The Devil Soldier (39 page)

In mid-April, however, the victories of summer were still many battles away. On April 22 Admiral Hope, General Staveley, and Admiral Protet met in Shanghai to sign an agreement formalizing their determination to clear the thirty-mile radius around the city in conjunction with the Ever Victorious Army. Specifically, the Allied commanders declared that occupation of Chia-ting, Ch’ing-p’u, Sung-chiang, Nan-ch’iao (south of Shanghai), and Che-lin (south of Nan-ch’iao) was necessary to “keep the rebels at a distance, which will preclude the continuance of that state of alarm which has prevailed during the last few months, and which has been so detrimental to [Shanghai’s] commerce.” The agreement noted that Ward was currently in possession of Sung-chiang and intended to fortify Ch’ing-p’u similarly, once it had been retaken. Hsüeh Huan had pledged garrison forces for the other cities, but, recognizing the value of this commitment, the Allied agreement added that “it will also be expedient to place 200 troops, half English and half French, in support of the Chinese, until Colonel Ward’s force is sufficiently augmented to enable him to replace them by 300 of his men.”

Within days of signing this agreement, the Allied commanders were surprised to learn that Hsüeh Huan, determined to play a role in the
thirty-mile-radius fighting, had ordered his Green Standard troops to attack a Taiping encampment at Nan-hsiang, on the line from Shanghai to Chia-ting. The assault took place on April 25 and, even more surprising, was successful, the rebels being driven to another, stronger encampment a mile away. On the following day General Staveley—as if to prove he would not be outpaced by the imperialists—ordered a march on Nan-hsiang, where he intended to link up with British naval units in preparation for a large-scale march on Chia-ting. Moving quickly through a dozen miles of devastated countryside, the British troops succeeded in reaching Nan-hsiang that same day and were joined there by naval units under Captain Willes and marines under Captain Holland. Early on the morning of the twenty-seventh, elements of the Thirty-first Regiment and the Royal Artillery also reached Nan-hsiang, many by boat. Immediately, skirmishing parties probed the nearby Taiping position, which was surrounded by stockades and ditches.

Ward, in the meantime, was leaving little to chance in preparing his army for its part in the looming attack on Chia-ting. Loading his men and several guns aboard his steamers as well as another thirty smaller gunboats, he made the approach to Chia-ting by water: At last the Ever Victorious Army would be in a position to cover its own attack with its own guns. Back on the route from Nan-hsiang to Chia-ting, General Staveley received a rude shock when, without coordinating his movements with his French comrades, he attacked the Taiping positions outside Nan-hsiang and was beaten back. Making as little of this incident as possible, the
North China Herald
reported that Staveley quickly recouped and was soon on the road to Chia-ting again. But the sight of British regulars retreating before rebel fire must have wounded Stave-ley’s pride deeply, although he could take some solace in the fact that Ward had not yet arrived to witness the humiliation. The Ever Victorious Army linked up with the Allied units on the twenty-eighth, at which point the badly outclassed Taipings in the area began a hasty retreat to the northwest. Close to 3,000 French and British troops, along with Tardif de Moidrey’s Franco-Chinese Corps, Ward’s 1,400 men, and several thousand Green Standard soldiers, now moved in a general advance on the walls of Chia-ting.

The Allied force spent April 30 reconnoitering the city’s defenses
and getting their various artillery units into place. The former assignment was entrusted to General Staveley’s brother-in-law and chief of engineers, Captain Charles G.
Gordon. Gordon’s ability to read and map terrain quickly was exceptional, and he charted Chia-ting in a manner that would characterize the rest of his tour of duty in China and, indeed, his entire life: with utter disregard for his own safety. Deeply religious and sometimes suspected of harboring a martyr complex, Gordon was at his best in situations of immense physical peril. His maps of the thirty-mile radius, often drawn as Taiping musket balls and bullets rained around him, eventually became vital to every commander in the region. Gordon dismissed the achievement with typical disdain, noting simply that he had been “in every town and village in the thirty miles’ radius. The country is the same everywhere—a dead flat, with innumerable creeks and bad pathways. There is nothing of any interest in China; if you have seen one village you have seen the whole country.” But Gordon did see other sights, at Chia-ting and elsewhere, that impressed him more than the Chinese countryside: most notably the disciplined Chinese soldiers of the Ever Victorious Army, and the inventive command techniques of its creator.

