There you have three of Elgin’s fads all together – he hated tobacco, was soft on Asiatics, and didn’t care for empire-building. I recall him on this very campaign saying he’d do anything “to prevent England calling down God’s curse on herself for brutalities committed on yet another feeble Oriental race.” Yet he did more to fix and maintain the course of British empire than any man of his day, and is remembered for the supreme atrocity. Ironic, ain’t it?
The letter he’d been dictating had been yet another demand to the local Manchoo governor for free passage to Pekin, which the Chinks had previously agreed to – and were now hindering for all they were worth, as at Sinho and Tang-ku.
“Perhaps when we’ve stormed the forts they may realise the folly of resistance,” says Loch. He was a tall, grave young file with a great beard, who looked a muff until you learned he’d been a Navy middy at 13, aide to Gough at 17, adjutant of Skinner’s Horse at 23, and come through Sutlej and Crimea. Parkes laughed.
“Why should they? The Emperor’s not there; he won’t suffer. Nor his ministers, Prince Sang and the like, who feed him vain lies about sweeping us into the sea. The Emperor believes them, the decree goes forth, the local commanders put up a futile fight, and send wild accounts to Pekin of how they’ve licked us. So the fool’s encouraged in his folly, and all his concubines clap their little hands and tell him he’s lord of creation.”
“He’s bound to learn the truth eventually, though.”
“In the Imperial Palace? My dear Loch, it’s another world! Suppose they do learn they’ve lost Sinho, for example – it won’t have happened before their eyes, at Pekin, so … it simply didn’t happen, you see? That’s Chinese Imperial logic.”
“Who’s Prince Sang?” I asked, remembering the swine who’d had Moyes butchered – and to whom I’d kow-towed.
“A brute and a firebrand,” grunts Elgin. “Prince Sang-kol-in-sen – our fellows call him Sam Collinson. Mongol general commanding the Emperor’s forces; he’s in the Taku Forts this minute, which is why we’ll certainly have to fight for them.” ’Nuff said; I’d met Prince Sang.
I asked when we’d advance on the forts, and he glowered and said, in a week, twiddling his scanty wing of hair, a sure sign of irritation.
“We’re too damned cumbersome by half!” says he. “I told Palmerston five thousand men would do; but no, Parliament thinks we’re still fighting the damned Bengal sepoys, so we must have three times that number.” He champed and snorted, tugging away. “A confounded waste of men, material, and time! Wait till the Commons get the bill, though! And to be sure, the fools of public will ask what it was for – they’ll expect victories, a dozen V.C.s, and enough blood and massacre to make their flesh creep. Well, they’ll not get ’em if I can help it! This is not a war, but an embassy. And this is not an expeditionary force, it’s an escort!”
He’d gone quite pink, and by the way Parkes was pulling his nose and Loch studying the distance, I could guess it was a well-played air. After a moment he left off trying to pull his hair loose.
“Our assault on Taku will take a week to prepare because the field command changes daily, to keep the French happy – Grant handed over to Montauban during our attack on Sinho, if you please! Oh, ’twas safe enough, and Montauban’s a sensible man – but it’s not a system that makes for expedition. We’d have been better with a small, mobile force – and no French.26 Ah, well!” He gave his hair a final wrench and suddenly grinned. “We shall have to see. Eh, Loch? As our old nurses would have said, ‘a sair fecht’. For your benefit, Parkes, that means a long, weary struggle.”
How long, I asked Parkes when he showed me to my billet, and he pursed his lips officially.
“To Pekin? Oh, a month, perhaps … six weeks?”
“God save us – you ain’t serious?”
“I try to be. Elgin’s perfectly correct – we’re too many, and Sir Hope, with his many fine qualities is … methodical. What with the French, and the Manchoos lying and procrastinating at every step … well, as his lordship’s interpreter, I expect to be chin-chinning to Chinamen quite excessively.” He paused in my doorway and gave a resigned sigh. “Ah, well … at least it should be a quiet little war. We dine at six, by the way; a coat is sufficient.”
* * *
a Time for action. Rosalie was the long French sword-bayonet.
