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 gingal
s 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.
The only real blunder Ward had made to this point—his assault on Ch’ing-p’u in August 1860—had been a result of wounded pride. So, too, was the second mistake of his career: attacking Lung-chu-an on April 4, 1862, without waiting for artillery support. Edward Forester—in a puzzling moment of humility that suggests more a desire to portray himself as the driving force behind the Ever Victorious Army’s field operations, mistaken and otherwise, than it does genuine honesty—later wrote that he was responsible for the hurried assault against the rebel stockades. But once again his claims are uncorroborated and unsupportable. Much more plausible is Augustus Lindley’s description of the attack, as seen from the Taiping side:
Drawing his mercenary sword, and brushing back the Yankee locks, General Ward gave the word to assault in a tone of assured victory. The disciplined Chinamen, led by their foreign officers, rushed forward bravely enough; but the Taipings had not been half destroyed by shot and shell; neither at that time had they lost their best troops in conflict with the British and French.… Consequently, after three attempts to storm the stockade, when five officers and seventy men [of the Ever Victorious Army] were placed hors de combat, Admiral Hope advanced to call off the men, and was rewarded with a Taiping bullet lodged in the calf of his leg. Ward, having none of the resistless artillery to mow down the patriotic Taipings, found them more than a match for his men—disciplined, led by foreigners, and well armed as they were. A retreat was therefore sounded, and the British Admiral was ignominiously carried away upon a litter borne by sundry cursing Celestials [imperialists].
In assaulting Lung-chu-an, Ward had rashly thrown his fifteen hundred men, unsupported by artillery, against some eight thousand Taipings who fought behind the safety of strong entrenchments. The odds against success were too astronomical even for Ward. Returning to Chi-pao with the wounded Admiral Hope—who, according to Forester, waited in line for six hours behind other, more seriously wounded men before having his leg treated, by which time the admiral’s boot was “filled to overflowing with blood”—Ward joined the other Allied commanders in planning a more considered and coordinated assault on Lung-chu-an. General Staveley, predictably, declined to dispatch his army troops on this latest adventure; rather he agreed, with apparent point, to hold Chi-pao “in case of a reverse,” as the Herald correspondent put it. Admiral Hope was forced by the wound in his leg to remain in Chi-pao, and the British naval units were placed under the command of Captain Borlase. Admiral Protet agreed to participate, as did Tardif de Moidrey, and at 7:00 A.M. on April 5 this force set out for Lung-chu-an.
During the night the Taipings had reinforced their stockades. Ward’s men were sent out toward these strengthened positions in skirmishing order, while the British and French contingents took up positions behind their guns, which were about three hundred yards from the Taiping fortifications. As the artillery opened fire, Ward’s men began to move in a large semicircle toward the rebels, under cover of various graves and burial mounds outside the town. Without risking or losing a man, the French and British continued to hammer away at Lung-chu-an, and very quickly Ward was in position to lead the final assault, which was observed by the Herald correspondent: “Ward’s men pushed on beautifully and in excellent order from cover to cover; while the rebels, notwithstanding the heavy pounding of the artillery, kept up a brisk fire upon them, by which five men were killed and two officers with seven men wounded. Having stolen up to within a hundred yards, Ward’s men made a most gallant rush—cheering in the English manner—causing the rebels to abandon their outworks.” According to Captain Borlase, the rebels, seeing that Ward’s men were quickly moving around to cut off their retreat, “immediately decamped.” And, with that, the chase was on.
After setting fire to the seven interlocking stockades of Lung-chu-an, the men of the Ever Victorious Army, along with the French and British contingents, herded the rebels into and out of other nearby encampments, driving them ever farther from their larger bases. By afternoon the Allied expeditionary force was back in Chi-pao, having completed what the Herald termed “the strongest and most successful attack by foreigners upon the Taiping rebels near Shanghai which has yet occurred.” There were apparent lessons to be drawn from the day, and Ward, upon returning to Sung-chiang, quickly set about absorbing them.
