The Devil Soldier (29 page)

It would appear that during the week the [rebel] bands infesting the northern suburbs [of Shanghai] have either retired towards the coast, or what is more probable, made a westerly detour towards the south where a large body of Taiping insurgents has been hovering on the outskirts of Ming-hong between Shanghai and Sung-chiang, after having been defeated in their attack upon the latter city by the bravery and discipline of the Imperialist troops under the command of Colonel Ward—who has trained a regiment of fine able-bodied men in the European system of military tactics.

Gone forever were accusations of lunacy or criminality; for the remainder of his life, Ward would be treated with uniform respect, if not deference, in the pages of
the
Herald
.

Ward’s friend Augustus A.
Hayes took note of this transformation in the attitude of Shanghai’s Westerners with appropriate irony. “One day,” he later recalled of that time,

it was known that a powerful Rebel force was approaching Shanghai. Then came again the familiar call to arms, the preparations to receive women and children on board the steamers, the daily orders and bulletins.

Then, however, followed something new and surprising. The Rebels had, we heard, been met and defeated with tremendous slaughter,—and by whom? By a native force, admirably drilled, equipped and disciplined, fighting by European tactics, and led to victory—complete, overwhelming victory against an enormous numerical superiority—by our lately despised American
filibustero
, General Ward. Public opinion changed at a jump. It must have been with a grim satisfaction that Ward awoke, the morning after this battle, to find himself famous.

Nothing in Ward’s subsequent behavior indicated that he paid any more attention to the praise he received from Shanghai’s Western citizens than he had to their insults. He secured payment for his troops, used his expanded contacts to procure more and better weapons, and continued to apply his energies to enlarging and drilling his corps at Sung-chiang. The attitude was an appropriate one, for, despite the kind words in the English-language papers, the distrust that official representatives of the Western powers, particularly the British, had always felt toward the commander of the Ward Corps remained intact following the successes near Sung-chiang. It would take more and greater victories to finally destroy those barriers.

The enthusiasm of Wu Hsü and Yang Fang for the new Ward Corps during the fall and winter of 1861, and the two men’s confidence that the unit could play an important role in stemming the Taiping advance, were not universal among Chinese merchants and civil leaders in the port. The native elite of Kiangsu province especially tried to find other
ways of bringing foreign power to bear on the rebel threat. Wu and Yang were, it should be remembered, Chekiang men, although they held positions of power in Shanghai; as such they were viewed with no little jealousy by many Kiangsu notables. This regional rivalry played a distinct part in prompting a powerful group of Kiangsu officials—most notably Feng Kuei-fen, a leading scholar from Soochow—to look beyond Wu and Yang’s pet project for help.

In November 1861 some half-dozen of these Kiangsu men—including not only Feng Kuei-fen but Wu Yün, the Soochow official who had attempted to discredit Ward’s victory at Sung-chiang in 1860—sent emissaries to Tseng Kuo-fan asking for assistance in meeting the Taiping threat in their province. Tseng replied that while he hoped to be able to dispatch an army to Shanghai soon, he could not yet spare troops for the job. The Kiangsu leaders, unimpressed by such outlandish and as yet unproved schemes as training Chinese soldiers to fight in the Western style, decided next to seek direct foreign military aid from the representatives of the Western powers in Shanghai. Specifically, they approached one of Great Britain’s more seasoned representatives, Harry Parkes. Parkes had been one of the British officials whose capture and abuse had prompted the burning of the Summer Palace in 1860: His views on a coordinated Chinese-Western response to the Taiping threat were understandably skeptical. In cautiously declining the latest Chinese request that foreign regulars take the field against the rebels, Parkes fell in line with the attitude not only of British minister Frederick Bruce but of Western officials generally. The rebels might have been viewed with steadily decreasing sympathy by the foreign powers, but joint action and offensive operations by their regulars remained steps too long for any of them to take.