Chapter 10
The great Taku Forts went down on the 21st, as advertised, to the astonishment of the Manchoos, who thought them impregnable, and the chagrin of the Frogs, who had violently opposed Grant’s plan of attack. They wanted to assail the forts on both sides of the river; Grant said no, settle the Great North Fort and the job’s done. Montauban squawked and hooted, saying it was an affront to military science, but Grant just shook his head: “North fort goes, rest’ll submit. You’ll see. Bonjour,” and carried on, humming bull-fiddle tunes. His force might be unwieldy, as Elgin said, but it was damned expert: he built two miles of road to the approaches, had volunteers swimming the river by night to mine the defences, hammered the place with siege guns and a naval bombardment, and sent in the infantry with pontoons and ladders to carry the walls – and sure enough, the infuriated Crapauds made sure they got in first.
Your correspondent bore no part beyond loafing up, when the Chinese guns had been safely silenced, to offer cheer and comfort to Major Temple before the final assault. A week ago he’d been damning his coolies for useless, but now he was in a desperate fret for their welfare – they were to carry in the scaling ladders in the teeth of cannon, jingal-fire, spears, stinkpots and whatever else the Manchoos were hurling from the walls, and Temple, the ass, was determined to go in with them. I found him croaking under his brolly, waiting for the word, but for once his complaint wasn’t a military one.
“These bloody magistrates!” cries he. “Have you seen the China Mail? Heenan’s been held to bail at Derby, an’ he an’ Sayers are to be charged with assault! Damned nonsense! Why can’t they leave sport alone?27 Ahah!” he roars, waving to the Frog colonel. “Ready, are we? Sortons, is that it? Come on, you chaps! China forever!” And he was away, bounding over the ditches, with his yellow mob at his heels and the Frog infantry in full cry, bursting with la gloire. They had warm work crossing the moats and canals, but they and our own 44th and 67th carried the walls with the bayonet – and as Grant had said, out came the white silk flags on the other forts. Four hundred Manchoos were killed out of five hundred; we lost about 30, and ten times as many wounded. The coolies behaved famously, Temple said.
Parkes and Loch and I were in the party sent across the river to arrange terms with Hang-Fu, the local mandarin, a leery ancient with the opium shakes who received us in a garden, sitting on a chair of state with a mighty block of ice underneath to keep him cool, and his minions carrying his spectacles and chopsticks and silver watch in embroidered cases. He served us champagne, but when Parkes demanded a signed surrender the old fox said he daren’t, not being military, and Prince Sang had already left up-river.
Parkes then came all over diplomatic, promising to blow the forts to kingdom come, at which Hang-Fu said, well, the Emperor would be graciously pleased to give us temporary occupation of them (which we already had) and we could take our gunboats up to Tientsin. Parkes almost had to take him by the throat to get it in writing, and then we ploughed back to the boat in the dark, past the huge gloomy fort-buildings, with slow-fuse mines which the Chinks had thoughtfully left behind exploding here and there. (Another trick was to bury cocked gun-locks with bags of powder, for the unwary to tread on; subtle, eh? – and yet some of their fort guns were wooden dummies.) I was never so glad to get back to a boat in my life.
So now the way was clear, and with the gunboats leading the way up the twisty moonlit river, it began: the famous march on Pekin, the last great stronghold on earth that had never seen a white soldier, the Forbidden City of the oldest of civilisations, the capital of the world, to the Chinese, having dominion over all mankind. And now the foreign devils were coming, th
e whining pipes echoing out across the sodden plain, the jaunty little poilus with their kepis tilted, stepping it out, the jingling troopers of Fane’s and Probyn’s with the sun a-twinkle on their lance-heads, the Buffs swinging by to the odd little march that Handel wrote for them (so Grant told me)28, the artillery limbers churning up the mud, the Hampshire yokels and Lothian ploughboys, the Sikhs and Mahrattas and Punjabis, McCleverty bare to the waist in the prow of his gunboat, Wolseley halting his pony to sketch a group of coolies, Napier riding silent, shading his eyes ahead, Elgin sitting under the awning of Coromandel fanning himself with his hat and reading The Origin of Species, Montauban careering up and down the columns with great dash, chattering to his staff, Grant standing by the roadside, tugging his grizzled whiskers and touching his cap to the troops who cheered him as they marched by. Fifteen thousand horse, foot and guns rolling up the Peiho, not to fight or to hold or to conquer, but just so that the Big Barbarian could stand before the Son of Heaven and watch him put his mark on paper. “And when he does,” says Elgin, “the ends of the earth will have met at last, and there will be no more savage kings for our people to subdue. We’ve come a long way from our northern forests; I wonder if we were wise.”