Clearly, the Taipings’ new strategy of firmly consolidating their positions before advancing meant that assault troops such as the Ever Victorious Army would more than ever require strong artillery support. The Herald may have overstated the case when it declared that “with a powerful artillery force every rebel post in the province might be taken with ease,” but the essential point was correct. Ward had demonstrated that his disciplined infantry battalions were the equal of any foot soldiers to be found in China; mobile and daring, they represented a true flying column. But if the Ever Victorious Army was to be able to stand on its own merits at all times and in all situations, Ward would have to be sure that he could bring not only his infantry but the artillery units he was training at Sung-chiang, as well as his small but growing flotilla of armed steamers, to bear on any battle in the province. By relying on Western guns he was doing more than giving Allied artillery a role in the fighting; he was making the Western forces indispensable to success.
This point was again driven home on April 17, when Ward took four hundred of his men and joined an Anglo-French assault on Chou-p’u, the Taipings’ strongest position on the Pootung peninsula (the body of land lying between the Huang-pu River and the sea). General Staveley brought elements of the same three British infantry regiments—the Twenty-second Punjab, the Fifth Bombay and the Ninety-ninth—while Admiral Protet headed a contingent of four hundred French sailors and marines. Admiral Hope was still recovering from his leg wound, and command of the British naval detachments again devolved on Captain Borlase. In all some two thousand Allied troops supported by a dozen guns took part in the action, which followed the same pattern as the successful assault on Lung-chu-an: The men were ferried in British gunboats, and, on arriving before the interlocking stockades of Chou-p’u, Ward’s troops spread out as skirmishers and storming parties, while the Allied troops remained behind the safety of their guns.
At two in the afternoon, according to Captain Borlase, the guns opened “a most destructive fire,” under cover of which Ward’s men moved into position to intercept the Taipings when they evacuated the town, it being by now assumed that the rebels would not hold up under the concentrated fire of the
British and French naval guns, Tardif de Moidrey’s howitzers, and Staveley’s Armstrongs. Sure enough, within half an hour the four to five thousand Taiping defenders had begun to flee, and many were shot down as they did: Borlase put the enemy dead at three hundred, but Augustus Lindley claimed that no fewer than six hundred lost their lives. Ward’s men fought their way through ditches spiked with bamboo and stormed the inner fortifications, and within hours the action was over. It was a particularly satisfying day for the attacking soldiers, because Chou-p’u was found to be full of Taiping loot. The Shanghai Daily Shipping List stated that
[a]s the houses were ransacked, great quantities of valuable jewels, gold, silver, dollars, and costly dresses were found, which was fair loot to the officers and men.… It was a glorious day of looting for everybody, and we hear that one party, who discovered the Taiping treasury chest with several thousand dollars in it, after loading himself to his heart’s content, was obliged to give some of them away to lighten his pockets, which were heavier than he could well bear—a marked case of l’embarras des richesses.
Matters of loot aside, the need for Ward to develop a more mobile and impressive artillery arm was apparent, and in the weeks to come it was this branch of service that received his special attention. Having experienced many times the difficulty of moving land guns through the Kiangsu countryside, Ward placed steadily greater emphasis on expanding his fleet of steamers and beefing up their armaments. He already had at his disposal the Cricket and the Zingari, and in late April or early May he either chartered or bought three more vessels, the Rose, the Pao-shun, and the steamer whose name would come to be most closely associated with the operations of the Ever Victorious Army, the Hyson. The British journalist Andrew Wilson described the Hyson as “a small iron paddle-steamer, of about ninety feet long and twenty-four feet wide, drawing three to four feet of water, and carrying one 32-pounder on a moving platform at her bow, while at her stern there was a 12-pounder howitzer. A loopholed protection of planking ran round the bulwarks to a height of six feet, and the steam-chests were protected by a timber traverse. She averaged eight knots per hour.”