The Devil Soldier (37 page)

Ward shrugged off this growing storm of controversy with typical confidence. He continued to treat the Ever Victorious Army “as if it were his own” and to keep tight control over its training and objectives. His every action indicated that he meant to stay in China and expand his activities: His partnership with Yang Fang became increasingly successful, involving ever more river steamers, and the building of his house in Shanghai went on. In late spring he wrote happily to his brother, Harry, in New York: “I bought the ‘Martin White,’ a slow tug boat a little while ago for Forty One Thousand Taels and have got her at work on the river, making money fast they say. I have not had time to overhaul the accounts, but believe she will clear me 4 or 5000 taels per month[.]—I have got my house started in the French Bund, [a] fine lot 370 feet, front house 100 by 96 and I think will suit. My material comes from all over the province and costs but little.” This was not to be any
temporary residence, as another letter
to Harry a few weeks later indicated: “My house is progressing slowly, was down last evening to see it—Basement built up 13 feet but it is all to be finished in four months. Figure Thirty-Four Thousand Taels [almost $55,000].” Apparently, Ward was looking beyond the defeat of the Taiping rebels to a day when he would be able to spend considerably more time in Shanghai.

But at the time Ward wrote these letters the downfall of the Heavenly Kingdom was far from achieved or even assured. From his luxurious seat of regional power in Soochow, the Chung Wang viewed the setbacks his armies suffered in Kiangsu during the opening months of 1862 with deep concern. In mid-March he issued orders to his field commanders in the Shanghai area to hold their ground and await his arrival: The Chung Wang intended again to take the field personally and lead his troops into Shanghai in order to establish Taiping authority over the port once and for all. It was the rebel general’s last real chance to give his cause a new and perhaps long-term lease on life by gaining access to Shanghai’s wealth and trade. And the only meaningful opposition he faced was the mysterious Hua’s devil soldiers and a comparative handful of foreign regulars.

VII
“ACCUSTOMED TO THE ENEMY’S FIRE”

Alarmed as
the Chung Wang was by the several reversals his armies suffered at the hands of Ward’s disciplined Chinese and their foreign allies in the early spring of 1862,
the rebel general’s decision to make another attempt on Shanghai was influenced at least as much—and probably to a greater extent—by developments within the Taiping hierarchy. His own power had created jealousy not only in the increasingly withdrawn and unstable T’ien Wang but in other top rebel leaders and his own officers as well. “The T’ien Wang,” the Chung Wang later wrote, “saw that I now had a large army and feared that I might have secret intentions—there were machinations by jealous ministers as well.… My subordinate officers were angry and bore resentment in their hearts.… [E]ach thought only of his own future, throwing administration and regulations into disorder.” By occupying Shanghai the Chung Wang would not only impress the T’ien Wang with his loyalty but simultaneously demonstrate to ambitious rebel generals that he was still the Heavenly Kingdom’s most formidable commander, a deadly adversary in any internecine conflict of the type that had decimated the rebel armies during the 1850s.

For all these reasons, the Chung Wang’s eastern campaign during the late spring and summer of 1862 was characterized by greater force and conviction than had marked his incursion into Kiangsu two years earlier. The Taiping forces did not move with zealous abandon in March 1862: On the eighteenth, for example, the Chung Wang wrote to the
rebel commander in Chia-ting, northwest of Shanghai, telling him not to attack the imperialists but to strengthen his present position. Chia-ting was a vital link in the chain of towns that composed Ward and Hope’s thirty-mile radius around Shanghai, and the Chung Wang knew that it was a logical spot for an imperialist attack. In addition, the Taiping commander at Chia-ting was told to build new fortified encampments in the areas around Chia-ting and Ch’ing-p’u, posts that could accommodate the large numbers of Taiping soldiers who would accompany the Chung Wang on his return to eastern Kiangsu. All these preparations were aimed at the final elimination of Sung-chiang as a base of operations for Ward’s troublesome devil soldiers, after which the Chung Wang could move his entire army against Shanghai without worrying about a pocket of resistance in his rear.

