The Devil Soldier (32 page)

Hope was again accompanied by Chaloner Alabaster, who provided another eyewitness account. Apparently Hope, in the process of “reconnoitring,” was fired at by the Taipings from behind their very considerable fortifications at Hsiao-t’ang. The admiral then determined to show the rebels, as Alabaster put it, “that they could not fire on Europeans with impunity.” (The fact that Europeans had already attacked the rebels with similar impunity and were thus understandably viewed as enemies
was conveniently ignored.) Hope and Admiral Protet again loaded HMS
Coromandel
and six gunboats with weapons and men, and on Friday, February 28, a battery of mountain howitzers and six-pounder rocket tubes was landed about three miles from Hsiao-t’ang. A pair of British naval guns and two French howitzers, the same models that had been brought to Kao-ch’iao, soon followed. During the night a detachment of French soldiers who were guarding the guns were surprised by a party of lantern-bearing Taipings, who came to get a look at the Western artillery and were easily driven off.

Toward dawn on March 1, Admiral Hope landed with 35 artillerymen and 350 sailors and marines. The first group was headed by Captain George Willes—who had observed the Taipings at Wu-sung and then commanded the
Coromandel
at Kao-ch’iao—and the second by Captain John Holland of the Royal Marines. Admiral Protet arrived next with 300 Frenchmen. The two Allied commanders were then joined, said the
Herald
, “on the spot by Colonel Ward and a detachment of his disciplined Chinese,” numbering about 700. The combined force proceeded to march on Hsiao-t’ang, which in most accounts was said to be defended by 5,000 to 6,000 Taipings. They arrived at the town just before 8:00
A.M
.

Hsiao-t’ang’s defenses were much like Kao-ch’iao’s and indeed were typical of most Chinese entrenchments. Described by the
Herald
correspondent as being “of a very formidable nature,” they consisted at their perimeter of several alternating rows of sharpened wooden stakes and deep trenches studded with pointed sprigs of bamboo. Behind these rows was a fifteen-foot earthwork topped by gun emplacements and a barricade constructed of “boxes filled with earth and stones, coffins, bags of cotton, sandbags, tables, and furniture—in fact everything that could be stuck together to form a barricade, thickly loopholed for musketry—a place that could not be stormed without the loss of a great many men, unless assisted by artillery.”

The expeditionary force halted some five hundred yards from these defenses. Curiously, there was no scattered, inaccurate musket fire or defiant screaming coming from Hsiao-t’ang. Nor was there the usual collection of bright banners proudly displayed. “At first,” said the
Herald
correspondent, “it was supposed that they had evacuated the place, when parties of skirmishers from Ward’s corps sent to the right, fearlessly crept up under cover of the graves, and soon began to exchange shots with the enemy, upon which all doubt as to their having evacuated the place was removed.”

Exchanges of fire suddenly flared up all along the line. Hope and Admiral Protet held the left side of the Allied position, while the Ward Corps attacked from positions on the right. “A shell or two was then thrown in,” said the
Herald
, “which proved to the rebels that their foreign assailants were in earnest.” The Taipings answered with a hail of small and long arms fire, as well as a few rounds from some light guns. On the left, British marines steadily approached the rebel positions. But they were outpaced by Ward’s men, who worked their way around the corner of the defenses on the right in order to cut off the Taipings’ escape route to the south.

Hsüeh Huan later informed Peking that Ward—as always at the head of his troops, urging them on with his rattan cane—“was wounded at seven points on his body” as he fought his way through the rows of rebel trenches and stakes. Despite superior numbers, a strong defensive position, and unquestioned bravery, the rebels could not match the Allied force in discipline, quality of arms, or mastery of modern skirmishing tactics. The British naval guns eventually opened a serious breach in the Taiping lines, and at this, said Alabaster, the “place was taken by assault; Ward’s men getting in at one corner immediately after we got in at another, and the rebels getting jammed in a street, there was immense slaughter.” The Taipings attempted to flee, but, as the
Herald
recorded, “Some of Colonel Ward’s men had got round on the other side, and were in hot pursuit.” Hsüeh Huan recorded that meanwhile, inside the town, “Ward continued to lead his army in the fight, burning the rebels’ barracks, demolishing the rebels’ fortifications and killing countless rebels.… [E]ven when he was wounded, he did not retreat, and eventually wiped out the rebels’ camp.” British and French troops poured into the town along with the balance of the Ward Corps, and after some bitter hand-to-hand fighting the battle came to an end.

