letter warning the rebel leaders that they were not to come within two days’ march of the treaty port of Ningpo (the same terms that had been arranged for Shanghai), and, on his return, to capture any Foreign Legionnaires he could find at Sung-chiang. But, as Dew and
Alabaster approached the walls of Ch’ing-p’u under a flag of truce (the captain “leaving his sword behind to make our peaceful object more apparent”), the rebels “opened fire with gingalls and on our stopping and displaying the letter which they certainly must have seen commenced firing their big guns, fortunately giving their shot too great elevation and as they showed no signs of desisting we retreated to the boats which were also fired on and got away as quickly as possible leaving the letter suspended on a pole we stuck in the ground.”

On June 6 the redoubtable Captain Dew again made contact with the rebels—this time at the town of Chapu on the northern shore of Hangchow Bay—to warn them not to attack Ningpo. Upon landing, Dew was escorted to the local Taiping chief by rebel soldiers. The march took them through a scene of devastation: “The streets and houses,” wrote Dew, “were occupied solely by soldiers, their former owners either having fled or been killed—a strange contrast to the usual life and bustle of a Chinese town.” Dew soon met the Taiping chief, who declared that he was, in Dew’s words:

most anxious to be on good terms with foreigners. Did we not, under Heaven, serve the same God? He could not see why we should interfere with his attacking Ningpo; our ships and property should be protected.… I remarked that no cause could prosper whose path was marked by bloodshed and the destruction of the homes of the people. It was a necessity, he said, to guard against treachery and inspire fear, and I am strongly impressed by the sagacity of the remark, for I feel certain that the rapid success of the Taipings is due far more to their destructive qualities and gay dresses of yellow and red silks than to their bravery or their weapons, which seemed, on an average, to be worse than those of the Imperialist soldiers.