But in fact Ward returned to the task of training his Chinese soldiers and European officers with pointed zeal: Adversity, on this as on many other occasions, seemed only to give him an increased sense of purpose and a rather gleeful delight in frustrating his antagonists. Those antagonists (or at least the ones who wore the Royal Navy’s blue and gold) were now growing weary, and when word of Ward’s return to the drilling ground at Sung-chiang reached Admiral Hope, he threw up his hands, abandoned the policy of harassing and imprisoning the Foreign Legion’s officers, and—according to Forester—invited Ward and his two seconds-in-command to attend a conference on board his flagship under a guarantee of safe conduct.
The idea that, at the height of their dramatic game of cat and mouse, Ward, Burgevine, Forester, and Admiral Hope should all have sat clown on board an English warship and discussed their differences like gentlemen has exercised understandable power over the imaginations of many students of the period. But we have no one’s word save Forester’s that the incident occurred. Writing in the Cosmopolitan, Forester claimed that
[t]his meeting was destined to have a most important bearing on the future of the Taiping rebellion. The British admiral was brought around to a new view of foreign interference with the Taipings. We gave assurances that we would no longer recruit our army from his man-of-war’s-men and the admiral promised to exert all possible influence with the British minister at Peking, and with the Home Government. From that day on Admiral Hope became our strong friend and rendered us service whenever it was possible.
Always weak on dates, Forester supplied no such specific for this fabled meeting: It might have taken place any time between the late spring and the fall of 1861. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the story, however, is its oblique reference to the shift that was taking place in the British attitude toward the Chinese civil war, for it was that change that would finally transform Britain’s approach to the Chinese Foreign Legion.
Ward had yet to make his way into the dispatches to Washington of either the American minister to China or Consul Smith: The United States was still interested in avoiding complications that might hinder trade. But by May 23 England’s Frederick Bruce thought enough of the activities of foreigners on either side of the Taiping rebellion to inform Lord Russell, the British foreign minister, of the details:
It will be seen that British subjects in both instances form but a fraction of the hired force. The enlisting agent on the part of the Government seems to be a man called Ward, an ex-Californian filibuster; and on that of the Taipings, a man called Peacock. Both are of United States origin, but Ward, it appears, does not now claim to be an American citizen. The law of the United States is, I believe, very severe against enlistment in the Chinese service; but it appears their authorities find great difficulty in putting the law into operation. Ward, it appears, besides the Foreign Legion, has undertaken to drill a body of Chinese in the employment of the Imperial Government. I look upon it as perfectly hopeless to prevent foreigners entering the service of these parties as long as the pay is sufficient to attract them, and as long as the Chinese think that they will be of use in military operations.
Thus even at the time Ward was making his escape, the senior British official in China was conceding that the policy of forcefully trying to put an end to the Foreign Legion’s activities was doomed. On May 24 Admiral Hope wrote to Bruce and complained that attempts by Chinese officials in Shanghai to discourage Ward were not “of that efficient character which I have a right to expect, being feigned and in the nature of a blind by delivering up a few with a view to the escape of the remainder.” The British, in short, may have believed in the rectitude of a policy designed to prevent foreign involvement in the rebellion, but the lack of cooperation they experienced indicated that virtually no one else in Shanghai—whether native or foreigner—shared their conviction.
Nor did the Taipings cooperate with Britain’s desire to pursue a neutral, noninterventionist course. On May 27 British interpreter Chaloner Alabaster wrote a memorandum describing a trip up the Huang-pu River that he had just completed in the company of Captain Roderick Dew, the aggressive officer who had raided the “Taki hong” and captured Burgevine. Dew had been ordered by Admiral Hope to proceed to Ch’ing-p’u, deliver a letter warning the rebel leaders that they were not to come within two days’ march of the treaty port of Ningpo (the same terms that had been arranged for Shanghai), and, on his return, to capture any Foreign Legionnaires he could find at Sung-chiang. But, as Dew and Alabaster approached the walls of Ch’ing-p’u under a flag of truce (the captain “leaving his sword behind to make our peaceful object more apparent”), the rebels “opened fire with gingalls and on our stopping and displaying the letter which they certainly must have seen commenced firing their big guns, fortunately giving their shot too great elevation and as they showed no signs of desisting we retreated to the boats which were also fired on and got away as quickly as possible leaving the letter suspended on a pole we stuck in the ground.”