Nearly a thousand Taipings had fallen, along with three or four
Europeans serving alongside them. Several hundred more rebels were taken prisoner. The British and French had lost one man killed and some twenty wounded, and Ward’s losses were similarly light. One of his fifty wounded, however, was a heavy blow. Burgevine, like Ward, had been consistently forward in the fight, inspiring his Chinese soldiers to impressive acts of courage. The
Herald
wrote that “[a]s for the Chinese organized under Colonel Ward, they seemed to know no fear, and, perhaps, exposed themselves too much.” Certainly Burgevine did: Hsüeh Huan noted in his memorial to the throne that during the street fighting “some rebels hid in a house, and when Burgevine broke in, he was wounded, a bullet hitting him on his right leg, penetrating his belly and coming out his left leg. He was rescued and sent back.” In fact, the Taiping musket ball that struck Burgevine made a clean hole about half an inch in diameter through his pelvis. Burgevine at first insisted on continuing his military duties and thus aggravated what was already a very serious wound. He would never fully recover from the injury, although he was to spend most of the spring and summer of 1862 trying. In addition, the wound gave Burgevine what he needed least: an additional reason to drink. By attempting to ease the chronic pain that tormented him for the rest of his life with alcohol, the Carolinian heightened the erratic and volatile side of his character to an eventually tragic extent.

Those Taiping soldiers who were able to escape Hsiao-t’ang fell back on the town of Nan-ch’iao, a few miles to the south. But when elements of the Allied expeditionary force appeared in pursuit, the rebels continued their flight by moving northwest and regrouping with the much larger Taiping army that was occupying Ch’ing-p’u. Clearly, the main rebel threat to Shanghai was now emanating from the west. During the days following Hsiao-t’ang, this threat was demonstrated when the imperialist commander Li Heng-sung—reportedly spurred on by the striking success and rising fame of the Ward Corps—martialed his Green Standard troops and attempted to check the Taiping advance at the village of Ssu-ching, on the line from Ch’ing-p’u to Shanghai. Given the quality of the Taiping army in Ch’ing-p’u, the outcome was predictable: By the second week of March, Li’s army was surrounded and cut
off. Ward, despite the multiple wounds he had received at Hsiao-t’ang, immediately decided to attack in support of the beleaguered Green Standard troops.

In his attempt to relieve Ssu-ching, Ward was unassisted by British or French troops. With between seven hundred and a thousand soldiers of the corps, as well as several pieces of his own artillery, he moved against the rebels on March 14. According to the
Herald
, Li Heng-sung “was on the point of giving in when this timely succour arrived.” Like the corps’s previous pair of engagements, the battle for Ssu-ching was comparatively short and very sharp, Ward’s men once again facing enormous numerical odds for which they compensated with disciplined movement, effective rifle fire, competent artillery support, and proficient use of their gunboats.

Ward himself, Hsüeh Huan told Peking, “was the first to break into the enemy’s position,” where he “gunned down two rebel officers in yellow clothes [a mark of particularly high rank] and seized a yellow silk flag with a dragon design.” This event threw the rebels into apparent fear and confusion: Flying into a panicked retreat, during which hundreds were captured and an even greater number killed, the Taipings crowded onto a “floating” bridge over a canal, which collapsed under their weight. Many hundreds were drowned. “Ward then moved on,” said Hsüeh, “to help the battle on water, capturing twelve gunboats and burning more than a hundred other [smaller] craft.” The casualties of the Ward Corps were somewhat higher on this occasion, chiefly because a rebel magazine was ignited in their midst, producing an enormous explosion.