Ward and Hope were fully aware of the extreme danger of allowing the Taipings to entrench themselves firmly in such close proximity to Shanghai. So, too, was the new British army commander in China, General Sir Charles Staveley, who arrived in Shanghai late in March to take up Sir John Michel’s duties. With him Staveley brought more troops, raising the number of British regulars in the port to about 2,500—roughly half of the overall British force in China. Even more important, Staveley transferred additional artillery units from the north, including batteries armed with Britain’s new Armstrong guns, twelve-pounder fieldpieces with rifled barrels and breech-loading mechanisms that were out and away the best guns in China. Capable of firing highly explosive shells farther, more accurately, and at a faster rate than other cannon, the Armstrongs had already proved their worth during the Peking campaign, and they were soon to become the most feared weapon in the Shanghai theater of operations.

Fresh from his training of imperial soldiers at Tientsin, Staveley continued to regard Ward’s Ever Victorious Army with a skeptical eye after his arrival in Shanghai. In his lingering jealousy and suspicion of Ward, Staveley lagged behind not only other Allied officers in Shanghai, such as Admirals Hope and Protet, but most of Britain’s diplomatic corps in China as well. By March nearly every representative of the Crown from Frederick Bruce down was beginning to grasp Sir John Michel’s
point that, whatever Ward’s personal motives or goals, his army could play—indeed was playing—an extremely useful role in strengthening and reforming the imperial Chinese government.

Though still of the opinion that the Taipings provided a useful spur with which to move the Manchus toward reform, Minister
Bruce wrote to the British Foreign Office on March 26 to say that “[t]he weakness of China, rather than her strength, is likely to create a fresh Eastern Question in these seas.” That same day Bruce wrote to Hope, suggesting a possible third trip by the admiral to Nanking, to negotiate new safeguards against rebel molestation of trade. Given the British and French governments’ now demonstrated determination to prevent such depredations, Bruce supposed that the Taipings would be “more disposed to be reasonable” than they had in the past. In addition, Bruce suggested the formation, “at Foochow, Canton, etc., of corps like that of Mr. Ward, to protect them against marauders, and to be substituted for the thousands of useless rabble, who now eat up the resources of the state.” Bruce’s idea of a third trip to Nanking was never pursued—Hope was far happier fighting the Taipings than talking to them—but in his March 26 dispatch to Lord Russell at the Foreign Office Bruce echoed and elaborated his second suggestion, which was destined to produce important results.

“In the Chinese force organized and led by Mr. Ward,” Bruce stated, “I see the nucleus and beginning of a military organization which may prove most valuable in the distracted state of China. If the Government is wise enough to adopt this reform, it may save itself; if not, the organization of this description of force at the chief ports will at all events preserve them from destruction.” Describing the 40,000 imperial Chinese troops in and around Shanghai as a “worse than useless horde,” Bruce pointed out that the funds needed for their maintenance could be better used to “equip and pay a disciplined force of from 20,000 to 25,000 men, who would be irresistible by any Chinese rebel bands.” Of course, such a force would also be irresistible by any imperial Chinese army, which was precisely why Peking was determined to prevent its development. But such Manchu concerns for the perpetuation of their own power only exasperated Bruce, who went on to “suggest most
strongly that 10,000 stand of smoothbore muskets be supplied without delay from India for the arming of [Ward’s] men. I suggest either that these arms be given gratis, or that time be allowed for payment.”

Bruce then revealed the rather surprising extent to which his opinions on Ward’s activities had come full circle, and how fully he appreciated the larger political and diplomatic implications of those activities: “It may be objected to the policy I have recommended in this and other despatches, that there may be danger in introducing an improved military system into China. To this it may be replied with truth, that any risk arising from this cause is far less serious than the danger, commercial and political, we incur from the unchecked growth of anarchy throughout China.” Thus Ward had evolved, in the mind of Britain’s chief diplomatic officer in China, from a potential cause of anarchy and conflict with the rebels in early 1860 into the most advantageous answer to those same problems in 1862. This development occurred simultaneously with Ward’s identification as a potential threat to Manchu authority by provincial officials and the imperial clique in Peking. Ward could not have helped but realize that these twin developments made it imperative that he take the field again, and quickly: By taking advantage of the Western powers’ current enthusiasm for his army and acting in conjunction with the newly reinforced foreign regulars, he could gain important victories that would disarm his critics in the imperial government. And so, in the first week of April, Ward bid his new Chinese wife good-bye and once more led the Ever Victorious Army against the rebels in a series of assaults that were coordinated with attacks by Hope, Staveley, and Protet.

