Part 6 (1/2)

Though the Manchu dynasty of China, to which he gave an additional half-century of existence, has fallen, the soldiers of the new republic continue to invoke his spirit as that of a G.o.d of battles, and the priests of Confucius still burn incense before his tomb.

The story of how this adventurous American youth recognized the splendid fighting material into which the Chinese were capable of being transformed; how he took that material and heated and hammered and tempered it into a serviceable weapon, and gave that weapon a keen cutting edge; how, with a force which never numbered more than six thousand men, he broke the backbone of a rebellion which turned China into a shambles; and how his battalions came to be known, in the annals of time, as the ”Ever-Victorious Army,” forms a chronicle of courage and thrilling incident the like of which can not be found in history. If the almost incredible exploits of Ward have escaped the notice of our historians, it is because, at the time they took place, Americans were too intent on the business of their own great slaughter-house to be interested in a similar performance going on, in much less workmanlike fas.h.i.+on, half the world away. Though British writers slightingly allude to Ward as ”an obscure Yankee adventurer,” the officer who succeeded him, General Charles George Gordon, merely completed the work which his predecessor had begun, and built his military reputation on the foundations which the American had laid. Though the name of Frederick Townsend Ward holds but little meaning for the vast majority of his countrymen, it is still a name to conjure with in that country which he saved from anarchy.

Though a youth in appearance and in years, Ward was a seasoned veteran long before he set out on his last campaign. Before he was five-and-twenty he had had enough experiences to satisfy a dozen ordinary men. Coming from New England seafaring stock, it was only to be expected that a pa.s.sion for adventure should course through his veins.

From the time he donned short trousers he dreamed of a cadets.h.i.+p at West Point, and a commission under his own flag. But it was destined that his military genius should profit another country than his own, and that he should fight and die under an alien banner. His father, a stern old merchant captain, held that there was no training for a boy like that to be had in the school of the sea, and so, when young Ward was scarce half-way through his teens, he was packed off aboard a sailing-vessel bound for the China seas. By the time he was twenty he held a first mate's warrant, and had paid for it with three long voyages. Joining Garibaldi's famous Foreign Legion, he saw service under that great soldier in the war between the Republic of the Rio Grande and Brazil.

Afterward he helped the young Republic of Uruguay to defeat Manuel Rosas, the Argentine dictator. At the outbreak of the Crimean War he obtained a lieutenant's commission in a regiment of French zouaves, and followed the tricolor until the Treaty of Paris brought that b.l.o.o.d.y campaign to an end. Turning his steps toward Latin America again, he joined William Walker in his ill-fated Nicaraguan adventure, and after that leader's execution in Honduras he offered his sword and services to Juarez, and helped to win for him the presidency of Mexico. With the triumph of Juarez, peace settled for a time upon the western hemisphere, and Ward, finding no market for his military talents, was driven by financial necessities to take up the occupation of a s.h.i.+p-broker in New York City. But the shackles of trade soon proved intolerable to this man of action. He was like a race-horse harnessed to a milk-wagon. Though his talk was of cargoes and bottomry and tonnage, his thoughts were far away, on those distant seaboards of the world where history was in the making. At the beginning of 1859, the only country in the world where fighting on a large scale was going on was China, which was being devastated by the great Taiping Rebellion. In the spring of that year Ward, unable to longer resist the call to action which was forever sounding in his ears, turned the key in the door of his New York office, saddled his horse, and, unaccompanied, rode across the continent to San Francisco, where he booked a pa.s.sage for Shanghai. It was no random adventure which he had undertaken. He had laid his plans carefully and knew exactly what he intended doing. Nor did the magnitude of his project dishearten him. He had set out to save an empire, and he intended to win fame and fortune in doing it.

The conditions which prevailed in China between 1850 and 1863 can be compared only to the French Reign of Terror, or to the rule of the Mahdi in the Sudan. About the time that the nineteenth century was approaching the half-way mark, a Chinese schoolmaster named Hung-siu-Tseuen, inflamed by the partially comprehended teachings of Christian missionaries, had inaugurated a propaganda to overthrow the Confucian religion, and incidentally the reigning dynasty. There speedily rallied to his banners all the floating scoundrelism of China. In 1852 the rebel hordes had moved into the province of Hunan, murdering, pillaging, and burning as they went; advanced down the Kiang River to the Yang-tse, down which they sailed, capturing and sacking the cities on its banks.

