The Devil Soldier (40 page)

Within a week, a detachment of four to five hundred men of the Ever Victorious Army had arrived in Ningpo to assist in garrisoning the port by guarding its western gate, and by month’s end the city’s activities were returning to something like normal. But Dew endured heavy criticism for his impulsive action from both his naval superiors and
British diplomatic officers. Determined nevertheless to follow up his initial move, he set about organizing a small defensive force of disciplined Chinese soldiers led by British officers. In doing so he ran into the additional opposition of local mandarins, who had little desire to see the British extend their control over yet another treaty port.

The French, witnessing the various controversies that swirled around Dew’s actions, saw an opening. The Imperial Chinese Customs Commissioner for the port, the Frenchman Prosper Giquel, had returned following Ningpo’s liberation, ready not only to reopen his customs house but to make use of the careful military study he had done in and around Shanghai. Conferring first with Ningpo’s mandarins and then with the French naval commander in East Asia, Giquel gained support for the idea of a corps of disciplined Chinese led by French officers. The unit would play much the same role that Ward’s Ever Victorious Army was filling in Shanghai and would establish France rather than England as the most influential Western power in Ningpo. The Chinese provincial officials agreed, out of a desire as much to play the two foreign nations off against each other as to reform the Chekiang military; they were, however, less forthcoming with funds for Giquel’s project than Hsüeh Huan, Wu Hsü, and Yang Fang had been for Ward’s. But Giquel did manage to have a talented French officer, Albert Édouard Le Brethon de Caligny (who had commanded the
Confucius
during Dew’s attack on Ningpo), named commander of the new unit. And, although the few hundred Chinese recruits they raised were early on armed with obsolete—even dangerous—firearms, and although the British strongly condemned the project, Giquel’s and Le Brethon de Caligny’s determination ensured future success.

The man who had served as Giquel’s model in the meantime was making ready to assault the city that two years earlier had been the site of his only catastrophic failure. The capture of Ch’ing-p’u, and after it Nan-ch’iao and Che-lin, represented the final step in the Allied-imperialist plan to clear the thirty-mile radius. In preparing for his part in the Ch’ing-p’u assault, which was scheduled for the second week in May, Ward assembled an even stronger contingent than he had brought to Chia-ting. There would be no repeat of the grisly humiliations of 1860:
Some eighteen hundred men, supported by the steamers with their big guns as well as batteries of howitzers, were drilled to a high state of readiness.

Ward’s consistent emphasis on discipline, both on the battlefield and off, was by this point showing not only in his men but in the general condition of Sung-chiang and its environs. The Allied expeditionary force of about 2,600 men discovered as much when they steamed up the Huang-pu from Shanghai to consolidate with the Ever Victorious Army before marching on Ch’ing-p’u. As one eyewitness put it in an account published in the
North China Herald:

The city of Sung-chiang has latterly become much improved under Colonel Ward’s protection. Very nearly all the suburbs, which were destroyed by the rebels when in possession of the place, have been rebuilt; and although there are a large number of shops, yet they scarcely seem adequate for the wants of the population,—which is very large. Good fish, mutton, and beef is to be had here in abundance.… The city walls have been repaired, and embrasures cut for guns, in imitation of the English method. They are manned with cannon on ship-carriages, working on roughly-made platforms, with due provision of shot alongside each. The guard-houses are tenanted by Ward’s drilled Chinamen,—who present a very creditable appearance. The sentries had evidently been ordered to pay the proper compliments to foreign officers, and carried arms to every uniform that presented an inch of gold lace, with great propriety.

On May 8 the combined expeditionary force—joined by several thousand imperialists under Ward’s old associate Li Heng-sung—embarked for Kuang-fu-lin aboard countless steamers, gunboats, and smaller craft. “Every one was in immense spirits,” according to
the
Herald
account, “the laugh resounded, and jokes and repartee passed from boat to boat increasing the volume of merriment as they were bandied about by hundreds of mouths.… Such a Babel of sounds filling the air; commissaries cursing, coolies groaning, voluble Hindustani, guttural
Chinese, and good broad English and Irish resounding on all sides.” Moving at a leisurely pace, the flotilla finally reached Ch’ing-p’u on the ninth, under a steady rainfall.