On June 6 the redoubtable Captain Dew again made contact with the rebels—this time at the town of Chapu on the northern shore of Hangchow Bay—to warn them not to attack Ningpo. Upon landing, Dew was escorted to the local Taiping chief by rebel soldiers. The march took them through a scene of devastation: “The streets and houses,” wrote Dew, “were occupied solely by soldiers, their former owners either having fled or been killed—a strange contrast to the usual life and bustle of a Chinese town.” Dew soon met the Taiping chief, who declared that he was, in Dew’s words:
most anxious to be on good terms with foreigners. Did we not, under Heaven, serve the same God? He could not see why we should interfere with his attacking Ningpo; our ships and property should be protected.… I remarked that no cause could prosper whose path was marked by bloodshed and the destruction of the homes of the people. It was a necessity, he said, to guard against treachery and inspire fear, and I am strongly impressed by the sagacity of the remark, for I feel certain that the rapid success of the Taipings is due far more to their destructive qualities and gay dresses of yellow and red silks than to their bravery or their weapons, which seemed, on an average, to be worse than those of the Imperialist soldiers.
Admiral Hope himself issued a warning to the Taiping chief at Chapu on June 11, telling him that should the rebels attack Ningpo, “I need hardly point out to you the hopelessness of success on your part, whilst what occurred at Shanghai last year is still fresh in your memories.” In addition Hope wrote to the British Admiralty, describing the Taipings as “banditti bent on free quarters and plunder” and advising direct British intervention to keep Ningpo safe. The truce with the rebels that he himself had worked out was beginning to seem to Hope a short-term policy with no application to the long run. British and Taiping goals were, in the admiral’s opinion, inimical.
The increasingly antagonistic attitude of British naval officers toward the Taipings in the spring of 1860 was echoed in the reports and dispatches of diplomatic officials, as well as in the changing tone of the North China Herald during the period. On June 23 Frederick Bruce wrote a lengthy indictment of the rebel movement to Lord Russell at the Foreign Office. Describing frequent alliances between Taiping and bandit groups, Bruce condemned the apparent rebel inability to create any kind of political or economic institutions: “If it were possible to conceive of [the rebellion’s] permanent success in its present form, China would be reduced to a mass of agriculturalists, governed by a theocracy, supported by armies collected from the most barbarous and demoralised part of the population.” And Herald editor Charles Compton had written as early as January that “[a]ll despotisms are bad enough, but the present Insurgent movement should it prove successful, will be not only an ordinary, but a religious despotism; surely China has had calamity enough to be spared from such a bitter woe.”
Yet these same men recognized the utter inability of the imperial Chinese armies to meet the threat of the rebellion. Noting that the “military
art in China is in that rude and barbarous stage in which conquest is synonymous with extermination,” Minister Bruce went on to warn that he saw “little hopes of communities like those of Shanghai and Ningpo escaping destruction.” Foreign intervention had saved Shanghai once, but unless the Western powers were willing to take on an open-ended commitment to protect the treaty ports (and, by doing so, rescue the imperial government) from the rebels, the only hope of defeating the Taipings rested with organizations such as the Chinese Foreign Legion.
Bruce was as yet unwilling to admit this last fact, but the Chinese imperialists in Shanghai had understood it for more than a year. Tseng Kuo-fan’s achievements in the west were still irrelevant to circumstances on the coast. Hsüeh Huan and Wu Hsü had seen nothing in the organization or conduct of the imperial armies in their area to indicate that any significant program of reform was under way. In June 1861, therefore, Hsüeh and Wu not only continued their carefully shrouded support of the Chinese Foreign Legion but also backed the creation of what came to be called the Franco-Chinese Corps of Kiangsu, commanded by Captain Tardif de Moidrey. Both the central Chinese government in Peking and the French minister to China had been unwilling to endorse such a project, but the French naval commander in Shanghai, Vice Admiral August-Leopold Protet, had favored it. Faced with the problem of removing Tardif de Moidrey from the French active duty list, Protet had told the captain to enter a Shanghai hospital and fake an illness while his detachment left the port. Safely on his own, Tardif de Moidrey, like Ward before him, started from humble beginnings: fifty Chinese soldiers, a handful of French assistants, and a few pieces of artillery. But the Franco-Chinese Corps was to play an important part in the campaigns to come.