By the following morning the Allied expeditionary force was ready for its assault on Chia-ting. “Daylight on the 1st of charming May,” Augustus Lindley recalled, “was ushered in by the roar of a large park of foreign artillery.” The French and British troops had taken up positions outside Chia-ting’s southern and eastern gates, while Ward attacked from the west and the Green Standard units were assigned to cover any Taiping attempt to escape through the city’s north gate. Chia-ting’s well-built walls were some three miles in circumference, and for two hours Ward’s guns and those of the various Allied units battered at them incessantly, during which time the city’s six thousand defenders were thrown into a state of utter confusion. Several Taiping units composed of young boys took part in the defense, and Lindley recounted one sad tale that gave a taste of the fiery terror produced by the artillery bombardment:

Three little fellows, each armed with a small matchlock, were seen by a friend of mine to rush forward directly a large shell would knock down a portion of the parapet and fire off their puny weapons at the foe. They were too small to reach the loop-holes, and so waited till the 32-pound shot of the besiegers made a hole for them to use. To avoid the deadly rifles they never used the same hole twice, but nevertheless were all killed, for my friend, when passing round the walls, found their bodies lying close together and crushed by a mass of fallen stonework.

Under the relentless pressure of the guns, the Taipings began to withdraw toward the avenue of least resistance: the imperialist detachments to the north. Seeing this, the other Allied units dashed to the walls, raised scaling ladders, and began their assault. “There was a great race,” wrote Dr.
Macgowan, “between the English, French and Chinese to be the first to plant their respective colours on the city walls. All three claimed to be first. The Sung-chiang contingent strongly claimed this honour; although, from apprehensions of the atrocities they might perpetrate, they were ordered not to enter the city.” Ward was being careful that his men should not spoil their reputation either in the countryside or in Peking through the kind of wanton pillaging that the French and British units engaged in immediately after they entered Chia-ting. Charles Schmidt recalled ironically that the French troops “seemed to be in the very best humour that day, for they carried off everything that could be got away. It was a romantic sight to see the soldiery leaving the city, followed by bullocks, sheep, goats, boys and women—all considered as loot.… In fact the French troops showed a bad example to the new Chinese levies, in committing all sorts of cruelties, which were all laid to Ward’s force.”

The behavior of the British troops was not much better than that of their French allies:
The
China Mail
commented that “[t]here is another matter of regret, and that is, that while we are stigmatizing the rebels as robbers and bandits, we should take their treasures and divide it amongst ourselves.… There is every reason to believe that England’s chivalry is likely to be kept a profound secret from the people of China so long as her affairs are under the present guidance.”

Taiping casualties—most of which occurred during their retreat from the city—were severe: Augustus Lindley put them as high as 2,500
killed. Five hundred of Ward’s men were detached to garrison Chia-ting, along with two hundred British troops and the imperialist units. The rest of the Ever Victorious Army then boarded their steamers and gunboats for the trip back to Sung-chiang. But the mood of the troops was less than triumphant. As Dr.
Macgowan wrote: “Those who returned to Sung-chiang were sulky and insubordinate, through not being allowed to plunder. What booty some of them managed to get was taken from them by the English provost-sergeants. It was usual to accord three days furlough, which was granted on this occasion also; and then drill instruction and recruiting were resumed.” In addition, “a German band was engaged,” perhaps to raise the morale of soldiers who were hard put to understand why their commander had stood by and watched the Allied troops strip Chia-ting without allowing his own men to participate. But Ward’s reasoning was sound: Excessive looting, even had Ward been personally disposed to it, would at this critical juncture have marked the Ever Victorious Army as just another oppressive imperial army, to be feared as much as the rebels by Kiangsu’s peasants. The growth of both Ward’s cult of personality and the mystique of his contingent required extreme restraint.

