by Dennis Parry
‘I should have thought that white men would need to stick together out there,’ I said sagely.
‘It would certainly have been a help to the wretched priests. But I doubt if they could have offered any quid pro quo. At the time when I knew him, Ellison was one of the most famous men in Sinkiang.’
‘I didn’t realize that he became more than a local figure.’
‘Oh yes. He’d shown himself to be something very rare: an original military thinker.’
My uncle sat back, twinkling his eyes. He always enjoyed small mystifications. But he could not have realized how much he had baffled me. The fact was I could not identify any event described in the letters with so grandiose a description.
Under his offhand Public School manner my uncle was profoundly romantic, and very English. He loved amateurism and improvisation and the triumph of underdogs. He needed little encouragement to tell a story which reeked of all three. Why Fulk himself did not relate it, seeing that he wrote at length of other events in which he played a far less glorious part, is not clear. Perhaps it was on account of the very celebrity of the operation. One of his un-Elizabethan characteristics was freedom from boasting.
As a matter of fact I later found two brief passages which must, I think, refer to the rebellion of 1917-18.
‘Well, Mother, there has been another damned uproar round here. Last week we had an army of Chinks trying to break into the place, but now most of them have been persuaded to go away, and the ones who are staying will not give any more trouble. . . .’
Between 1912 and the late twenties, Sinkiang as a whole enjoyed a spell of exceptional peace. But the term was relative, as if a doctor in plague-ridden territory were to note the absence of any pandemic outbreak. During these years the Governor-in-Chief of the provinces was a Chinese official named Yang, who, at least during the earlier years of his rule, showed unusual force and integrity. He is to be distinguished from the man whom Fulk refers to as the ‘Governor’ Yee. The latter was, in effect, a Resident or Deputy with local authority, who controlled Doljuk and a clutch of the northern oases. Yee was not a happy choice, perhaps because of a certain whimsicality which Confucian culture seems to impress on some of its devotees. This led him to alternate between excessive severity and excessive lenience. In any case it was not much good being cultured or whimsical with Tungans and Turkis.
A dispute about taxation set up a steady ferment which exploded in 1917. Only the cities of Yee’s sub-province were involved, but within a limited area the rebels made an even cleaner sweep than usual, largely because Fulk had bought up quantities of modern arms from Russian deserters. He had also been speculating in the opposite market. Through China he imported five hundred cheap shot-guns with ammunition to match. Did he think he was going to popularize game-hunting in Doljuk? If so, he was as big an optimist as the man who tried to introduce the battle-of-flowers in Wigan. More likely he had from the first some dim notion of tactical possibilities.
At the end of spring, 1918, the expected Chinese army arrived in front of Doljuk. Two hundred miles east at Barkul, it had already inflicted a severe defeat on the rebels and had then proceeded to capture that city, executing all the notables after confiscation of their goods. Naturally there was some alarm among the upper circles in Doljuk about their future.
The Chinese sat down in front of the walls and the great wooden gates. They had no artillery except three old French guns which had been used in the Franco-Prussian war; and though these were capable of breaching the fortifications, they never continued serviceable for long enough to make an exploitable gap. Unfortunately for the defenders, however, the operations were not entirely directed by the ostensible Commander of the Chinese army, a rough-neck war-lord from Kansu. With him travelled the Governor Yee, who had skipped out at the beginning of the trouble, and spent a very pleasant year in Pekin. He was a well-educated man, and he had read the history of previous campaigns in Sinkiang. He remembered that in the rebellion of 1794 the Chinese General Huang Su had recaptured Doljuk with the loss of scarcely a man, by the simple trick of diverting its water-supply.
The wells in the city were virtually useless. Doljuk had a long history, and the sanitary habits of its population had not changed much in two thousand years. Consequently the soil and all that percolated through it were polluted to a remarkable depth. Not even the best acclimatized of the natives would venture to drink from the deep stinking holes which were to be found in the courtyards of the richer houses. Indeed it was considered reckless to wash clothes in liquid drawn from them.
In normal times all drinking water was provided by a stream which descended from a pool to the west of the oasis and flowed through the city, being conducted under the wall in two brick tunnels. In 1794 the Chinese smashed these tunnels by laying charges of gunpowder in the night. The result was doubly gratifying: not only did the men of Doljuk lose their water, but it piled up in a flood at the old point of inlet, threatening to dissolve the mud structure of the wall.
Another factor made the problem of thirst peculiarly tantalizing to the besieged. There was an alternative source of supply, which consisted of a broad pool rising in the garden of the Governor’s palace. Its position had prevented it from becoming immoderately fouled; and in any case its strong mineral content was a purifier. But the latter, alas, gave it medicinal properties; it was a laxative with a harsh action. Heat exaggerated the city’s plight. Towards the end of the first week of siege, the temperature stood at over 100° in the shade. People could no longer control themselves, but sucked down pints of the toxic water. The results, though not without the usual element of low farce, were ultimately horrible. Many died in great agony from the excoriation of their bowels.
