The Devil Soldier (38 page)

The only real blunder Ward had made to this point—his assault on Ch’ing-p’u in August 1860—had been a result of wounded pride. So, too, was the second mistake of his career: attacking Lung-chu-an on April 4, 1862, without waiting for artillery support. Edward Forester—in a puzzling moment of humility that suggests more a desire to portray himself as the driving force behind the Ever Victorious Army’s field operations, mistaken and otherwise, than it does genuine honesty—later wrote that
he was responsible for the hurried assault against the rebel stockades. But once again his claims are uncorroborated and unsupportable. Much more plausible is Augustus
Lindley’s description of the attack, as seen from the Taiping side:

Drawing his mercenary sword, and brushing back the Yankee locks, General Ward gave the word to assault in a tone of assured victory. The disciplined Chinamen, led by their foreign officers, rushed forward bravely enough; but the Taipings had not been half destroyed by shot and shell; neither at that time had they lost their best troops in conflict with the British and French.… Consequently, after three attempts to storm the stockade, when five officers and seventy men [of the Ever Victorious Army] were placed
hors de combat
, Admiral Hope advanced to call off the men, and was rewarded with a Taiping bullet lodged in the calf of his leg. Ward, having none of the resistless artillery to mow down the patriotic Taipings, found them more than a match for his men—disciplined, led by foreigners, and well armed as they were. A retreat was therefore sounded, and the British Admiral was ignominiously carried away upon a litter borne by sundry cursing Celestials [imperialists].

In assaulting Lung-chu-an, Ward had rashly thrown his fifteen hundred men, unsupported by artillery, against some eight thousand Taipings who fought behind the safety of strong entrenchments. The odds against success were too astronomical even for Ward. Returning to Chi-pao with the wounded Admiral Hope—who, according to Forester, waited in line for six hours behind other, more seriously wounded men before having his leg treated, by which time the admiral’s boot was “filled to overflowing with blood”—Ward joined the other Allied commanders in planning a more considered and coordinated assault on Lung-chu-an. General Staveley, predictably, declined to dispatch his army troops on this latest adventure; rather he agreed, with apparent point, to hold Chi-pao “in case of a reverse,” as
the
Herald
correspondent put it. Admiral Hope was forced by the wound in his leg to remain in Chi-pao, and the British naval units were placed under the command
of Captain Borlase. Admiral Protet agreed to participate, as did Tardif de Moidrey, and at 7:00
A.M
. on April 5 this force set out for Lung-chu-an.

During the night the Taipings had reinforced their stockades. Ward’s men were sent out toward these strengthened positions in skirmishing order, while the British and French contingents took up positions behind their guns, which were about three hundred yards from the Taiping fortifications. As the artillery opened fire, Ward’s men began to move in a large semicircle toward the rebels, under cover of various graves and burial mounds outside the town. Without risking or losing a man, the French and British continued to hammer away at Lung-chu-an, and very quickly Ward was in position to lead the final assault, which was observed by
the
Herald
correspondent: “Ward’s men pushed on beautifully and in excellent order from cover to cover; while the rebels, notwithstanding the heavy pounding of the artillery, kept up a brisk fire upon them, by which five men were killed and two officers with seven men wounded. Having stolen up to within a hundred yards, Ward’s men made a most gallant rush—cheering in the English manner—causing the rebels to abandon their outworks.” According to Captain Borlase, the rebels, seeing that Ward’s men were quickly moving around to cut off their retreat, “immediately decamped.” And, with that, the chase was on.

After setting fire to the seven interlocking stockades of Lung-chu-an, the men of the Ever Victorious Army, along with the French and British contingents, herded the rebels into and out of other nearby encampments, driving them ever farther from their larger bases. By afternoon the Allied expeditionary force was back in Chi-pao, having completed what the
Herald
termed “the strongest and most successful attack by foreigners upon the Taiping rebels near Shanghai which has yet occurred.” There were apparent lessons to be drawn from the day, and Ward, upon returning to Sung-chiang, quickly set about absorbing them.