The Westerners, characteristically, had their own ideas about meeting the rebel challenge. Early in January 1862, a Defense Committee was formed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, and this committee quickly decided that, while they did not wish to act in concert with imperial Chinese forces, all expenses incurred by foreigners in their efforts to protect the port should be met by their Chinese hosts. There was a mercenary quality to this proposal, one that had previously made
the idea unacceptable to the British Foreign Office. But times had, apparently, changed, and, even more important, the Chinese were anxious to pay. As always in the Chinese bureaucracy, an official organ for the disbursement of these funds had to be established, and soon Governor Hsüeh Huan had called into existence the United Defense Bureau. The bureau had four Chinese executives whose task was to coordinate payment and military logistics in Shanghai with representatives of the foreign powers.

The Chinese were enthusiastic about the bureau, believing that it would inevitably draw the foreigners into offensive action against the rebels in the interior. With this end in mind, the bureau was authorized to raise enough funds to pay and supply as many as ten thousand foreign regulars. But on January 12, during a gathering at the British consulate, the Chinese representatives learned just how unrealistic their plans were. The French, with Prosper Giquel as interpreter, initially seemed obliging: They were ready to defend not only the foreign settlements but the Chinese city as well and, beyond that, to engage the Taipings outside Shanghai. But the British quickly squelched such ideas. Despite the misgivings of Admiral Hope, British diplomatic representatives stuck to Frederick Bruce’s clearly delineated line of defensive measures within Shanghai. Even defense of the Chinese city was not considered important or wise. Rightly suspecting that the “United” Defense Bureau was a Chinese contrivance aimed at getting foreigners to do the work of imperial forces, the British remained cool.

Besides inadvisable, the Kiangsu leadership’s plans for foreign intervention remained academic so long as Peking refused to allow foreign soldiers to operate in the Chinese interior. The imperial government’s concern over this matter had not vanished.
Tseng Kuo-fan was still bitterly opposed to the idea, convinced that if the foreigners were successful in such operations they would only use their victories to gain greater influence in internal matters of state and if they were unsuccessful it would “invite ridicule.” But Tseng’s views were now opposed, and effectively, by the Kiangsu men, who spoke through Hsüeh Huan. Late in January, Hsüeh memorialized to the throne, summarizing the opinions of the Kiangsu elite by reviewing other cases during which Chinese
imperial dynasties such as the Han and the T’ang had used foreign warriors for their own purposes.

Great as their respect for the views of Tseng Kuo-fan was, Tz’u-hsi and Prince Kung were both impressed by Hsüeh Huan’s argument. In addition, Tseng had unconsciously undercut his own case by capturing Anking: The Chinese imperialists no longer looked utterly incapable of meeting the rebel threat, and the prospect of accepting foreign help in the treaty ports and perhaps even in the interior was far less humiliating. The Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi and Prince Kung both paused to reflect on the subject, and their reflections were influenced by events in the Shanghai region: Ward’s successful engagement of the Chung Wang’s advancing army offered additional hope that the Chinese could accept some kind of foreign aid without mortgaging their integrity.

Seeing that the scheme of training Chinese soldiers to fight a modern war now had political value, the British quite predictably reacted to Ward’s success by vigorously inserting themselves into the training business. Here was a job that was suddenly something more than the fantasy of a handful of Western free-lances, was, in fact, far too important, and too full of potential influence, to be left to men such as Ward and Tardif de Moidrey. Ever able and willing to shift course drastically, the British established their own training ground for Chinese troops at Tientsin in February 1862.

The driving force behind the project was General Sir Charles Staveley, who had commanded a brigade in John Michel’s division during the Peking campaign and who was shortly to assume Michel’s duties in Shanghai. The two men were very different: Michel had experience in unconventional warfare and respect for those who could wage it well, even if such men, like Ward, lacked formal training or experience in a national army. In addition, Michel was by nature gregarious and not disposed to condemn men from Ward’s walk of life out of simple prejudice. Staveley, on the other hand, represented the more unfortunate type of British officer abroad: skilled and undeniably brave, but ambitious, aloof, and narrow-minded. Staveley’s sister had married the brother of Charles George Gordon, the young captain of engineers who had so forthrightly recorded the activities of Allied troops at the Summer
Palace, and
Gordon served as Staveley’s chief of engineers. Observing his brother-in-law with the same careful eye that had watched the burning of the Summer Palace, Gordon pronounced that “[t]he worst feature in his character is his selfishness & a certain want of consideration for others.”