Making Nanking his capital, the rebel leader a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Tien w.a.n.g, or ”Heavenly King,” and proclaimed the rule of the Ping Chao, or ”Peace Dynasty,” which, with the prefix Tai (”great”) gave the rebellion its name, Taiping. w.a.n.g's great hordes of tatterdemalions, flushed with their unbroken series of successes, gradually overran the silk and tea districts, the richest in the empire, threatened Peking, and advanced almost to the gates of Shanghai, carrying death and destruction over fifteen of the eighteen provinces of China. Perhaps it will give a better idea of the magnitude of this rebellion when I add that reliable authorities estimate that it cost China _two billion five hundred million dollars, and twenty million human lives_. By the autumn of 1859 such of the imperial forces as remained loyal had been whipped to a stand-still, and the European powers having interests in China had their work cut out to defend the treaty ports; the rebels were undisputed masters of all Central China; the rivers were literally choked with corpses, and the smoke of burning cities overhung the land. The atrocities committed by order of the Taiping leader shocked even the dulled sensibilities of China. On one occasion, six thousand people, suspected of an intention to desert, were gathered in the public square of Nanking. A hundred executioners stood among the prisoners with bared swords, and, at a signal from the w.a.n.g, slashed off heads until their arms were weary, and blood stood inches deep in the gutters. Ward had indeed chosen a good market in which to sell his services.

Through an English friend in the Chinese service, Ward obtained an introduction to Wu, the Taotoi of Shanghai, and to a millionaire merchant and mandarin named Tah Kee. The plan he proposed was as simple as it was daring. He offered to recruit a foreign legion, with which he would defend Shanghai, and at the same time attack such of the Taiping strongholds as were within striking distance, stipulating that for every city captured he was to receive seventy-five thousand dollars in gold, that his men were to have the first day's looting, and that each place taken should immediately be garrisoned by imperial troops, leaving his own force free for further operations. Wu on behalf of the government, and Tah Kee as the representative of the Shanghai merchants, promptly agreed to this proposal, and signed the contract. They had, indeed, everything to gain and nothing to lose. It was also arranged that Tah Kee should at the outset furnish the arms, ammunition, clothing, and commissary supplies necessary to equip the legion. These preliminaries once settled, Ward wasted no time in recruiting his force, for every day was bringing the Taipings nearer. A number of brave and experienced officers, for the most part soldiers of fortune like himself, hastened to offer him their services, General Edward Forester, an American, being appointed second in command. The rank and file of the legion was recruited from the sc.u.m and offscourings of the East, Malay pirates, Burmese dacoits, Tartar brigands, and desperadoes, adventurers, and fugitives from justice from every corner of the farther East being attracted by the high rate of pay, which in view of the hazardous nature of the service, was fixed at one hundred dollars a month for enlisted men, and proportionately more for officers. The non-commissioned officers, who were counted upon to stiffen the ranks of the Orientals, were for the most part veterans of continental armies, and could be relied upon to fight as long as stock and barrel held together. The officers carried swords and Colt's revolvers, the latter proving terribly effective in the hand-to-hand fighting which Ward made the rule; while the men were armed with Sharp's repeating carbines and the vicious Malay _kris_. Everything considered, I doubt if a more formidable aggregation of ruffians ever took the field. Ward placed his men under a discipline which made that of the German army appear like a kindergarten; taught them the tactics he had learned under Garibaldi, Walker, and Juarez; and finally, when they were as keen as razors and as tough as rawhide, he entered them in battle on a most astonished foe.

The first city Ward selected for capture was Sunkiang, on the banks of the Wusung River, some twenty-five miles above Shanghai. In choosing this particular place as his first point of attack, Ward showed himself a diplomatist as well as a soldier, for it was one of the seven sacred cities of China, and to it had been wont to come thousands of pilgrims from the most distant provinces, to prostrate themselves in the temple of Confucius, the oldest and most revered shrine in the empire. Its capture by the Taipings and their desecration of its altars had sent a thrill of horror through the imperialists, such as was not even caused by the loss of the great metropolis of Nanking.

Ward, who appreciated the necessity of winning the recognition and confidence of the higher authorities, well knew that the regaining of this sacred city would endear him to the religious heart of China as nothing else could do. But Sunkiang, with its walls twenty feet high and five miles in circ.u.mference, and with a garrison of five thousand fanatics to defend those walls, was no easy nut to crack even for a powerful force well supplied with artillery. The idea of its being taken by Ward and his five hundred desperadoes was preposterous, unthinkable, absurd. He first tried the weapon he had so painstakingly forged on a July morning, in 1860. Just as his European critics in Shanghai had prophesied, the attack on Sunkiang proved the most dismal of failures.

His stealthy approach being discovered by the Taipings, he was greeted with such a withering fire upon reaching the walls that, being without supports, and perceiving the hopelessness of the situation, he ordered his buglers to sound the retreat.

