Page images
PDF
EPUB

THE OCCUPATION OF PEKING BY THE ALLIES AFTER THE SIEGE OF THE LEGATIONS IN 1900

THE cup of the iniquity of the Boxers was full, and the blood of the murdered foreigners cried out for vengeance. All through the sweltering heat of the long summer the Boxers had run riot over the whole of the North of China. They had gloated over the sight of the foreign refugees fleeing before them, half-naked and bleeding. They had tortured them with a refinement of cruelty and done them to death, even the inhumanly barbarous ling ch'ih, or "death by a thousand cuts."

The cauldron of the Far East had boiled over and the scum had come to the top. The typical Boxer was possessed of great physical strength combined with brutal stolidity of temperament. Robore corporis stolide ferox-to borrow a Tacitean expression-he was utterly incapable of any chivalrous instinct.

The truculent Yü-Hsien, the Governor of Shansi, had summoned all the Europeans in his capital to his Yamen, including two Roman Catholic bishops, and had then and there caused them all-men, women and children-to be beheaded in his presence. Mission stations were burned and women outraged. The very name of the white races, foreign devils," as they were opprobriously called, had been held up to contempt and had become a byword throughout half a dozen provinces of the Celestial Empire.

[ocr errors]

Where, as in Peking and Tientsin, the relative strength of the foreigners had enabled them to defend themselves, they had been subjected to a prolonged siege, harassed by hordes of Boxers and assailed by legions of Chinese soldiers. Now at last a formidable expeditionary force had, not without heavy conflicts, forced its way through to the capital, relieved the Legations and held the enemy in a strangle-hold. The Court had fled and the Chinese Government was suspended and the foreign armies had the metropolis at their mercy.

The immediate objective of the relief column had been attained in the raising of the siege of the Legations, where in utter violation of the sacred law of nations the Ministers

* "The Defence of the Peking Legations, 1900-a Retrospect," in the May number of the National Review.

accredited to the Court of Peking had been subjected to a close investment for over two months, and where a Minister had been murdered in cold blood by a Chinese soldier on his way to the Foreign Office in his official green chair borne by chair-bearers wearing the livery of the Legation.

And now the Allies had a further task to perform, to inflict such condign punishment on the authors of these crimes that never more should it be possible for the like to be committed within the bounds of the Chinese realm, to re-establish the prestige of the foreigner, which had reached its nadir during these stormy months, and after dealing with the prime originators of these bloody deeds to temper justice with mercy and allow the innocent to return to their homes and to foster the resumption of a normal life and build up again the commerce of a devastated capital.

The actual occupation of the capital was not effected without a struggle. Machine-guns were brought to bear down the principal avenues of the city, which is laid out on a geometrical plan favourable to such a method of domination, the city walls forming an admirable vantage-ground for the emplacements, and the Chinese suffered heavy losses.

On the day following the relief of the Legations a Japanese and French force relieved the Pei-Tang, the Roman Catholic Mission in the heart of Peking, where the bishop, Monseigneur Favier, the priests of the Mission and twenty sisters had been besieged together with some three thousand Chinese converts. In this heroic defence forty French and ten Italian Marines had taken part. An irregular force of five hundred spearmen had been raised from among the converts. The cathedral had been battered by shell-fire almost out of recognition, and large areas of the defences had been blown up by mines.

The same day I was present on the wall of the Tartar City when a battery of American guns was mounted on it at the Ch'ien Gate and started shelling the Forbidden City. While this shelling was in progress, the officer commanding the battery fell mortally wounded. An advance was subsesequently made by the American troops against the Imperial City from the south. Two gates were carried by storm in the face of heavy fire on the part of Tung Fu Hsiang's soldiers, who here made a final stand. Their general had already fled.

The enemy, brought to bay, fought with much tenacity, and the Americans had many casualties in rushing the courtyards as each gate was captured.

The Chinese soldiers made use on this occasion of the

distinctively Oriental weapon, the gingal. This consists of a ponderous breach-loading stock to which is attached a barrel some seven feet long. None but a Titan could bring up to the shoulder and fire this gigantic rifle-shaped fire-arm. The missile discharged is of iron, and the bore is of about two inches diameter. These cumbrous weapons take three mere mortal men to man them, and are sufficiently formidable at close range.

At this period the Chinese army afforded many anomalies. The obsolete medieval engines of warfare were gradually being discarded in favour of modern weapons of precision. But army reform was as yet in its infancy, and there were still many strange survivals of the old inefficient military machine.

The armament of the Ch'ien Gate was an illustration of this. Massive gate-towers dominated the quadrangle between the gates, looming high above the city wall of medieval antiquity. The walls of these towers were pierced by rows of embrasures, tier upon tier, and at each embrasure appeared what looked in the distance like the muzzle of a gun. In point of fact there were a few rusty old muzzle-loading guns here and there in the lowest tier of embrasures. All the remaining emplacements had been adorned with the "counterfeit presentment" of a gun to strike terror into the heart of the enemy.