The inhabitants had a long tradition of defeat which sapped their will to resist when things were going badly. There was some talk of surrender, particularly among the lower orders who might expect to escape any but a perfunctory and collective vengeance. Some of the rich tried to make their way by night through the Chinese lines.
As an infidel foreigner, Fulk Ellison had no official standing in Doljuk. Even his popularity with the Turkis which had been his chief asset was temporarily dimmed. When war turned against them, simple and faithless men found it convenient to blame the person who had provided them with the means to wage it. Nevertheless, because of his skill as an engineer, he was an informal member of the junta which had organized the defence of the city. At the meeting which, but for him, would have been the last he put forward a plan of rescue.
The key of his project was the Banner of Oirats with whom he had had previous dealings. A detachment of this tribe made an annual pilgrimage to the neighbourhood of Doljuk in order to collect salt—in which their own pastures were very poor—from the saline desert to the south of the city and they had been reported in the district several days before the beginning of the siege—of which they took not the slightest notice. Since the days of Jenghiz and Batu their nation had learnt to mind its own business.
‘Still,’ said my uncle, ‘those who know claim that the ancient spirit has survived endemic syphilis and can still be uncorked by a good cash offer.’
That was the commission with which Fulk left. He crept alone through the Chinese lines, and rode southwards until he made contact with the Mongols. After a day of feverish negotiations, he led them to the ruined Uighur watch-tower which he used as a store for big consignments of illicit arms. There the contingent was served out with a shot-gun apiece and upwards of forty cartridges filled with duck-shot.
Fulk must at some time have asked himself the question why the nomad horsemen who had once terrorized Asia and Europe had lost their impact, and found an answer in their abandonment of rapid fire-power. Accounts of the Mongol campaigns in the thirteenth century always emphasized the dismay caused by a rain of arrows accurately directed from galloping horses. But for generations the bow had been yielding place to the gun. The snobbery of modern weapons had ruined a great military power. Bullets were ind
eed better than arrows—but only provided that both were delivered with approximately the same efficiency. The current arms among the Mongols were old muzzle-loaders or lengths of unrifled gas-pipe fitted with triggers by cynical and ingenious Japanese. In either case the barrels were as smooth as billiard balls, and the flight of the missile unpredictable. Consequently the irresistible charge of Jenghiz’ followers had degenerated into a mere ritual letting-off of fire-crackers.
‘Ellison told me,’ said my uncle, ‘that a lot of them used to shut their eyes when they fired.’
‘Why?’
‘In order to pray more reverently for a hit.’
Since improvement in marksmanship would be a long job, Fulk’s idea was to reduce the margin of error.
Having equipped themselves, the party made a detour until they were a couple of miles above the city on its north flank. They waited until the sun was up and had begun to cast its intolerable dazzle down the mica slopes. They then charged.
‘Ellison,’ said my uncle, ‘had that habit of deprecating his own achievements which was so admired in my boyhood. You remember how Rider Haggard’s heroes usually insist that they are cowards? I suppose it’s really a degenerate offshoot of the chivalric tradition. Anyhow it suited Ellison about as well as kid gloves on a coal-heaver. . . . He pretended that he couldn’t keep up with those steppe horsemen, and that he was glad to be two hundred yards in the rear. Personally I don’t think he was too sure that the Mongols would do their stuff and he deliberately hung back to act as whipper-in. But whatever the reason was he had an ideal position for seeing the whole operation.
The Mongols came down at a controlled trot for the first mile and a half. By this time the Chinese had realized that they were being threatened from outside their lines and had faced round a part of their troops to meet the assault. But they had not realized how much the assailants were capable of stepping up their speed of approach. Over the last half-mile the Mongols broke into a furious gallop, weaving in and out of each other’s paths in a cat’s cradle of movement to confuse the enemy’s aim. The Chinese were still deploying when the attackers arrived within twenty yards of the front line. Even so their Commanders were probably not unduly disturbed, imagining they would have to face merely the usual random rifle-fire, followed up with a little sword play. But at the last moment the irregular mass wheeled broadside on, and with a fair semblance of unison both barrels of every gun were discharged. Eight hundred cartridges (excluding the minority which blew up in the faces of the firers) amount to quite a heavy concentration of shot. Comparatively few of the Chinese were killed, but the number of these who lost their eyes or were shocked into helplessness by face wounds entirely crippled the front line.
Drunk with excitement, screaming in high-pitched voices, the small hairless men, who rode as if welded to their horses, careered to and fro among the disordered ranks, reloading and shooting indiscriminately in all directions. The rout was completed by a sortie from the besieged town. The whole Chinese army broke and streamed eastwards into the desert.
During the pursuit they lost about a quarter of their strength, and another two or three hundred were taken prisoner. Among the latter was the Governor Yee.
Three days later when the water-supply had been restored and the inhabitants had partially recovered from their savage purgation, a great feast was held. Because of the numbers attending it took place in the grounds of the Governor’s palace. All the Mongols became terribly drunk, to the scandal of the teetotal Mohammedan natives. At the end the captive Yee was brought out and strangled. My uncle thought that Fulk had nothing to do with this.
These celebrations gave rise to the only other comment in Fulk’s letters on the whole chain of events.