If the French naval commander in Shanghai could see the realities of the moment and facilitate the involvement of Westerners in anti-Taiping activities, it is unlikely that Admiral Hope could not do the same. Thus while Forester’s tale of a meeting on board Hope’s flagship between himself, Ward, Burgevine, and the admiral is uncorroborated, it is entirely plausible. For, while the British diplomatic community had many reasons to resent Ward’s repeated violations of Western neutrality laws, one thing only had caused friction between the British Royal Navy and the Chinese Foreign Legion: the desertions of British sailors. In his opposition to the Taipings, by contrast, Ward was at one with Hope as well as most of the admiral’s officers, such as Captain Dew. And if Ward did indeed pledge at the meeting not to entice more British seamen and soldiers to desert, it is likely that Admiral Hope would have been willing to drop his harassment of Ward’s operations. As it turned out, during the summer and fall of 1861 Ward placed notably less emphasis on recruiting foreigners (he even dropped the name Chinese Foreign Legion) and concentrated instead on using what capable officers he had to train ever greater numbers of Chinese recruits. Simultaneously—and coincidence here is doubtful—he endured no significant interference from the Royal Navy in building what came to be popularly known as the Ward Corps of Disciplined Chinese. Both facts suggest that he had indeed worked out a tacit agreement with Admiral Hope.
On July 3 Frederick Bruce wrote to Lord Russell from Peking and announced “with satisfaction that the Foreign Legion has been disbanded.” But the minister was not, it seems, abreast of the latest developments in Shanghai. Bruce went on to express a hope that the “example of the value of Chinese cooperation” given by Li Heng-sung’s Green Standard braves during the May 11 attack on Ch’ing-p’u would prove a deterrent to “the adventurers who infest the coast of China.” But Ward, Burgevine, and Forester had already taken their operations to another plane, one on which “adventurers” played a secondary role. Ward’s latest formula was at last the correct one, and within a year the Ward Corps would become not only the most reliable military unit on the imperialist side but the finest in all of China.
V
“ASTONISHED AT THE COURAGE”
In the late summer of 1860 the Emperor Hsien-feng, desperate for victories against the Taipings, had put his lingering distrust of Tseng Kuo-fan aside and elevated the eminent Han commander and bureaucrat to the post of governor-general of the provinces of Kiangsu, Anhwei, and Kiangsi. During the closing months of 1860, Tseng had tightened his grip on Anking, gateway to the Taiping capital of Nanking, with typical relentlessness. As a result, the Chung Wang was compelled to abandon his attempt to take Shanghai and marched west to relieve the pressure on Nanking. The rebel general did not go happily; but angry denunciations from the T’ien Wang—who told his young commander, “You are afraid of death”—as well as sinister hints from the Taiping prime minister that the Chung Wang’s reluctance was “sure to give rise to discussion,” spurred him on toward the upper Yangtze valley. The Chung Wang’s reappearance in the west produced a protracted and finally frustrating campaign that lasted through much of 1861, and for the duration of that period Kiangsu province was stripped of almost all first-rate Taiping fighting units.
This situation—combined with the oppressive heat of a typical Shanghai summer, during which neither the imperialist nor the rebel armies in the region showed any inclination toward strenuous campaigning—made it possible for Ward, Burgevine, and the officers of their new corps to pursue the training of their Chinese recruits at Sung-chiang without enemy interference. Several encampments and training grounds were established outside the city walls, and within weeks Ward had a substantial force, according to Charles Schmidt, “in excellent military subjection, each one doing all the common duties of a regular garrison life, obeying his commands with precision; clothed, equipped and drilled in perfect unison with the modes of the European soldier.… The progress attained in so short a time was the greatest of wonders to every one in Sung-chiang.”