By the morning of the tenth the rain had stopped, and the expeditionary force began to take up positions before the walls of Ch’ing-p’u and attend to the business of reconnoitering. Once again, Captain Charles Gordon braved rebel musket fire to make a detailed map of the city’s defenses: The
Herald
account stated that he got within fifty yards of the Taiping perimeter. A rebel deserter was interrogated and revealed that many of the city’s defenders were impressed peasants with little enthusiasm for the job before them; thus heartened, Ward and his comrades decided to wait for the ground to dry before making their attack.

Ward deployed his men before the eastern and northern walls of Ch’ing-p’u, while Li Heng-sung’s men guarded the west gate and the Allied forces prepared to attack the southern gate. At dawn on May 12, the firing commenced. Considering the rather colorful trip that had preceded it, as well as the emotional value that Ward could not have helped but attach to Ch’ing-p’u, the battle itself was brief and anticlimactic. The rebel deserter’s report that many of the defenders were less than dedicated proved true: About an hour before the artillery barrage stopped, said the
Herald
correspondent, “a man came from the city into Ward’s camp and offered to give it up if we would cease firing. He was not to be trusted and his offer was refused.” The Taipings subsequently left the city in haste: Ward’s men and the Allied soldiers, on entering the city, found “bowls of food still smoking,” as well as “kettles of hot tea … which the rebels had left in their speedy retreat from the walls.”

By 8:00
A.M
. the battle was over. Ward deposited fifteen hundred of his men in the town as a garrison, under the command of Colonel Forester (Forester’s rank, like most of those in the Ever Victorious Army, was conferred by Ward and did not represent a commission in the Chinese service). Once again, Ward did not permit his men to plunder the city (although he received a thirty-thousand-tael bonus for its capture), and he quickly took those men who were not staying with
Forester back to Sung-chiang. Within days, however, the Ever Victorious Army was again on the move, marching with the Allied expeditionary force against Nan-ch’iao.

The casualties suffered by Ward’s force and the other Allied contingents thus far in the thirty-mile-radius campaign had been exceptionally low, all the more so when measured against the staggeringly disproportionate losses inflicted on the Taipings. In the battles to date Ward’s killed and wounded could be measured in the tens, while the Allies rarely had more than one or two men killed during a battle. This low casualty rate, along with the plundering permitted by Allied commanders and the relatively small amounts of actual marching that had to be done during the campaign, had all given the undertaking what Richard J.
Smith has called an “almost carnival atmosphere.” Nan-ch’iao looked to be more of the same. A smaller city than Ch’ing-p’u, its loose brick walls only about three-quarters of a mile in circumference and surrounded by a simple ditch and dike, Nan-ch’iao was occupied by a large number of Taipings who had no ordnance that could match the artillery Ward and the Allies were bringing with them. Allied spirits during the approach to the city were once again high.

On Friday, May 16, the expeditionary force arrived at Nan-ch’iao, and on the seventeenth Admiral Protet and General Staveley undertook a personal reconnaissance of the city’s defenses. Ward, as always, assumed his position at the head of his troops, preparing to storm Nan-ch’iao after the guns had done their work. In the afternoon the artillery barrage began, and before long the usual sight of Taipings fleeing the city was noticed. At this point, General Staveley ordered the guns to cease fire and, together with his staff, began to dash about the walls looking for a suitable spot for storming. He was followed by a French contingent under Admiral Protet, moving at double time. And then, according to the
Herald
correspondent, “lo and behold! the cunning defenders, who, with the exception of their guns’ crews and a few musket parties, had been lying behind and at the bottom of their wall to escape from our fire, uttered most appalling yells, manned their walls, and gave us a well-sustained sharp fire of small arms, well-directed.”

In an instant, the carnival atmosphere was dispelled, for among
those who fell in the hail of Taiping fire was Admiral Protet. A rebel musket ball hit him full in the chest, and he was flung back into the arms of his soldiers. The admiral was quickly taken to safety, but his wound proved mortal. Protet had been one of the antirebel commanders most liked and respected by French, British, and Chinese soldiers alike: Good-natured and aggressive, he had pursued the clearance of the thirty-mile radius without partisan sentiment. It scarcely seemed possible that the Taipings should have been able to claim such a victim; and, in the aftermath of the admiral’s death, they might well have wished that they had not.