The use of the bow and arrow still survived. Outside the walls of Peking are long, arid, sandy stretches admirable for equestrian exercises. Here could be seen in the days before the siege the Manchu horseman displaying his prowess in archery. He would gallop past a target discharging one arrow before he was up to it, another when he was level with it, and a third Parthian shot as he swept past in his wild career. I have already recorded the use of fire-bearing arrows during the siege. Another form of frightfulness was the whistling arrow. This arrow had a hollow head with air-holes, and made a sibilant sound as it whizzed through the air.

It is a fact, too, that there still survived in the Chinese army a corps of men known as "Brandishers." The rôle assigned to these stout fellows in an engagement was to envelop their heads in a head-dress on which were portrayed the features of a fierce tiger. Thus attired, they preceded the advancing forces as skirmishers, and by their fantastic capers were believed to turn the heart of the stoutest foe to water.

A fan and an umbrella formed part of the Chinese soldier's

kit. He coiled his pigtail round his head on the line of march and inserted his fan in the coils. The umbrella was slung across the shoulders.

But times were changing, and at the period of which I write China had also well-equipped and efficient foreigndrilled troops. The pick of these were under the command of the enlightened Yuan Shih Kai, the Governor of Shantung province. This able general and administrator refrained from participating in the operations against the European Powers and kept his army within the confines of his own province. These soldiers were trained on the German model. Other foreign-drilled troops, commanded by General Nieh, took an active part in the hostilities against the Allies.

Quite apart from the foreign-drilled armies, the rank and file of the regular units of the Imperial forces, both Chinese and Manchu, were recruited from men of good physique, not lacking in soldierly qualities. They were armed with modern rifles and had a plentiful supply of ammunition.

Such was the character of the troops arrayed against us, whose powers of resistance, already much shaken by the entrance of the foreign forces into the capital, had now to be finally broken.

Meanwhile, confused fighting was in progress in different parts of the city, and the flags of the Allies were gradually seen to be floating on all the prominent strategic positions, including the Mei Shan, or Coal Hill, the highest eminence in Peking, and the Pei Ta Shan, a hill crowned by a remarkable cone-shaped monument, within which a Buddha was said to be enshrined. The defeat of the Boxers and the Imperial troops fighting in sympathy with them soon developed into a rout.

Guards were now set at the four gates of the Forbidden City which faced the four points of the compass, the task of guarding these gates falling to the British, French, Russians and Japanese. As yet no foreigner had set foot within the Forbidden City, and by mutual consent the Allies still refrained from this consummation of their victory.

Arsenals were discovered in all parts of the city, stocked with hundreds of thousands of rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition, and for days after the relief columns of thick smoke could be seen sullying the blue sky as the Allies fired some fresh magazine.

Though the power of the Boxers was shattered and the Imperial troops were fast disbanding themselves, casting away their rifles and uniforms, there was still sporadic firing at various points throughout the city, and snipers

lurking under cover shot our soldiers whenever a chance offered.

To put an end to this state of affairs, it was decided to inflict upon the Chinese the final humiliation of a triumphal entry into the Forbidden City. This took place on August 28th, just a fortnight after the relief of the Legations. Representative detachments of all the Allies marched through the Forbidden City on this occasion.

A few Chinese officials-a crestfallen little group-were present to admit the Allies into the precincts of this Chinese "Holiest of Holies." One wonders, were they haunted in this hour of their degradation by visions of the past glories of the mighty ancient city of Cambaluc? Did they reflect how the Great Mongol, Kublai Khan, transferred his capital to Cambaluc, the modern Peking; how he thus became the first Chinese Emperor of Mongolian descent; and how he built the Tartar City and its palaces on the broad, bold outlines, the main features of which survive to this day?

The entire Diplomatic Corps attended this ceremony. As each detachment marched through the Central Courtyard, the band played the appropriate national anthem, and the whole setting of the scene was imposing and in harmony with the historic character of the occasion.

The golden-roofed Forbidden City stands four-square within the yellow-tiled Imperial City, like a topaz set in gold. After the troops had marched through, I was one of the party of Ministers, generals and other officers, who with the mandarins acting as guides, set out to inspect the interior of the Imperial Palaces. The courtyard in which the march-past of the troops before the Russian general, the senior military officer, took place was the Yü Hua Yuan, or Imperial Flower Court. Starting from this point, we made a tour of a succession of halls with glazed yellow tiles glistening in the sunshine. The dominant note in the colouring of the walls of the buildings was red, the colour appropriate to the Son of Heaven. The most imposing of the halls was the Tai Ho Tien, the Audience Chamber, where the Emperor received Imperial princes and special envoys. The approach to the hall was screened by beautiful marble balustrades in three tiers, ornamented with dragons carved in relief. What scenes of Oriental splendour this hall had witnessed in the palmy days of the Empire, when tribute was humbly proffered by envoys from States situated in remote regions far beyond the confines of China, in the days when scarce a dog might bark in the whole of Asia-ay, or in Europe either-without the permission of the Great Khan!

« PreviousContinue »