Certainly, the sights to be seen on the Sung-chiang drilling grounds were unlike anything the Kiangsu peasants had ever witnessed in connection with Green Standard units. These local residents observed the corps’s strange doings with a blend of admiration, trepidation, amusement, and sarcasm. The behavior of the corps’s American commander was also very different from that of most imperialists: Ward kept single-mindedly to the task at hand and tried to impart a similar dedication to his men. As Dr. Macgowan noted, “In learning drill, the Chinese of Kiangsu proved apt scholars, and being an easy race, a certain amount of discipline was easily established. Commands were given in English, which, with the bugle calls, were soon acquired. They were trained to come into line quickly, irrespective of inverted order. Much time and patience were required to teach them artillery practice; but ultimately they became expert in that also.” As for equipment, Ward continued to work through his agents in Shanghai to procure the best available arms, and by summer’s end he was receiving regular shipments of not only English muskets but Prussian rifles and even Britain’s latest Enfields, rifles whose rate of fire and accuracy were currently being admired (and demonstrated) in every part of Victoria’s empire.
Using English commands and bugle calls as well as Western weapons were all ways to demonstrate to the men of the corps (as well as to Chinese and Western onlookers) that the unit was to be very different from any other imperial army. But no training program or type of armament aroused as much comment among observers as did the corps’s decidedly non-Chinese uniforms. Ward himself paid particular attention to this detail, by some accounts designing the costumes himself. Boots and leggings were in the European mode, as were the tunics: Ward’s infantry wore light green and his artillerymen light blue. Ward also retained a number of Manilamen, estimated in most accounts at two hundred, as a personal bodyguard, and these were given similarly Western uniforms of deep navy. (According to some writers, Ward frequently addressed this unit in Spanish, further tightening the bond that had first been formed when he found Vincente Macanaya roaming the Shanghai waterfront in the summer of 1860.) As headgear, the entire corps wore deep green turbans, not unlike those of British Sepoy troops in India.
This distinctive attire initially inspired hearty derision among th
e people of Kiangsu. The men of Ward’s corps were branded “imitation foreign devils” by peasants who were used to brightly colored and frequently impractical dress being a particular point of pride with Chinese soldiers. Embarrassed by the taunts of their countrymen and occasionally bewildered by the maneuvers they were relentlessly ordered to repeat, some of the Chinese soldiers gave voice to questions and doubts: Although the men did drill well, as both Schmidt and Macgowan recorded, the English journalist Andrew Wilson reported that “their great fault” was that of “talking in the ranks.” Without having yet experienced the battlefield advantages of Ward’s techniques, many recruits remained hard-pressed to comprehend the value of being not only dressed but, in Wilson’s words, “drilled and disciplined by Foreign Devils in a manner totally different from that to which they had become accustomed.… It was not until these troops became ‘victorious’ that their appearance was any sense of pleasure to them; but after a time they became proud of the ‘imitation foreign devil’ uniform, and would have objected to change it for a native dress.”
It was not pride but money that secured the loyalty of Ward’s recruits early on, and here Ward’s relationship to Wu Hsü and Yang Fang was once again crucial. Having personally observed the training activities of the corps, Wu later noted with some awe that “every eighty soldiers carrying artillery or rifles formed a platoon, which were led by one foreign commander in the front and guarded by another one at the end; the lead soldiers carried flags and drums; following their commanders’ instructions, the soldiers moved or halted, sped up or slowed down, marching systematically like fish scales or comb teeth.” Bureaucratic form was given to Wu’s enthusiasm with the creation of an official agency in Sung-chiang whose sole purpose was to facilitate the training of Chinese recruits in the Western ways of war. But Wu continued to shroud the activities of the corps cautiously: As late as November 1861, the taotai told Governor Hsüeh Huan that Ward’s “barbarian braves” (a phrase that downplayed the role of Chinese recruits) numbered no more than 420 men, although Ward by that point had at least twice that many in an adequate state of readiness. Wu said that these troops were commanded by Ward and eight “deputy chiefs,” but he was careful never to mention Burgevine, Forester, or any of the other well-known figures who were working the drilling grounds at Sung-chiang.