Soon after Chia-ting the British Foreign Office, impressed with Ward’s activities, approved both the strategy of the thirty-mile radius and the idea of expanding the Ever Victorious Army to the remarkable size of ten thousand men. On May 6 a British Foreign Office memorandum to the Lords of the Admiralty stated that “Her Majesty’s Government are of the opinion that stores, and even guns and muskets which can be spared, should be sold to Colonel Ward … at cost price. Lord Russell will instruct Her Majesty’s Minister at Peking to advise the Chinese Government to furnish Colonel Ward the supplies he may require, and to do their utmost to raise his force to ten thousand men.” Such a notion was out of the question to the Manchus, who did their very best to plead poverty and every other excuse for not making it possible for Ward’s army to grow beyond the four to five thousand it eventually did reach. But this expanded and high-level British support meant that Ward would have considerably less trouble procuring rifles, muskets,
pistols, swords, ammunition, and other equipment for his men, as well as new pieces of up-to-date artillery.

The British attitude to
ward the Ever Victorious Army was indicative of London’s increasing impatience with Chinese anarchy and the Taiping rebels. In perhaps the most famous embodiment of this impatience, Captain Roderick Dew—the aggressive British naval officer who, in 1860, had scoured Shanghai looking for Ward, captured Burgevine, and subsequently been fired on by the Taipings outside Ch’ing-p’u—retook the Chekiang port of Ningpo on May 10. The operation was reminiscent of Ward’s capture of Sung-chiang in 1860, a fact that was not altogether surprising, for in temperament the two men were much alike. By 1862 their relationship had evolved so far that Ward was able to refer to Dew as “my friend and moreover a fine fellow & officer.” Dew’s exploits at Ningpo offer clues to the origins of this friendship.

Since capturing Ningpo in December 1861, the Taipings had garrisoned it with between twenty and thirty thousand troops and tried to avoid conflict with the Westerners who lived and traded in the treaty port. But in mid-April, with Allied contingents actively campaigning against the Chung Wang in the Shanghai area, the Taipings in Ningpo had become testy: Some shots were fired at a British gunboat by unidentified rebels, and several Chinese inside the British settlement were reportedly killed by similar fire. Admiral Hope, still nursing the leg wound he had received at the hands of the rebels at Lung-chu-an, was in no mood to hear of high-handed Taiping actions against his officers in Ningpo: Captain Dew was immediately dispatched aboard HMS
Encounter
, with orders to warn the Taipings that such behavior would bring forceful British intervention.

Dew received no apologies from the Taiping commanders in Ningpo when he arrived on April 24, and tension mounted. At this point the taotai of the city arrived with a fleet of Chinese junks commanded by one A-pak, a piratical acquaintance (and sometime hireling) of Ward’s. The taotai and A-pak met with Dew and the French naval commander and asked for their help in an attempt to reestablish imperial authority over the port. Dew refused to participate without provocation, but he knew that such provocation was not far off. The Taipings had built a
series of impressive fortifications overlooking the British settlement and installed in them a battery of sixty-eight-pounder guns that could not be fired without at least some risk to British residents.
Dew warned the Taipings that if any such firing took place—even if the rebels were only defending themselves—he would return fire on the city. All A-pak had to do was move his junks past the foreign ships in the harbor, draw the inevitable Taiping fire, and British participation in the battle would be ensured. Such was the sequence of events on the morning of May 10.

With the
Encounter
and a handful of British and French gunboats—including the
Confucius
, on which Ward had served years earlier—Dew launched a determined assault on one of Ningpo’s gates as soon as the Taipings fired on A-pak. The naval guns blazed away at the Taiping position while Dew took two hours off for lunch; then the
Encounter
’s captain personally scaled the gate at the head of several hundred British and French sailors. Suffering heavy casualties, Dew’s party reached the top of the gate, hauled up a howitzer, and began to rake the inside of the city with artillery fire. The rebels stood this punishment briefly, then began a general withdrawal to the city of Yü-Yao, some thirty miles away.

Without any higher authorization than some vaguely encouraging words from Admiral Hope, Captain Dew had committed a major act of aggression against the rebels. What he found inside Ningpo’s walls, however, convinced him that his course had been the right one. Dew later wrote: “I had known Ningpo in its palmy days, when it boasted itself one of the first commercial cities of the empire; but now, on this 11th May, one might have fancied that an angel of destruction had been at work in the city as in its suburbs. All the latter, with their wealthy hongs and thousands of houses, lay leveled; while in the city itself, once the home of half a million people, no trace or vestige of an inhabitant could be seen. Truly it was a city of the dead.”