The Chinese evidently thought not, for having given us fawning assurance of free passage and no resistance, they hampered us every yard to Tientsin. Transport and beasts had vanished from the country, the local officials used every excuse to delay us, and to make things worse the weather was at extremes of broiling heat and choking dust or deluges of rain and axle-deep mud29. Fortunately the Manchoos hadn’t had the wit to break bridges or block channels, and the peasantry, with a fine disregard for Imperial policy, were perfectly ready to repair our road and sell us beef and mutton, fruit, vegetables and ice at twenty times their proper price. Snug on Coromandel, I could endure our leisurely progress, but Parkes was plumb in the path of all the Manchoos’ growing insolence and deceit, and I could see his official smile getting tighter by the hour.
“At this rate we may reach Pekin by Christmas. The more we submit to their lies and hindrance, the less they respect us.” He was at the rail, glaring coldly at the glittering salt-heaps that lined the banks below Tientsin. “In ’58, after we shelled Canton, the river banks were black with Chinese – kow-towing. You will observe, Sir Harry, that they do not kow-tow today. Much as I admire our chief, I cannot share his recently-expressed satisfaction that in these enlightened times we no longer require every Chinaman to take off his hat to us.”
But even Elgin’s patience was beginning to wear thin. Somehow he preserved a placid politeness through every meeting with Manchoo officials who barely concealed their satisfaction in wasting time and frustrating our progress, but afterwards he’d be in a fever to get on, snapping at us, tugging his fringe, urging Grant and Montauban with an energy that stopped just short of rudeness; Montauban would bridle and Grant would nod, and then we staff-men would get pepper again. He was bedevilled, trying to keep the Chinks sweet and the advance moving, fearful of provoking downright hostility, but knowing that every hour lost was time for the war party in Pekin to get their nerve back after Taku; we knew Sang-kol-in-sen was back in the capital, urging resistance, and Elgin in his impatience was being tempted by a new Manchoo ploy – speedy passage to Pekin in return for a promise of active British help against the Taipings, which he daren’t concede or bluntly refuse.30
It took us ten crawling days to cover sixty miles to Tientsin, a stink-hole of salt-heaps and pi-dogs – and smiling Manchoo mandarins sent by Pekin to “negotiate” our further progress. They talked for a full week, while Parkes risked apoplexy – and Elgin nodded gravely, with his lip stuck out. Finally, after interminable discussion, they agreed that we might advance to Tang-chao, eleven miles from Pekin – provided we didn’t take artillery or too many gunboats to alarm the people – and from there Elgin and Baron Gros might go into Pekin with a thousand cavalry for escort, and sign the damned treaty. It seemed too good to be true – although Grant looked grim at the smallness of the escort – but Elgin accepted, hiding his satisfaction. And then the mandarins, smiling more politely than ever, said of course they couldn’t confirm these arrangements, but doubtless Pekin would do so if we were patient a little longer …
If Bismarck or D’Israeli or Metternich had had to sit through those interminable hours, listening to those bland, lying old dotards, and then received that slap in the face, I swear they’d have started to scream and smash the furniture. Elgin didn’t even blink. He listened to Parkes’s near-choked translation of that astounding insolence, thanked the mandarins for their courtesy, stood up, bowed – and told Parkes, almost offhand, to pass ’em the word that they now owed Britain four million quid for delays and damage to our expedition. Oh, aye, and the treaty would now contain a clause opening Tientsin to European trade.
Back on Coromandel he was grimly satisfied. “Their bad faith affords the perfect excuse for proceeding to Pekin forthwith. Sir Hope, the army will no longer halt when discussions take place; if they want to talk we’ll do it on the march. And if they don’t like it, and want a fight, they can have it.”