‘We had a party for some chaps who had done us a good turn. At the end it got rather rough, and you would not have liked it, Mother.’
Soon the Oirats rode away northward into their own land. Before they went they begged, in addition to their covenanted reward, a large cart and three mules. These were gladly granted. They took bands of leather and bound them very tautly from side to side of the cart. Then they studded them with nails according to an ancient craftsmanship. The mules were put between the shafts (for it was against the Mongols’ principles to harness a horse), and two men with wooden mallets mounted between the lattice of thongs. They struck them and there came out a deep humming music like the approach of a million hornets.
It was their tradition to mark great victories by the construction of a giant dulcimer on wheels. The battle at Doljuk was the first occasion for doing so in over three hundred years.
This departure from the normal pattern of events seems to have shaken the Chinese. At any rate, though the city and its confederates ultimately abandoned their resistance, they were not subjected to any penalties. The old regime returned slyly and on sufferance.
‘Did you ever find out,’ I asked my uncle, ‘why Fulk Ellison broke so drastically with his family?’
‘The story I heard in India was that old Joseph who used him as a sort of roving ambassador sent him to Mexico to negotiate a contract and gave him several thousand pounds for bribery. It so happened that he got the contract almost without paying and went off to Australia leaving the balance in his own bank account. When he returned to England he found that his father who’d grown insanely suspicious in his old age had sworn out a warrant against him for fraudulent conversion. The case was dropped of course, but it made Fulk so furious that he determined never to set foot in England again. He took on a series of jobs as mining-consultant all over the world. One of them landed him in Doljuk and there he suddenly put down fresh roots and stayed.’
‘It seems a terrible waste,’ I said. ‘If he achieved so much in Sinkiang, think what he might have done if he’d remained among civilized surroundings!’
By this time I was somewhat excessively under the spell of Varvara’s father and too ready to view him as a kind of Robin Hood. My uncle applied a mild dampener.
‘I don’t think that it would have made all that difference in the end. People find their own level.’ He cleared his throat selfconsciously as he did whenever he brought out a quotation from his considerable stock of classical knowledge: ‘ “Sunt quos comitatur vastitas sua—Some there are that carry their own wilderness with them.” ’
9
Turpin was looking out of his subterranean window from which the legs of a housemaid were visible halfway up the area steps.
‘What are we?’ he said. ‘Whence do we come? Whither do we go? Dunno!’
His reflections on life had a pleasantly mixed flavour of lacrimae rerum and je m’en fous. They soothed me at a moment when I needed soothing. For I had just made a silly mistake.
The point had arrived when, having read all Fulk’s letters three times, I was bound to render some account of my investigation. Accordingly I had gone to see Mrs. Ellison in her room; not much relishing the prospect of having to point out to her the only piece of evidence which I had discovered. It was the passage where Fulk distinguished between Varvara and any other children whom he might have begotten. It seemed to me that calling attention to it would rip away the veil behind which we had hitherto hidden the true aim of my search. But I had reckoned without the invincible capacity of people of Mrs. Ellison’s generation to remain blind when they did not wish to see.
‘Very interesting,’ she said, examining the lines through her lorgnette. ‘Very interesting. I think men are more sentimental than women over children. Perhaps that’s because they are nearer to them. My son, for instance . . . how he did love to tease by pretending all sorts of wild things about himself!’
I looked at her in astonishment, but she gave no indication of disbelieving what she said. On the whole I was delighted that the awkward corner had been rounded so easily. This gave me a false confidence; for the moment I was under the impression that I could ‘manage’ Mrs. Ellison. In this mood I said something which suggested fairly unequivocally that, whatever the fa
cts about Varvara’s birth, there was a moral obligation to treat her as a full member of the family.
I forget exactly what reply I received but it was one which choked me off completely. I was made to feel impertinent and vulgar. That I soon got over, but I could not so easily rid myself of the fear that I might have done Varvara some irrevocable harm. It persisted, despite the fact that for me the interview closed on a note of signal forgiveness.
When I tried to give back the originals of the letters and the copy which I had had made, Mrs. Ellison waved the latter aside.
‘If you find them as interesting as you say, David, you might like to keep them. When I am dead you can do with them what you like.’
I think the sincerity of my thanks did a good deal to rehabilitate me in her eyes.
It was August Bank Holiday and stiflingly hot when Cedric brought Deirdre round for the second time. Whilst he was having one of his usual interviews with his mother she came out into the garden. Hardly wasting an instant on greetings, she launched into a long dirty story of whose point she obviously had only a dim conception. She had barely finished when her father joined us.
For once he seemed to be in a good temper.
‘Tea,’ he said. ‘Yes, a little tea, I think, today. With cucumber sandwiches.’
He strolled back across the lawn to summon Turpin. Simply making conversation, I said to Deirdre:
‘Your father doesn’t usually take tea, does he?’
A truly fiendish gleam lit up her eyes.
‘Because of his weight. We have to be very careful of that, otherwise he might stop being such a fine figure of a man. D’you know something . . . he wears corsets. Sometimes when he’s very hurt and grieved because I’ve let him down, I can hear them creaking.’