The victory was important on many levels. First, the immediate goal of saving Li Heng-sung and his men had been achieved, although just what effective function these troops could serve was becoming less and less clear. Second, the imperial Chinese government now had a fighting force of proven quality in eastern Kiangsu, one which, unlike the Green Standard units, could engage much larger Taiping formations successfully. Recognizing the vital role that the corps had seized for itself, Hsüeh Huan immediately authorized Ward to enlarge it. But most important, Ward had again demonstrated, as during the battles in January
and early February, that such victories did not require the cooperation or the support of Western regulars. Given enough men and proper equipment, the Ward Corps could make it unnecessary for the foreign powers to intervene with their troops, while establishing itself as the vital eastern arm for Tseng Kuo-fan’s nutcracker strategy.

The advantages of enlarging the corps seemed clear, yet almost as soon as these several factors were recognized and appreciated by the Chinese government and the representatives of the Western powers, they became sources of suspicion and anxiety. Ward himself was responsible for this. Chinese officials, once intrigued by Ward’s desire to turn to Chinese ways, suddenly discovered the actual limitations of that desire. The best-trained, best-equipped, and best-led army in the empire was in the hands of an adventurer who, it became known, refused to wear the mandarin’s robes he had been granted or to shave his forehead according to the Manchu style. For the representatives of the West, by contrast, it was precisely Ward’s signs of devotion to China—his close association with Wu Hsü and Yang Fang, his well-known contempt for Shanghai’s Western mercantile community, and his support of Chinese political integrity—that were disturbing. Clearly, Ward was answering to a set of values of his own devising, and in mid-March his roguish behavior reached its apogee when he married, in a traditional Chinese ceremony, Yang Fang’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Chang-mei.

VI
“HIS HEART IS HARD TO FATHOM”

No single episode in Ward’s mysterious life is more difficult to assess than his marriage to Chang-mei. Indeed, the event remains the clearest symbol of just how complex and ambiguous Ward’s motivations actually were. Ambition, avarice, and affection were all factors in the young American commander’s decision to ally himself intimately with the family of his most loyal backer, Yang Fang—but in what proportions these elements were blended is a matter for conjecture. One clear conclusion can, however, be drawn from the event: By March 1862 Ward had cast his lot irreversibly with China. Fame, failure, and death were all possible ends to the course on which he had embarked. But whichever fate it was to be, Ward would meet it not as a foreign adventurer intent only on profit but as a Chinese subject whose ambitions—whether pointed at greater elevation within the Manchu hierarchy, at the overthrow of that hierarchy, or at the establishment of a private warlord domain—were to play an important role in the future of the empire that had so consistently drawn him back from escapades in other parts of the world.

Certainly, the marriage ruled out any possibility that Ward, after years of being branded a notorious scoundrel, might capitalize on the success of his new corps to become one of the leading citizens of Shanghai’s foreign settlements and of the Western element in China generally. Hallett Abend—a
New York Times
correspondent in China during the 1930s who authored a somewhat fanciful biography of Ward—claimed that by March 1862 Ward had become

one of the most desirous social catches of Asia’s then most colorful international community. Added to the fact that Ward was young and a bachelor, and Shanghai’s most exclusive hostesses, particularly those with marriageable daughters, began to compete to lure him to their dinners, their teas, their receptions, their balls.… Much sought after, he appeared briefly between his marches and his battles, and was greatly lionized during several short intervals between campaigns. And then, by his own act, he cut himself off from this charmed circle, and to this day no one knows the precise motivation for the act, publicly performed, which abruptly made him a social outcast.

Whether Ward was ever so enthusiastically “lionized” by Shanghai’s hostesses is questionable. Many of
Abend’s statements were based (or so he claimed) on an examination of records that were destroyed by the Japanese during the Second World War. But it is certainly true that the marriage to Chang-mei—coinciding as it did with Peking’s approval of Ward’s long-standing petition to become a Chinese subject—perpetuated the distance between Ward and many other Westerners just when that gap might have been narrowed. Of course, celebrity among Shanghai’s foreign residents had never held any value for Ward, and it is therefore unsurprising that he should have given so little thought to how his marriage might be interpreted in the settlements. Yet Abend was right to presume that Ward would have made some effort to explain the “shocking mésalliance” to his brother, Harry, and sister Elizabeth, who remained among his closest confidants. Any letters that might have embodied such efforts were destroyed, however, and we are once again forced to examine an important episode in Ward’s life not by studying his own words but by deducing from circumstances.