Clearly, the Taipings’ new strategy of firmly consolidating their positions before advancing meant that assault troops such as the Ever Victorious Army would more than ever require strong artillery support. The
Herald
may have overstated the case when it declared that “with
a powerful artillery force every rebel post in the province might be taken with ease,” but the essential point was correct. Ward had demonstrated that his disciplined infantry battalions were the equal of any foot soldiers to be found in China; mobile and daring, they represented a true flying column. But if the Ever Victorious Army was to be able to stand on its own merits at all times and in all situations, Ward would have to be sure that he could bring not only his infantry but the artillery units he was training at Sung-chiang, as well as his small but growing flotilla of armed steamers, to bear on any battle in the province. By relying on Western guns he was doing more than giving Allied artillery a role in the fighting; he was making the Western forces indispensable to success.

This point was again driven home on April 17, when Ward took four hundred of his men and joined an Anglo-French assault on Chou-p’u, the Taipings’ strongest position on the Pootung peninsula (the body of land lying between the Huang-pu River and the sea). General Staveley brought elements of the same three British infantry regiments—the Twenty-second Punjab, the Fifth Bombay and the Ninety-ninth—while Admiral Protet headed a contingent of four hundred French sailors and marines. Admiral Hope was still recovering from his leg wound, and command of the British naval detachments again devolved on Captain
Borlase. In all some two thousand Allied troops supported by a dozen guns took part in the action, which followed the same pattern as the successful assault on Lung-chu-an: The men were ferried in British gunboats, and, on arriving before the interlocking stockades of Chou-p’u, Ward’s troops spread out as skirmishers and storming parties, while the Allied troops remained behind the safety of their guns.

At two in the afternoon, according to Captain Borlase, the guns opened “a most destructive fire,” under cover of which Ward’s men moved into position to intercept the Taipings when they evacuated the town, it being by now assumed that the rebels would not hold up under the concentrated fire of the British and French naval guns, Tardif de Moidrey’s howitzers, and Staveley’s Armstrongs. Sure enough, within half an hour the four to five thousand Taiping defenders had begun to flee, and many were shot down as they did: Borlase put the enemy dead at three hundred, but Augustus Lindley claimed that no fewer than six
hundred lost their lives. Ward’s men fought their way through ditches spiked with bamboo and stormed the inner fortifications, and within hours the action was over. It was a particularly satisfying day for the attacking soldiers, because Chou-p’u was found to be full of Taiping loot. The
Shanghai Daily Shipping List
stated that

[a]s the houses were ransacked, great quantities of valuable jewels, gold, silver, dollars, and costly dresses were found, which was fair loot to the officers and men.… It was a glorious day of looting for everybody, and we hear that one party, who discovered the Taiping treasury chest with several thousand dollars in it, after loading himself to his heart’s content, was obliged to give some of them away to lighten his pockets, which were heavier than he could well bear—a marked case of
l’embarras des richesses
.

Matters of loot aside, the need for Ward to develop a more mobile and impressive artillery arm was apparent, and in the weeks to come it was this branch of service that received his special attention. Having experienced many times the difficulty of moving land guns through the Kiangsu countryside, Ward placed steadily greater emphasis on expanding his fleet of steamers and beefing up their armaments. He already had at his disposal the
Cricket
and the
Zingari
, and in late April or early May he either chartered or bought three more vessels, the
Rose
, the
Pao-shun
, and the steamer whose name would come to be most closely associated with the operations of the Ever Victorious Army, the
Hyson
. The British journalist Andrew Wilson described the
Hyson
as “a small iron paddle-steamer, of about ninety feet long and twenty-four feet wide, drawing three to four feet of water, and carrying one 32-pounder on a moving platform at her bow, while at her stern there was a 12-pounder howitzer. A loopholed protection of planking ran round the bulwarks to a height of six feet, and the steam-chests were protected by a timber traverse. She averaged eight knots per hour.”

Steamers such as the
Hyson
would play an especially critical role in attacking towns that were not removed from the waterways of Kiangsu. But landlocked operations would also require heavy artillery
support, as Ward had seen at Wang-chia-ssu, and he continued to push for the procurement of up-to-date land guns. It was a slow process. In the spring of 1862 Ward was able to acquire little more than some serviceable American twelve-pounders, but by the late summer and early fall the Ever Victorious Army was being outfitted with advanced British and French pieces as well. Ward’s emphasis on artillery endured after his death: According to
Wilson, when the Ever Victorious Army’s artillery arm reached its height some months after its creator had been killed, it had “two 8-inch howitzers, four 32-pounder guns, three 24-pounder howitzers, twelve 12-pounder howitzers, ten American 12-pounder mountain howitzers, eight 4 1/2-inch mountain howitzers, fourteen mortars, brass, 4 1/2 to 8 inches, and six inch rocket tubes.” Wilson’s somewhat laconic statement that this “was a heavy force of artillery in the circumstances” reflected how fully Ward, during his tenure in command, put the Ever Victorious Army on a course toward independence.