But Ward was one of those rare men to whom discouragements and disasters are but incidents, annoying but not disheartening, in the day's work. He spent a fortnight in strengthening the weakened _morale_ of his force, and then he tried again, making his onset with the suddenness and fury of a tiger's spring just at break of day. Slipping like ghosts through the grayness of the dawn, Ward and his men stole across the surrounding rice-fields, and were almost under the city walls before the Taiping sentries discovered their approach. As the first rifle cracked, Ward and one of his lieutenants raced ahead with bags of powder, placed them beneath the main gate of the city, and lighted the fuse. Like an echo of the ensuing explosion rose the shrill yell of the legionaries, who dashed forward like sprinters in a race. Instead of the gates being blown to pieces as they had expected, they found that they had been forced apart only enough for one man to pa.s.s at a time--and on the other side of that door of death five thousand rebels waited eagerly for the first of the attackers to appear. ”Come on, boys!” roared Ward, his voice rising above the crash of the musketry, ”We're going in!” and plunged through the narrow opening, a revolver in each hand. Hard on his heels crowded his legionaries. Though they were going to what was almost certain death, such was the magnetism of their leader that not a man hung back, not a man faltered. Before half a dozen men were through they were attacked by hundreds, but, so deadly was the fire they poured in with their repeaters, they were able to hold off the defenders until the whole attacking force was within the gate. Then began one of the most desperate and unequal fights in history. The key to the city was the howitzer battery, which was stationed on the top of the ma.s.sive main gate, forty feet above. Up the narrow ramps the legionaries fought their way, five hundred against five thousand, hacking, stabbing, firing, at such close range that their rifles set fire to their opponents'

clothing, driving their bayonets into the human wall before them as a field-hand pitchforks hay. Wherever there was s.p.a.ce for a man to plant his feet or swing his sword, there a Taiping was to be found. The pa.s.sageway was choked with them, but they sullenly gave way before the frenzy of Ward's attack as a hillside slowly disintegrates before the stream from a hydraulic nozzle. Ward was wounded, and his men were falling about him by dozens, but those that were left, mad with the l.u.s.t of battle, fought on, until with a final surge and cheer they reached the top, and the position which commanded the city was in their hands.

Then the Taipings broke and fled, some to be overtaken and slaughtered by the legionaries, others throwing themselves into the streets below.

Bayoneting the rebel gunners, the howitzers were turned upon the city, raking the streets, sweeping the crowded walls and house-tops, and leaving heaps of dead and dying where Taiping regiments had stood before.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Come on, boys!” shouted Ward. ”We're going in!” and plunged through the narrow opening, a revolver in each hand.]

For four-and-twenty hours Ward and the exhausted survivors of his legion, without food and without water, held the gate in the face of the most desperate efforts to retake it. Then the Chinese reinforcements for which he had asked tardily arrived, and Sunkiang was an Imperial city again. The American had taken the first trick in the great game he was playing. It was at fearful cost, however, for of the five hundred men who followed him into action, but one hundred and twenty-eight remained alive, and of these only twenty-seven were without wounds. In other words, the casualties amounted to _more than ninety-four per cent of the entire force_. Ward had ridden out of Shanghai a despised adventurer to whom the foreign officers refused to speak. He returned to that city a hero and a power in China. The priesthood acclaimed him as the saviour of the sacred city; the emperor made him a Mandarin of the Red b.u.t.ton; the merchants of Shanghai voiced their relief by adding a splendid estate to the promised reward of seventy-five thousand dollars. His reputation would have been secure if he had never fought another battle.

Leaving Sunkiang heavily garrisoned by imperial troops, Ward withdrew to Shanghai for the purpose of recruiting his shattered forces. Such a glamour of romance now surrounded the legion that Ward was fairly besieged by European as well as Oriental volunteers. Shortly after the capture of Sunkiang, Ward had occasion to visit Shanghai with reference to the care of his wounded. While riding through the streets of the city he was arrested by a British patrol, and despite his protestations that he was an officer in the imperial service, was hustled aboard the flag-s.h.i.+p of Admiral Sir James Hope, which lay in the harbor, and was placed in close confinement. In reply to his inquiries he was told that he was to be tried for recruiting British man-o'-war's-men for service in his legion. Though the arrest was high-handed and unjustified, there seemed no immediate prospect of release, for the American consul-general refused to interfere on the ground that Ward, by taking service under the Chinese government, had forfeited his right to American protection; the imperial authorities were powerless to take any action; while the British were notoriously fearful of the dangerous ascendancy which this American might gain if his successful career was permitted to continue.