Suddenly everyone was grinning; even Parkes was delighted, although he confided to me later that Elgin should have taken a high hand sooner. Elgin himself looked ten years younger, now that he’d cast the die, but I thought exuberance had got the better of him when he strode into the saloon later, threw The Origin of Species on the table, and announced:
“It’s very original, no doubt, but not for a hot evening. What I need is some trollop.”
I couldn’t believe my ears, and him a church-goer, too. “Well, my lord, I dunno,” says I. “Tientsin ain’t much of a place, but I’ll see what I can drum up –”
“Michel’s been reading Dr Thorne since Taku,” cries he. “He must have finished it by now, surely! Ask him, Flashman, will you?” So I did, and had my ignorance enlightened.31
It was bundle and go now. We left 2nd Division at Tientsin, shed all surplus gear, and cracked away at twice our previous pace, while the Manchoos plagued Elgin with appeals to stop the advance – they would appoint new commissioners, they had further proposals, there must be a pause for discussion – and Elgin replied agreeably that he’d talk to ’em at Tangchao, as agreed. The Manchoos were frantic, and now we saw something new – great numbers of refugees, ordinary folk, streaming towards us from Pekin, in evident fear of what would happen when we arrived. They flooded past us, men, women, and children, with their possessions piled on rickety carts – I remember one enormous Mongol wheeling four women in a barrow. But no sign of armed opposition, and when our local guides and drivers decamped one night, spirits were so high that no one minded, and Admiral Hope and Bowlby, the Times correspondent, took over as mule-skinners, whooping and hawing like Deadwood Dick. We swung on up-river, the gunboats keeping pace and the Frog band thumping “Madelon”, for now Pekin was barely thirty miles ahead, and we were going to see the elephant at last, seven thousand cavalry and infantry ready for anything, not that it mattered for the Manchoo protests had subsided to whines of resignation, and we were coming home on a tight rein, hurrah, boys, hurrah!
And the dragon … waited.
It happened the day after we held divine service in a big temple, and afterwards there was much fun while we looked over a book of pictures which Beato, who’d been photographing the march, presented to Elgin. Word came that new Manchoo commissioners, including the famous Prince I, were waiting just up ahead, at Tangchao, and they hoped the army would camp on the near side of the town while we negotiated the details of Elgin’s entry to Pekin.
“Go and see him,” says Elgin to Parkes, so on the Monday, in the cool of a beautiful dawn, about thirty of us set out to ride ahead. There was Parkes, Loch, De Normann from Bruce’s office, Bowlby of The Times, and myself, with six Dragoon Guards and twenty of Fane’s sowars under young Anderson, as escort. Walker, the Q.M.G., and Thompson of the commissariat rode along to inspect the camp site.
“As you can see.” He touched the button on his hat; it was white, not red. “I was also degraded by losing my peacock feather,” he added, grinning like a corpse, and Parkes and I made sounds of commiseration. “Oh, it is no matter!” cries he. “Lost honours can be regained. As Confucius says: Be patient, and at last the mulberry leaf will become a silk robe.”
I remember the proverb, because it was just then that I chanced to look round. The six Dragoons had been riding immediately behind Parkes and me since we set out, in double file, but I’d paid ’em no special heed, and it was only as I glanced idly back that I saw one of them was watching me – staring at me, dammit, with the oddest fixed grin. He was a typical burly Heavy with a face as red as his coat under the pith helmet, and I was just about to ask what the devil he meant by it when his grin broadened – and in that moment I knew him, and knew that he knew me. It was the Irishman who’d been beside me when Moyes was killed.
I must have gaped like an idiot … and then I was facing front again, chilled with horror. This was the man who’d seen me grovelling to Sam Collinson, my abject companion in shame – and here he was, riding at my shoulder like bloody Nemesis, no doubt on the point of denouncing me to the world as a poltroon – it’s a great thing to have a conscience as guilty as mine, I can tell you; it always makes you fear far more than the worst. My God! And yet – it couldn’t be! the Irishman had been a sergeant of the 44th; this was a trooper of Dragoon Guards. I must be mistaken; he hadn’t been staring at me at all – he must have been grinning at some joke of his mate’s, when I’d caught his eye, and my terrified imagination was doing the rest –
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