The Devil Soldier (47 page)

Both Hope and Staveley were understandably dismayed by such behavior, and, in the wake of the capture of Chia-ting, Admiral Hope persuaded Burgevine to agree to the appointment of Captain John Holland of the Royal Marines as chief of staff of the Ever Victorious Army, in an effort to “prevent the entire disorganisation of the Corps.” But Holland soon proved a less than imaginative officer; in fact, his appointment may only have worsened the situation, for, as one of Ward’s veteran officers put it, “Burgevine, instead of giving responsible appointments to competent men, was very often ruled by some of his staff officers; and men were appointed because they were favored by those around him. Burgevine was not the man that Ward was. The latter used to go by his own judgment; while Burgevine confided too much to his
staff; which would have been right enough, if these men had been competent to hold their rank; but Burgevine ought to have known that they were not.”

Admiral
Hope—tired, still feeling the effects of his wounded leg, and ready to relinquish his command in China—tried to remain hopeful: “Colonel Burgevine,” he told Frederick Bruce, “is perfectly sensible of the necessity of thoroughly organising and disciplining the Corps prior to attempting any distant operation, and will during the ensuing winter limit his operations to the protection of the Shanghai district.” Following the Allied recapture of Chia-ting, however, the Chung Wang returned east to make sure that the new threats to his forces in Kiangsu did not result in the fall of Soochow. An opportunity for a decisive imperialist move against Nanking was thus created, and by late fall Hope, the only hand that could moderate Burgevine’s behavior, had left for England. In November and December, Burgevine’s Chinese superiors pressed him to prepare his army for an attack on Nanking in conjunction with Tseng Kuo-fan’s forces. Burgevine agreed to the plan but stated that he would not move until he was completely ready and until Wu Hsü and Yang Fang supplied him with more supplies and money than they had to date.

Burgevine’s position in this last regard was understandable: He did not possess Ward’s magic gift for getting what he needed out of Wu and Yang, who since Burgevine’s assumption of command had withheld sorely needed funds. By January 1863 the situation was so bad that the Ever Victorious Army was on the brink of mutiny. After trying to placate his men by repeating a series of empty pledges from his backers, the desperate Burgevine marched into Yang Fang’s office, beat the old banker bloody, and took forty thousand silver dollars.

This was not only theft but a crime against the Confucian order: To Li Hung-chang, Burgevine was “in the sight of Chinese law, guilty in the highest degree, and even according to foreign law such a rebellious and treasonable subject cannot be tolerated in the service.” Needless to say, the Ever Victorious Army’s expedition to Nanking never materialized. After making repeated attempts to exonerate himself, Burgevine fled Sung-chiang with many of his officers and eventually defected to the Taipings.

Burgevine’s behavior gave Li Hung-chang the excuse he had long needed to strip Wu Hsü and Yang Fang—who, as Burgevine’s sponsors and superiors, were responsible for his actions—of most of their government posts. Wu subsequently left Shanghai, and Yang withdrew into the Western settlements, where he owned considerable property. As to command of the Ever Victorious Army, Li and his superiors had had enough, by this point, of foreign adventurers: They agreed to allow the British to appoint an officer to command the steadily deteriorating force.

They were encouraged to do so by the successes enjoyed during the winter of 1862-63 by the Franco-Chinese troops supporting the imperial armies in Chekiang province. In December 1862 Prosper Giquel and Lieutenant Le Brethon de Caligny had begun operations against the Taipings again. Giquel quickly received a bad wound and was forced to suspend his field participation, but in January Le Brethon de Caligny resolutely moved against the Taiping stronghold of Shao-hsing without the support of any Ever Victorious Army or Anglo-Chinese troops. Among Le Brethon’s artillery force were some old British nine-pounder guns, which Le Brethon himself positioned outside the walls of the city. In the midst of this bold action, tragedy struck: “[A]t the first discharge the gun burst,” wrote Andrew
Wilson, “and a large portion of the breech struck Le Brethon, carrying away the whole upper part of his body and causing instantaneous death.”

The wounded Giquel still could not assume field command of the Franco-Chinese troops, which now devolved on Ward’s old comrade Adrien Tardif de Moidrey. Many of the Franco-Chinese soldiers were reluctant to renew the attack on Shao-hsing, whose defenders were determined. But Tardif was as unstoppable as ever. On February 19, 1863, he ordered his troops back to Shao-hsing’s walls. On this occasion, however, discipline had its price: At 10:00
A.M
. Tardif de Moidrey was shot in the back of the head by one of his own soldiers. Wilson recalled that “[h]is iron constitution enabled him to live for eight hours, though his brains were scattered over the hair of his head.” Ironically, Tardif’s troops finally took the city when the rebels evacuated it on March 18. In subsequent months, commanded by Giquel, the Franco-Chinese Corps of Chekiang became the Ever Triumphant Army and played a key role in the recapture of Hangchow.

The Ever Victorious Army, meanwhile, was enjoying no such success. In response to the Chinese agreement to allow a British officer to command the force, General Staveley—who, with Hope gone, became the dominant voice in British military policy in Shanghai—put forward his young brother-in-law, Charles George Gordon, as a candidate. The Chinese requirement that any Ever Victorious Army commander become a Chinese subject was waived, but the imperial government still insisted that Gordon at least enter the Chinese military service. To do so, however, Gordon needed permission from Staveley’s superiors. As those orders were awaited, Captain John Holland was placed in temporary command of the Ever Victorious Army.

It quickly became apparent that Holland had no central understanding of what made the Ever Victorious Army work as a unit: “Everything,” Dr.
Macgowan wrote, “was reorganised, after the pattern of the Queen’s regulations, as Holland used to term it. Even Ward’s uniform, which that general had ordered to be worn when he raised the force—a kind of American style, was done away with, and instead, a new one invented
à la
Holland. It was a wonder he did not order a red coat, like the Royal Marines.”

Unfortunately, Holland paid less attention to tactics than to details: When he engaged the rebels at T’ai-ts’ang on February 14, he was soundly beaten. The English-language periodical
Friend of China
commented, “It took the troops four days to reach T’ai-ts’ang;—it took them—less muskets, blankets, provisions, munitions of war, ordnance—everything,—to the tune of over a hundred thousand dollars—eight hours only to get back! Such a skedaddle was never seen.”

Lieutenant Thomas Lyster of the Royal Engineers wrote to his father of the incident: “The rebels … beat Ward’s force, killing several hundred.… General Holland had no idea beyond brute force. He actually told me, when I was at Sung-chiang, and had an argument with him about the last French and Austrian campaign, that he did not believe in
tactics!
 … He, throughout all the operations, did not take the least advantage of tactics. General Ward, who was not a professional soldier, would have acted better.”

The Ever Victorious Army’s sad disintegration during the early months of 1863 caused many Westerners in Shanghai to wonder if the
army had ever truly been the wondrous force of disciplined Chinese that they had once supposed. The
North China Herald
, for example, wrote in January that “there is reason to believe that the corps has not been of that high character it was represented to be.” This attitude only deepened as time went by: Soon
the
Herald
was worrying that the force would “degenerate into, what in Ward’s time it too much resembled, a rabble presenting the guise only of a military organization—which in reality it never possessed.” Typically, the
Herald
was encouraged by the appointment of Captain Holland, who, as a British officer, could presumably reverse the downward trend. But after T’ai-ts’ang the
Herald
was forced to admit that Holland “did not exhibit the requisite skill in generalship to command so large a force.”

On March 23 command of the Ever Victorious Army was given to Charles George Gordon (now promoted major), despite the continued protests of the army’s veteran officers against outside control. Charles Schmidt wrote in early April that “ ‘[t]he ever Victorious army’ [
sic
] do not want any regular Military Foreign Generals, however necessary the latter may be supposed to be. Do not intrude! We want men of Ward’s and Vincente’s stamp!” But the likelihood of Vincente Macanaya being given command was slim, as Schmidt himself recognized: “[H]is being a Manila man puts the damper on his chances of election to the position of Commander under the present Sung-chiang dynasty.” Schmidt could see that with the arrival of Gordon the Ever Victorious Army entered on a period of transition that would leave it far from the vision Ward had originally conjured up and subsequently come so close to achieving. Schmidt further sensed that the money he and Vincente were owed by their Chinese backers would probably never be paid. Schmidt, Vincente, and other officers of the force had, like Ward, often accepted Wu Hsü’s and Yang Fang’s vouchers in lieu of payment. But as things stood in April 1863—with Ward dead and Yang and Wu degraded—these vouchers meant little. In bemoaning this fact, Schmidt bid farewell to Vincente Macanaya and, at the same time, to an era:

“Perhaps, Vincente, the time may come when our old Tartar masters will be tired of their new ones [the English]. They may then again ask a favor of us and let us then be wise;—have nothing to do with a
necessity for vouchers;—but catching our one moon’s advance first, be with that content.—Until then Adieu.”

