The Devil Soldier (28 page)

But for such plans to proceed the governments involved would have to sanction joint offensive action by their armed forces, and in the diplomatic realm there were serious impediments to this. Whatever the cooperative inclinations of Western military officers, the diplomatic representatives of France and Britain viewed each other with less than trusting eyes. Informed of the steady progress of Tardif de Moidrey’s Franco-Chinese contingent, the
British consul in Canton wrote to the Foreign Office in London and accused the French of “trying to make political capital out of the Chinese embrouillement.” This transparent expression of Britain’s fear that France would shortly rival Her Majesty’s representatives at their own game was underlined in talks between Frederick Bruce and the Chinese central government in Peking. Bruce informed the Chinese that if they needed foreign officers to train soldiers they should “apply for Prussians.” He made his reasons plain to Lord Russell: “Prussia is Protestant, she represents a large trade in China, and she is not a powerful naval force—Her officers would be less troublesome, and would create little jealousy, than those obtained from any other Treaty-Power—They are also comparatively indifferently paid.”

In short, British diplomats not only prevented their own officers from commanding either foreign or native troops in offensive field actions, but intended to see to it that the French did not do so either. For several enterprising Frenchmen, however, such obstacles meant comparatively little, especially when measured against the military and monetary allure of training Chinese units to meet the coming onslaught of the Chung Wang. Foremost among these was Prosper Giquel, the French director of the Ningpo office of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service. The Customs Service was by this time headed and staffed by
Westerners, an arrangement accepted by the Chinese because of the dramatic rise in revenues it produced. Understandably, it was also the focus of particular animosity from anti-Manchu factions. When Ningpo fell, therefore, Giquel quickly closed his office and journeyed north to Shanghai.

Giquel had been a soldier during the Anglo-French campaign in China in 1857 and had stayed on to master the Chinese language and eventually sign on with the Customs Service. Just twenty-six years old in 1861, he arrived in Shanghai to find the foreign settlements furiously trying to arrange for the city’s defense. Giquel quickly offered his services as an interpreter during various meetings between French, British, American, and Chinese representatives. But it was the activities of Frederick Townsend Ward and Adrien Tardif de Moidrey that particularly fascinated him.

Securing the post of interpreter for Admiral Protet, Giquel was given a chance to get a closer look at the Franco-Chinese Corps of Kiangsu. By the beginning of 1862, Tardif de Moidrey had satisfied his backers’ requirements by drilling his Chinese artillerymen to a high state of readiness, and he was allowed to expand his unit to two hundred. The Franco-Chinese Corps was an ideal adjunct for the kind of campaign that Admiral Hope, General Michel, and Admiral Protet hoped to fight: a compact, hard-hitting force capable of quick movement and—because of its familiarity with Western tactics and commands—of integrating itself into a larger Allied force. Giquel learned many lessons from Tardif de Moidrey, lessons that he was to apply on his return to Ningpo. But in his attempts to gain firsthand information concerning the activities of the Ward Corps, Giquel was far less successful.

Indeed, few Westerners in Shanghai had heard any news or had any glimpse of the Ward Corps for quite some time. But in the initial confusion and subsequent panic prompted by the Chung Wang’s advance, no one stopped to remark on the fact. As during the Taiping eastern offensive of 1860, refugees poured into Shanghai from the interior, carrying what belongings they could, drastically overcrowding the Chinese city and the Western settlements, and bringing horror stories of Taiping occupation. The Chung Wang, meanwhile, declared openly that he intended
to take Shanghai no matter who participated in its defense, and the only military units in the city that had a real chance of stopping the rebels before they reached Shanghai’s walls, the Anglo-French regulars, were prohibited from taking the field for offensive actions. Once again, it was a dismal scenario, and once again, when cause for hope emerged, it came out of Sung-chiang.