On Thursday, April 3, General Staveley took a thousand men from three regiments—the Ninety-ninth, the Fifth Bombay Native Infantry, and the Twenty-second Punjab Native Infantry, all units that would see heavy service against the Taipings in the weeks to come—and marched west-southwest from Shanghai to the deserted town of Chi-pao. In Chi-pao he rendezvoused with about 450 marines and sailors under the overall command of Admiral Hope. Individual naval detachments were commanded by a group of officers whose names were cropping up more and more in British dispatches concerning actions against the Taipings:
Captain George Willes, who had intrepidly investigated rebel fortifications and armaments at Wu-sung and scouted Kao-ch’iao earlier in the year; Captain John Borlase of the
Pearl
, who would shortly demonstrate an enthusiasm for fighting the Taipings that rivaled Hope’s own; and Captain John Holland of the Royal Marines, a pugnacious officer with a singular appreciation of brute force and an equally singular disdain for tactical complexity.

In Chi-pao this British force was joined by several hundred of Ward’s soldiers, along with three hundred French marines and sailors under Admiral Protet. In addition, one hundred of Adrien Tardif de Moidrey’s Franco-Chinese Corps arrived, with a half-dozen rifled howitzers and guns. The British had brought along about ten pieces of artillery, including several of Hope’s large naval guns and Staveley’s devastating Armstrongs. In all, the expeditionary force that assembled at Chi-pao was an unusually powerful one, and on the morning of April 4 it marched due west toward the rebel bastion of Wang-chia-ssu.

Though an unwalled town, Wang-chia-ssu had been fortified in a manner that typified the Chung Wang’s new determination not to lose ground in eastern Kiangsu. Perhaps having learned from their several experiences of being trapped in their own strongholds, the Taipings had built not one but a series of stockades, each surrounded by the usual network of ditches spiked with bamboo. These stockades interlocked, allowing the various rebel detachments—some four or five thousand men in all—to support each other; at the same time, because of their separation, the fate of all the stockades was not necessarily dependent on any one. It was an impressive example of the Chinese genius for defense, one that would put the Allied expeditionary force to a genuine test.

The general Allied plan of attack at Wang-chia-ssu called for an initial assault from the west and north; the rebels, it was assumed, would flee south, where they were to be intercepted by Ward, who was marching north-northeast from Sung-chiang with another thousand to fifteen hundred of his troops. At first all went well: At 8:00
A.M
. a dense fog lifted to reveal the Taipings brandishing hundreds of banners atop the two-mile expanse of their various stockades, and the French and British
artillery, along with Tardif de Moidrey’s guns, immediately opened up a devastating fire. For half an hour the pummeling continued, the rebels trying for a time to answer with their gingals and smaller guns but eventually growing altogether silent. Already Taiping soldiers could be seen escaping from various stockades. But the main body of the Ever Victorious Army was nowhere in sight. Those of Ward’s men who were present were dispatched to deal with the fleeing rebels, and although they did, according to an eyewitness account published in the
North China Herald
, “considerable execution” among the fugitives, most of the rebels were able to escape. By 10:30 the Taipings were in full flight under pressure of a frontal assault by the British troops, but Ward’s main force still had not appeared, and the rebels continued to stream south toward safety.

Whether Ward was held up by another rebel force or by difficult terrain has never been clear. The fact that when he finally arrived in the early afternoon he was without artillery suggests that he had been delayed in trying to get his guns through the soft earth between Sung-chiang and Wang-chia-ssu, and had finally abandoned the effort and gone ahead with just his infantry. Whatever the case, only several hundred of the Taipings at Wang-chia-ssu had been killed, and the survivors subsequently withdrew into an even more powerful series of interlocking stockades—garrisoned by a much stronger rebel force—at Lung-chu-an, half a dozen miles to the southeast. The body of the Allied force returned to Chi-pao, its commanders understandably disappointed. The day had done nothing to raise General Staveley’s estimation of the Ever Victorious Army, and, as if to restore the slightly tarnished name of his force, Ward elected to pursue the Taipings to Lung-chu-an. Admiral Hope accompanied him.