Soon after the battles of Wang-chia-ssu, Lung-chu-an, and Chou-p’u,
Li Hung-chang and his long-awaited Anhwei Army began to arrive in Shanghai, opening a new chapter in the military and political history of the port during the Taiping period. Ferried down the Yangtze on British vessels, the Anhwei troops were a very different breed of soldier from the largely useless and often destructive imperialist Green Standard soldiers who operated in the Shanghai region. Thus far the Green Standard contingents had been unable to competently garrison any of the important positions won by Ward and the Westerners. In Chou-p’u, for example, Ward’s men, along with elements of the Twenty-second Punjab Regiment, had held the town during the night following the attack, then turned it over to Green Standard soldiers for permanent garrisoning. But the nervous Green Standard men, left on their own, quickly abandoned it. The Taipings were thus free to return and rebuild their fortifications in the Chou-p’u area as soon as the Ever Victorious Army and the foreign contingents turned their attention to other sections of the thirty-mile radius. It was hoped that the Anhwei Army would be able to finally provide badly needed, effective garrison troops. Its commander, however, had other ideas.

Li Hung-chang’s caution concerning foreign military activities in China, as well as his personal ambition, dictated that he would not allow the troops that he and Tseng Kuo-fan had so carefully trained and indoctrinated to play a supporting role to Western regulars, or even to the Ever Victorious Army, at least until Li was better acquainted with the imitation foreign devils and their commander. Li’s first concern on reaching Shanghai was, in fact, not fighting the rebels at all but slowly and carefully assessing the immensely complex situation that faced him in the port. Having received his final civil and military schooling at the feet of Tseng Kuo-fan—a man who did not tolerate corruption or the subordination of Chinese interests—Li was deeply disturbed by much of what he found. “The Taotais Wu and Yang Fang,” he wrote to Tseng in mid-April, “and the officials and gentry of the Joint Defence Bureau, in managing diplomatic relations, behave in too humble and flattering a manner. His Excellency Hsüeh [Huan] barely maintains a proper attitude, and often has quarrels with the foreigners. They do not treat him very amicably, and often quarrel with him over joint military action in the interior.”

Li’s soldiers did not arrive in Shanghai all at once but over a period of weeks, giving him an excuse for not going on the offensive immediately. In addition, Li did not become acting governor of Kiangsu until mid-May; for the moment, overall responsibility for imperial military movements remained with Hsüeh Huan. During the grace period afforded by these two factors, Li continued to observe and report back to Tseng concerning affairs in Shanghai without engaging in any significant military operations. Worried as he was about the honesty and capabilities of his fellow Chinese officers and officials as well as about the ultimate intentions of the Western powers, Li—who always viewed affairs with unusual and incisive detachment—did not fall prey to exaggerated suspicions about Ward. Ordered by Peking to “fraternize” and make “small rewards” to “Ward and others who seek both fame and fortune,” Li went on to exhibit genuine admiration for the commander of the Ever Victorious Army, although he never gave full credence to Ward’s change of nationality. For the remainder of his days Ward remained a “foreigner” to Li, albeit “the most vigorous of all” foreigners in his actions against the Taipings.

Ward also developed a qualified respect and admiration for the man who soon became his imperial superior. Li Hung-chang was obviously, in style, training, and leadership ability, far superior to the Chinese officials Ward was used to doing business with in Shanghai. At the same time, Ward could see that Li—whatever his condemnations of Wu, Yang, and the rest of their clique for corruption—was no less ambitious or averse to political and financial maneuvering than any of them. To Ward, Li was “the Devilish Governor,” yet while there was perception in the epithet, there was little real hostility. And certainly, during the battles they fought together in the summer of 1862, the two men demonstrated something that transcended personal suspicions and jealousies. For it was Ward and Li, acting in concert, who most clearly revealed that if the Chinese were willing to suspend their cultural arrogance, accept the assistance of ambitious but loyal outsiders such as Ward, and adapt to Western ways of war, they might not only quell rebellion within their borders but establish themselves as a power to be reckoned with internationally.