At first, it was only a succession of rumors. One of the strongest of the rebel columns moving on Shanghai was coming from the northwest and by early January had reached the vicinity of the important town of Wu-sung. From Wu-sung the rebels could hope to close the mouth of the Huang-pu River, a disastrous prospect for Shanghai. But an Allied counterattack was as yet impossible. The Taipings thus had time to entrench themselves, and into these fortifications they moved some of their best-equipped and best-trained troops. A British officer who had unusually close contact with the Taipings during one of their attacks on Wu-sung, Captain George O.
Willes, later reported to Admiral Hope that

[f]rom a personal interview with two [rebel] officers, and being for some time within thirty or forty yards of the skirmishers, I am enabled to say that they were armed with muskets, which they handled efficiently. The two officers were dressed in Chinese costume, but with … single-barrelled [
sic
] European pistols.… [H]aving had an opportunity of seeing the Imperialist troops in the Peiho expedition, I was quite astonished at [the rebels’] apparent equipment and organisation.

In mid-January these same Taipings, having grown fairly accustomed to what Captain Willes called the “smart but ineffective fire” of their imperial opponents, encountered an unprecedented and unwelcome sight: a detachment of Chinese soldiers in Western uniforms, bearing down on their entrenchments. Like the armies of such imperial commanders as Tseng Kuo-fan, this unit carried a banner emblazoned with the name of their leader: a light green standard, bordered in red, with a dark green Chinese character denoting the name
Hua
. Hua, the
Taipings would soon learn, was the Chinese name adopted by the young American who had trained and was leading this unit. (The name was a phonetic approximation, much like Augustus Lindley’s “Lin-le.”) In the ensuing encounter, the rebel soldiers, despite numerical superiority, were driven from their positions by the highly disciplined “imitation foreign devils,” and before long word had spread throughout Shanghai and along the China coast that, after six months of careful preparation, Colonel Ward was back at work.

The success at Wu-sung was followed up quickly. In their eastward march from Soochow, the Taipings had once again secured Ch’ing-p’u and then established strongly entrenched bases at several towns in the area: Ying-ch’i-pin, Ch’en-shan, T’ien-ma-shan, and Kuang-fu-lin (Ward’s original training ground in 1860). The rebels consolidated their occupation of Kuang-fu-lin by filling it with twenty thousand troops. A week after his appearance at Wu-sung, Ward took five hundred men of his corps and, according to Dr.
Macgowan, attacked Kuang-fu-lin “without artillery, and made a bold rush on the rebel fortifications. The enemy seeing, for the first time, their own countrymen in foreign attire, and led in a disciplined way by gallant officers, were filled with dismay, and fled precipitately.”

Banking not only on the superior arms and training of his men but also on the psychological impact of their appearance, Ward had taken an enormous risk at Kuang-fu-lin. The gamble had paid off, and Ward repeated the tactic during the first week of February at Ying-ch’i-pin. He launched a surprise attack against greatly superior numbers, killing and wounding thousands of stunned rebels and driving the rest back to Ch’en-shan and beyond. During this action Ward sustained some five wounds, the most serious of which was the loss of a finger to a Taiping musket ball. Characteristically, he did not pause to recuperate but on February 5 took Burgevine and six hundred men of the corps and attacked T’ien-ma-shan. The pattern of victory was the same: a surprise rush against the rebel entrenchments, then a wild pursuit during which thousands of rebels were killed, wounded, or captured.

Wu Hsü’s joy over Ward’s successes was unrestrained. On February
5 he sent a personal letter to Ward, congratulating “the General” (although Ward had not yet received such a rank from the Chinese government) on his successes at Kuang-fu-lin and Ying-ch’i-pin:

I have received reports from battalion commander Li [Heng-sung] and others that the rebels have attacked the barracks in Kuang-fu-lin since the new year, and that you, General, repeatedly led troops to engage them, and you are invincible. Yesterday, I heard that at 9:00 a.m. on the fifth day of this month [Chinese calendar], a large number of rebels attacked and occupied Ying-ch’i-pin. Then again, your excellency led five hundred men of the Foreign Arms Corps to attack the nest of rebels, and defeated several tens of thousands of them.… I was very pleased when I heard this news. A blemish in an otherwise perfect thing is that your finger has been wounded.… The soldiers of the Foreign Arms Corps have rendered good service in these battles, and they are all praiseworthy and should be given rewards respectively. I have already discussed this with Yang Taki personally. As to the details of how to reward the soldiers, your excellency can name a sum to Taki, who will send the money at once.… The only thing (which is not good) is that your finger has been wounded, I do not know if this will affect the everyday life of your excellency. I hope that you will pay much attention to your health and recover very soon. This is the most important thing.