Never known for their mercy or restraint, the French troops went somewhat mad as news of Protet’s fate spread. Nan-ch’iao was quickly stormed by the Allies along with the Ever Victorious Army, upon which Ward’s men stepped back to watch the French troops vent their sorrow and anger. As Augustus
Lindley recalled:

Mercy seems never to have entered the minds of those Christian warriors, who loudly inveighed against the Taipings as “bloodthirsty monsters,” &c., &c.; for when victory crowned their unparalleled feats of arms, no effort to save the defenceless and unresisting fugitives was ever made, but while those who had thrown down their arms were vainly trying to hide or flee from the deadly rifle, or stood blocked in the gateway of the tower, the valorous conquerors calmly and easily continued to shoot them down so long as they remained within range.

Resentment was still running high as the expeditionary force pressed on to the city of Che-lin, a few miles to the south. Ward and the Allied commanders learned from informants that Che-lin’s two-mile wall, surrounded by canals and a wide, heavily bambooed ditch, were impressively fortified and contained somewhere between five and ten thousand Taipings armed with serviceable artillery and British Tower muskets. After wresting some buildings that lay outside the city away from the rebels on May 19, the expeditionary force opened up a typically devastating artillery barrage on the twentieth. The only unusual event
of the morning occurred when a Taiping leader, riding through the camp of the Western forces, was taken for an imperialist and allowed to pass on. The rebel leader subsequently “rode for his life and got to his friends inside the city,” reported
the
Herald
, but the inside of the city soon became the least healthy place to be. The French and British effected two breaches in Che-lin’s walls and before long were inside. The French troops raced through the city full of a vengeful fire that quickly infected the British. Lindley wrote that “[t]he defenders driven from the ramparts or killed, the gallant Allies rushed through the small town,
indiscriminately massacring every man, woman and child within its walls
. The Taipings had so earnestly endeavoured to shut out the besiegers that they had most effectually blocked themselves in, and were consequently butchered almost to a man.”

One British officer who followed in the wake of the French wrote that, indeed, “[a]lmost every house we entered contained dead or dying men,” and the
Overland Trade Report
, another of the English-language China coast newspapers, reported that “[s]ince the death of Admiral Protet the French troops have been behaving like fiends, killing indiscriminately men, women and children. Truth demands the confession that British sailors have likewise been guilty of the commission of similar revolting barbarities—not only on the Taipings, but upon the inoffensive helpless country people.”

Had Ward not been present, there seems little doubt that his Chinese troops would have felt free to join in this destructive frenzy. Already there were reports that the Ever Victorious Army detachment sent to Ningpo, commanded by Major J. D. Morton, had been guilty of plundering and extortion in its administration of the port’s west gate. Such reports offered further proof that only Ward stood between his men and an utter breakdown in discipline: a position he had occupied since the very first days of his corps.

It is impossible to say how long the Allied troops would have continued their brutal activities south of Shanghai had they not been restrained by events in other parts of the thirty-mile radius. General Staveley himself stated that his troops burned Che-lin to the ground, following which he ordered them to prepare “to advance on the next
rebel town,” even though the capture of Che-lin marked the realization of the goals set out by the Allied commanders during their meeting on April 22. Once freed to plunder, it seemed, the French and British troops, along with their commanders, were not easily brought back to the essential goal of defending Shanghai. Fortunately, the Chung Wang himself inadvertently provided the necessary reminder.

Following their successful actions at Nan-hsiang and Chia-ting, the Green Standard units in and around Chia-ting had become overconfident and attempted an attack against a rebel force at T’ai-ts’ang—some ten miles farther northwest than Chia-ting—during the third week of May. Perhaps smelling disaster, Li Hung-chang had refused to allow his Anhwei troops to participate in this action, which resulted in a disastrous rout of the imperialist forces by the Chung Wang on May 17. Knowing that the Western troops and Ward’s men were occupied to the south, the Chung Wang next decided to surround not only Chia-ting but Sung-chiang and Ch’ing-p’u as well. Although none of these cities fell immediately, the Chung Wang did succeed in cutting off the lines of communication to Chia-ting and Ch’ing-p’u, retaking Kuang-fu-lin, and once again threatening Shanghai, with a force of between 50,000 and 100,000 men.