Staveley’s training operation at Tientsin went well, and he became rather inordinately proud of it—too proud to believe that any American mercenary could do the job as well or better. Nor was Staveley the only Englishman convinced that the task of supplying China with modern armed forces was one for which only Queen Victoria’s officers were fit. Soon after the Tientsin program was launched, a former head of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service, Horatio Nelson Lay—like Staveley a remarkably arrogant and ambitious man—sketched out a plan for the creation of a modern Chinese navy: a fleet of British gunboats, officered by British sailors, answering only those orders of the Chinese government that Lay himself believed advisable. The project was doomed to failure; British arrogance had for once exceeded the bounds of possibility. But its mere conception was nonetheless revealing.

Thus there was, in the beginning of 1862, more than ample reason for Ward to keep a very watchful eye on British representatives and soldiers in the Shanghai region. This atmosphere of mutual distrust was heightened by news from the United States. That Great Britain had been flirting—whether capriciously or not—with recognition of the Confederate States of America was well-known, and late in January word was received in Shanghai that in November an American warship had seized two Confederate emissaries traveling on board a British mail packet, the
Trent
, and sent them as prisoners to Boston. The British government had immediately demanded a formal apology for what was an illegal act, and war fever had been whipped up on both sides of the Atlantic. The U.S. government eventually disavowed the action, and the British were placated, but not before the effects of what came to be called the
Trent
affair had been felt in every corner of the globe where American and British citizens lived and carried on business together.

In Shanghai British officers were heard to say openly that if war between the United States and Great Britain did come, Her Majesty’s
naval forces intended to seize and even destroy American assets and property. The situation momentarily drew Ward’s attention away from the fighting west of Shanghai, and his subsequent actions revealed the loyalty that he still felt toward the nation he had disavowed a year earlier. At the time of the
Trent
affair, Ward remarked to A. A.
Hayes: “I was an American before I was a Chinaman; and these Englishmen will find it out.” Ward then confided “to a few confidential friends” the details of a characteristically daring plan that was to be implemented in the event of war. The scheme involved not only his Chinese troops but a group of coastal pirates whose acquaintance Ward had made during his various tours on coastal and river steamers and whom he now occasionally paid for their services and support. Hayes later recalled that Ward

determined to mass, quietly and secretly as he could easily do, a large body of his disciplined troops at a town some twenty miles distant, from which a forced march could readily be made without any warning. Entirely under his control was a guild of what one might politely call privateers, or junks manned by desperadoes of a piratical class thoroughly armed. A large body of these privateers he proposed ordering into the river before the settlement, and distributing among the few naval and many merchant vessels flying the British flag. On board such junks is carried a fearful engine of destruction known by a name unmentionable to ears polite [stinkpots]. It is a species of hand grenade of earthenware, easily broken, and filled with a composition not only possessing the destructive qualities of Greek fire, but capable of suffocating those among whom it strikes. It is this which places any vessel, however heavily armed, in a dangerous position when at anything like close quarters with a Chinese pirate. On the day, grimly said General Ward, on which his British friends should begin the seizure of the property of Americans, the latter would have warning from him of what was to happen during the ensuing night. Of such happenings it was needful for him to enter into but a few details. They were summed up with the quiet remark that the next morning would see the British portion of Shanghai “a heap of smouldering and looted ruins.”

Though extreme, Ward’s plan was wholly feasible: The Ward Corps had already grown to a sufficient size to be able to engage the limited number of British troops in Shanghai. All that was needed was determination and recklessness, and, as Hayes concluded, “To any one who should read this statement, and pronounce it overstrained or fanciful, I would simply remark that the reader did not know General Ward.”