The letter was not signed but concluded “Signature is in another place”—a Chinese expression indicating that the receiver would know who the sender was without the latter identifying himself, and a sign of Ward and Wu’s unusually close relationship.

Just a day after writing this letter, Wu received a note from Ward detailing the success at T’ien-ma-shan. The taotai again sat down to write: “You have obtained a great victory. I was so delighted after reading your letter. The victory you have just had shows that your troop is well-trained and impenetrable. In addition to sending your letter to the Governor [Hsüeh Huan], I am looking forward to your coming to Shanghai, so that I can seek your counsel personally.” On receiving the details
of Ward’s successes,
Hsüeh Huan, in a subsequent memorial to the throne, acknowledged the American’s personal leadership in this series of attacks and his “great contributions” to their success.

Inspiring as Ward’s victories were, however, the sheer weight of numbers was with the Taipings, and following the defeat at Wu-sung (an event important enough to rate a line in the “Latest Intelligence” section of the London
Times
), Ying-ch’i-pin, Ch’en-shan, and T’ien-ma-shan rebel units quickly surrounded Ward’s several encampments in the Sung-chiang area, as well as the walls of the city itself. Once again, Ward’s daring had proved an annoyance to the Chung Wang, one that the rebel commander intended to erase with overwhelming odds. Taiping storming units immediately went to work on Ward’s defensive positions, and the outlook was not hopeful.

In Shanghai, news of the fighting in the Sung-chiang area had quickly followed reports of the Wu-sung engagement. Yet the citizens of Shanghai’s Western settlements—desperate as they were for any sign of effective resistance to the Chung Wang’s legions—did not reprise their familiar vitriolic denouncements of “the filibuster Ward.” The
North China Herald
, along with the other China coast English-language papers, remained momentarily silent, as if awaiting events; when it did acknowledge the situation, on January 18, it was only to say that “[b]esides this body of armed men [the Taipings near Wu-sung] there are two others approaching Shanghai, one from the direction of Soochow, which during the day was in fierce combat with the Imperialists at Sung-chiang; the other body from Hangchow.”

Alarm in Shanghai had continued to mount as January came to a close and it was learned that the central Taiping column alone—the force moving east from Soochow—numbered eighty thousand men. On January 25
the
Herald
reported “that up to the hour of going to press, the advance of the insurgents is imminent, and our naval and military authorities are on the
qui vive
to repulse them should they appear within range of the posts occupied by the troops, marines, and blue-jackets. The firing in the direction of the Pootung [eastern] side of the river has continued at intervals during the day. As we write the booming of distant guns reaches our ears, which are estimated at about five miles distant.”
During the first week of February, any hope that the men at Sung-chiang might hold out against the Taipings dwindled.

And then came another unexpected report. Far from being overwhelmed by the rebels in their district, the Ward Corps had survived every Taiping attack; indeed, they had turned the final assault into a disaster for the soldiers of the Heavenly Kingdom. The Taiping commanders had thrown some 20,000 men at Sung-chiang, only to find that Ward, anticipating the move, had placed “masked” or hidden artillery batteries in the main path of the rebels’ advance. When the Taipings had come within close range, these batteries opened fire. The Taipings suffered 2,300 casualties immediately. Reeling under the shock of concentrated artillery fire, the rebels were next assaulted by a strong detachment of Ward’s infantry, who quickly seized between 700 and 800 prisoners. In the ensuing confusion, Ward was able to recapture many boats laden with arms and provisions that the rebels had taken during their occupation of the area. In all, it was a daring display of offense as defense, and the
Daily Shipping and Commercial News
did not overstate the issue by declaring that “the Taiping rebels have sustained a severe defeat, which may have a wholesome effect on the bands of marauders in the vicinity of the city and settlement of Shanghai.”

On February 15 it was the turn of the
North China Herald
, Ward’s old nemesis, to acknowledge his achievement: