The Devil Soldier (11 page)

Unfortunately, Peking was not yet desperate enough to seek the
advice and aid of sympathetic Westerners in formulating that response. Thus Ward once again could find no employment to suit him in China in 1854, and he soon departed. Always on the lookout for new opportunities, Ward was drawn this time to the great power conflict that was brewing in Europe. But China was by now exercising a powerful hold on him, and besides his native America it was the only place to which he would return time and again during the years to come.

Ward’s sister
Elizabeth vividly remembered her brother coming to say good-bye to her at boarding school in 1854, “on his way to the Crimean War.” Through family friends, Ward had apparently secured a lieutenancy in the French army. Journeying first to France and then on to Russia, the twenty-three-year-old Ward demonstrated that his idiosyncrasies were crystallizing into patterns.

The Crimean War, pitting Great Britain and France against Russia, was a politically senseless conflict, and that senselessness was echoed in the dull-witted savagery of the combatant armies. But Ward took advantage of the dismal affair to learn a great deal about the weapons and tactics then in use among large national armies. Most important, the experience offered some practical training in the employment of modern riflemen as independent skirmishers (rather than as traditionally organized units of marching infantry) and in military engineering, particularly siege techniques. The reduction of fixed fortifications was the ultimate key to victory in the Crimea and would be of immense value to Ward later in China.

But Ward’s Crimean adventure came to an end when, as A. A. Hayes recorded, “he quarreled with his superior officer and was allowed to resign.” Ward’s Yankee self-reliance was showing a marked tendency toward intolerance of superior authority. Indeed, for the rest of his life Ward would display simultaneously a talent for leadership and an inability to suffer constricting subordination, traits not inconsistent with his boyhood experiences in Salem. Taking his leave of the French service without penalty, Ward next surfaced in China in 1857.

It was, in all likelihood, news of war that drew him back. In 1856 France and Britain, weary of the imperial Chinese government’s ongoing
refusal to comply with its treaty obligations, had seized on a minor offense in Canton as an excuse for forcefully coercing Peking into more cooperative behavior. In 1857 a joint Anglo-French expeditionary force bombarded the Chinese forts at Taku in the mouth of the Peiho River, opening the way for an overland march to Peking. Once again, the Chinese were humiliated, and once again the Westerners demanded increased trade and increased safety for foreign nationals.

But the British and the French—as well as the Americans, who, though they offered no troops, sent a minister plenipotentiary to accompany the Allied expedition—wanted something else too: foreign diplomatic residences in Peking. The symbolism of the demand, if obscure today, was striking at the time. The Western nations were insisting that the Chinese finally accept them as equals, and drop their claim that China was the center of the world and foreign emissaries could therefore only be received as tribute bearers. While this demand might have seemed reasonable enough in the West, in Peking it was viewed as a more serious issue than even religious or commercial encroachment. The Manchus feared that such a concession would be interpreted within China as proof that they had lost the Mandate of Heaven and would thus lend legitimacy to the Taiping cause.

For the moment, however, the Chinese government could do nothing but accept the terms—forced on them at the city of Tientsin on June 18, 1858—and hope that they would be able to stall on actual fulfillment. In light of this result, the time seemed right for an all-out Taiping move against Peking. But the Taipings had suffered setbacks of their own. In 1856 several of Hung’s wangs, jealous of one another’s power, had launched an internal struggle that had cost tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Shaken by the ordeal, Hung had decided to entrust power to members of his own family—men whose experience was questionable but whose loyalty was not—as well as to religious leaders who gave him spiritual comfort. The Reverend Issachar J. Roberts, the Tennessee Baptist who had schooled Hung in the Bible, was even asked to come to Nanking to assist the rebels in managing relations with foreigners. Only the talents of rising field commanders such as the Chung Wang kept the Taiping movement alive.