Under Charles G. Gordon the Ever Victorious Army came out of the organizational and operational tailspin it had been in since Ward’s death. But it also lost much of the roguish élan that had characterized it during Ward’s tenure and took on an aura that more closely matched its deeply religious and psychologically complex new commander. The contrast between Ward and Gordon was a paradoxical one, involving details of character that at once suggested similarity and extreme difference. For example, when Gordon was younger he, like Ward, had played a game that involved falling into the ocean and observing the reaction his distress created among those ashore; the difference, as Richard J.
Smith has pointed out, “was that Ward could swim.” Ever the pure adventurer, Ward had none of the religious intensity and fascination with death that marked Gordon, whose indulgent mother had taught him to interpret the Bible as literal truth. Gordon never belonged to any church or organized Christian sect but relied wholly on his own interpretations of the sacred book for guidance. Thus like Ward he constructed his own system of values, but unlike his American predecessor Gordon formed those values around a deep religious commitment that bordered on mysticism.

Again like Ward, Gordon had had a history of violent encounters as a boy at school. But while Ward had been a popular champion of weaker children, Gordon had been a difficult youth prone to violent outbursts that too often resembled bullying. In adulthood, both Ward and Gordon possessed undeniable charm, yet Gordon’s was perhaps the less calculated. Indeed, for all his perspicacity about the world around him, Gordon could be remarkably lacking in insight about his own character and actions. For this reason his personality, while more restrained than Ward’s, was also less disciplined. Never very comfortable with other people, Gordon was particularly ill at ease with women, giving rise after his death to grossly unfair questions concerning his sexuality. Harry Parkes, Britain’s foremost consul in China, summed Gordon up as “a fine noble generous fellow, but at the same time very peculiar and sensitive—exceedingly
impetuous—full of energy, which just wants judgment to make it a very splendid type.” Throughout his life it was this occasional lack of judgment that kept Gordon from attaining the highest level of success. It also, in the end, made him a legend throughout the world: His final decision to stand alone at the head of a comparatively tiny garrison at Khartoum and take on the hordes of the Sudanese Islamic rebellion in 1885, while impractical to the point of being suicidal, also gave him just renown as a courageous martyr.

On taking command of the Ever Victorious Army in March 1863, Gordon made several disparaging statements that unfairly attributed the unit’s recent troubles to Ward. But he quietly took other actions that indicated both that he knew such statements to be ungrounded and that he had studied Ward carefully during the thirty-mile-radius campaign. Adopting the practice of going into battle armed only with a rattan cane, Gordon was able to form around himself the same superstitions of invulnerability that had marked the attitude of China’s peasants toward Ward. On a more practical level, Gordon strengthened the branches of the Ever Victorious Army that Ward, toward the end of his life, had recognized were the most crucial: the artillery and the armed steamers. He cleaned out officers he considered unreliable and restored a disciplined air to the army’s camp. Yet this air, unlike that of Ward’s day, was all business: While the men marched, drilled, and fought effectively, they did so with little of the enthusiasm that had so marked the Ward period.

By late July 1863 Gordon and Li Hung-chang had engaged the Taipings extensively outside the thirty-mile radius. These engagements had been so successful that they were closing in for an attack on Soochow, the Chung Wang’s most valued prize. Now serving with the Taipings was Burgevine, whom Gordon knew personally, and through an extensive system of spies and contacts inside the rebel camp that he (again like Ward) employed, Gordon was able to communicate with the troubled ex-commander of the Ever Victorious Army. Having found the rebel service less profitable than he had expected, Burgevine was ready to desert, and Gordon facilitated the move. According to Augustus
Lindley, Burgevine next proposed to Gordon that the two men abandon both the Manchus and the rebels “and commence a system of independent
conquest.” Lindley speculated that the idea might have been the result of “mental derangement, consequent upon the effects of his [Burgevine’s] wound and the stimulants he used”; whatever the case,
Gordon turned him down.