Despite these momentous events, Ward could find no more significant employment in China in 1857 than as first mate on the coastal steamer
Antelope
. The Chinese government still would not accept the notion of using foreigners against the rebels, despite the fact that Western mercenaries were known to be serving the rebel cause. The
Antelope
ferried passengers between the five treaty ports, and one such traveler,
William S. Wetmore, later recalled an encounter he had with Ward when the ship went aground during a voyage through pirate-controlled waters:

Our captain quite lost his head and swore he would blow his brains out if he failed to get the ship off. The first officer, however, fortunately was cool and collected, and it was by his efforts that necessary steps were taken for protecting the steamer and ultimately getting her out of the perilous position she was in. At a later date … Ward … was pointed out to me, and I was certain that in him I recognized the quondam first officer of the
Antelope
, who had shown so much self-possession on this occasion.

But transporting treaty-port merchants could not hold Ward for long, and he once more turned his back on China. Unconfirmed but nonetheless plausible stories have persisted that he went back to Mexico to serve Benito Juárez (Ward himself later told an English officer in China that the Mexican government had been his last employer) and that he turned up in Texas as one of that state’s famous Rangers. Whatever the case, early 1859 found him in New York, working in an office and for his father: twin testimonies that his fortunes were at a low point. The elder Ward had left dying Salem to try his hand as a shipping agent, but if he hoped that his son would or could be of assistance in the venture, he was quickly disappointed. Ward left the East as soon as he had secured enough funds for another trip to China. Some have said that he completed the first leg of this journey—New York to San Francisco—alone and on horseback, but more reliable sources have him sailing on a clipper in the company of his brother, Harry. The two were moving with evident purpose, and soon after their arrival in San Francisco in the fall of 1859 they continued on to Shanghai.

Ward was just shy of twenty-eight at the time of this voyage, still full of the energy, exuberance, and recklessness that had marked his entire life. The rigors of an adolescence spent at sea, the deadly absurdity of William Walker’s Sonora expedition, and the sickening waste of the Crimea had not hindered his development into an affable yet singularly iron-willed individual with a head full of great ambitions. Like many international adventurers, Ward drank and gambled in his idle hours (although he does not seem to have abused either pastime) and had a fondness for tobacco, particularly pipes and Manila cheroots. From a childhood pugilist he had developed into a more than capable close-quarters fighter, a valuable asset in maintaining discipline. Able to make and part with acquaintances easily, he had few true friends and kept his deepest thoughts to himself. All these were qualities much admired by—and, in their pure form, rare among—the world’s free-lances.

Yet in his few surviving letters there is an air of isolation about Ward’s individuality, an alienation that kept him apart even from his followers. Whether writing to his brother, Harry, about his personal affairs or requesting information from the soon-to-be American minister to China (and fellow New Englander) Anson Burlingame about events in America, Ward was unable to conceal a craving for the kind of conversation and companionship he could never find among the men he commanded. One astute
British officer would later write that the ability to control the mercenary officers and irregular soldiers Ward organized in China rested on the commanding officer’s not being “one of their style.” Ward, once an inexperienced second mate of fifteen who had been thrown overboard by his crew, had by 1859 learned how to control such men successfully—but he never became one of them. Nor, for all his charm, did he ever strive to fit in among the merchants, diplomats, and military men who occupied the opposite end of the social spectrum. In fact, beneath a veneer of what one English official called “consummate tact,” Ward remained a puzzling and independent man, one whose idiosyncrasies—fully revealed only on the drilling ground and in battle—inspired consternation as much as awe in both his men and the foreign communities in China.

To the America that he once again left behind in the fall of 1859
Ward seems to have had some sentimental yet little real attachment. Apparently he had, in his early twenties, fallen in love with a Salem girl of sixteen, but the girl’s parents found the young sailor and soldier of fortune an undesirable suitor. The relationship was broken off when Ward was at sea, and there is no other mention of a woman in Ward’s life until his final trip to China. Although Ward subsequently took an active interest in the domestic crisis facing the United States (voicing unbridled enthusiasm for “old Uncle Abe” and equally fervid hatred of “the blackguards Jeff[erson Davis] & Cabinet”), and although in letters he signed himself “an honest American,” he never felt the urge or the obligation to return. Given the tensions within his family, his attitude toward Salem, his failure to achieve his dream of an appointment to West Point, and the forced end to his only known romantic involvement, such reluctance is understandable.

Ward’s ultimate commitment, then, was to his restless ambition. At twenty-eight he already knew a good deal about where that ambition might lead: to what he later called
“the fate of war.” Yet had he known, on that last journey across the Pacific in 1859, that he would never again see or touch American soil—even to be buried in it—one doubts that he would have given any thought to turning back.

III
“AS IF BY MAGIC”

Soon after his arrival in Shanghai late in 1859, Ward was keeping company with Henry Andrea Burgevine, a fellow American and adventurer who was to become Ward’s most capable and famous (some said infamous) lieutenant. Precisely when the two first met has never been firmly established.
At least one authority states that while in New York, Ward convinced the penniless Burgevine to accompany him to China by spinning tales of the lucrative opportunities that had been created by the anarchy of the Taiping rebellion. In fact, the two men may have met at a much earlier date, for Burgevine, like Ward, had served in the French army during the Crimean War. Whatever its origins, the friendship between Ward and Burgevine was crucial to the events that were about to unfold in China—and Burgevine’s tempestuous character, formed during twenty-three already checkered years, was to have a strong effect on the course of
the Chinese civil war in the Shanghai region.

Burgevine had been born into tragedy. His father had fought for the French during the Napoleonic Wars, then emigrated to America, where he married in North Carolina and became an instructor of French at the fledgling university at Chapel Hill. A hopeless alcoholic, the elder Burgevine was dismissed by the university when its president entered a classroom and found the Frenchman drunk and the object of his students’ scornful derision. In the face of this disgrace, the elder Burgevine abandoned his family before Henry Andrea was even born in 1836; he was subsequently killed in a barroom brawl in South Carolina. Young
Henry spent his first seven winters in his grandparents’ home in North Carolina and his summers with his eldest sister and her husband in Ashford, Connecticut.

At seven Henry moved with his mother to Washington, where an old friend of his father’s who had been elected to Congress secured the boy a position as a congressional page. Henry soon moved on to paging in the Senate, where he remained until 1853. At the same time, he received the beginnings of an excellent education—including instruction in the military sciences—at a private academy and made a number of influential contacts with Washington notables (among them Anson Burlingame, later U.S. minister to China). A bright student, possessed, like Ward, of considerable personal charm,
Burgevine seemed well on his way to escaping his dark origins and moving up the social ladder in the nation’s capital. But at seventeen, as he later put it, “a great desire to see something of the world” struck, and he signed on as mate aboard a ship bound for Hawaii, Australia, and ultimately India.

After picking up some rudimentary Hindustani on the subcontinent, Burgevine traveled on to the Crimea and enlisted, at nineteen, as a French private. Unlike Ward, Burgevine saw the bloody conflict through to its conclusion, earning a promotion for bravery. Then it was on to Europe and finally back to Washington late in 1856. Having, in his own words, “verified the old adage, that a ‘rolling stone gathers no moss,’ ” Burgevine came back to his mother “older, steadier, but no richer.” He gave some thought to studying law, but soon the hard reality of supporting both himself and his aging mother intruded. Drawing on family and personal connections, Burgevine tried to obtain a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. Desperate, he contacted one of North Carolina’s senators, telling him that “if I do not obtain this situation by the first of July [1857], I hardly know what I shall do.” But for reasons unrecorded, Burgevine was denied the post. He soon traveled to New York, where he took a job writing for a newspaper.

In adulthood, Burgevine’s generally appealing personality became tainted by a tactless arrogance that was often fueled by alcohol. The effects of this unfortunate trait were first felt during his months in New York. America’s crisis over slavery was fast reaching a breaking point,
and Burgevine foolishly wrote an article supporting the right of Southerners to work their fields with human chattel. His paper became the object of public demonstration; Burgevine himself was fired and his home was ransacked. His mother, increasingly infirm, was dispatched to relatives in Connecticut, and Burgevine vanished into the anonymity of the New York postal bureaucracy.