CHAPTER VIII

THE BURNING OF HANKOW

Have you ever seen a fire--a big fire? Have you ever stood watching a wide prairie fire and seen the flames dance and leap upwards, downwards, wriggle in and out, and menacingly approach you? If you have, you will in some measure be able to follow me. Can you imagine in that great dancing prairie fire that you have seen thousands of housetops, minarets, temple spires, roofs of all heights, sizes, and shapes--can you? Can you imagine those wild flames, fanned strongly to one side, and see that mighty belt of flame galloping furiously onward, then drawing back, then galloping on again and gaining ground, then settling finally down as if it had its luckless enemy in its most deadly grasp, slowly to torture it and cruelly to draw from it its last gasp of life? Can you see that sea-like, billowy mass of curling smoke, too thick to be driven by the strong north wind, but just thick enough slowly to move and to give way now and again to that enormous force of white-hot, crackling fire that sends up its deep red flame in anger to the heavens? And can you see beyond you through that dense smoke more roofs and spires and curving Chinese architecture, seeming to dodge up and down, in and out, like a full disordered regiment of cavalry in awful flight; on and on they seem to go, yet to get no farther? Terrific is their endeavour, but futile. They gallop never faster, in and out, up and down, and at last, {82} giving up all hope, are compelled hopelessly to settle down in the smoke and are lost to sight for ever.

But those roofs are not cavalry; they are not men. The men and terrified women, and the tiny helpless children, the old fathers and the mothers, the invalids, the incapacitated, the blind, the halt, and the maimed had left the city a couple of days before, and now were around the countryside, rich and poor alike being turned out of house and home. Those who doubted, however, or were indifferent were mixed up in the flaming street, helpless, hopeless, waiting for their inevitable doom in that great fire, the great fire of Hankow, the devoted central market of the Chinese world, now lost in doom in the Chinese war.

No one will ever tell precisely what happened during the firing of the city. Europeans gathered on their housetops in the Concessions to watch and to feel their hearts torn with pity. One gazed abstractedly into a boiling cauldron, and expected that behind the lurid flame thousands were pitifully exchanging their sad farewells ere they settled down to die. There seemed to be no escape for the poor people other than in the grave; all effort seemed to be void of hope. As one watched he seemed to feel that underneath those roofs the saddest scenes possible to enact in history were being recorded with sad, sad tears. He seemed to feel that they were huddled round, those men and women, those little children, those invalids, those blind, those poor people who were about to die like rats in their holes. And there crept into one's soul an infinite pathos.

But I ask again, Can _you_ imagine all this? And imagining, think you that you could describe? I watch, and watch. The flames seem to draw me into their fiery bosom as the phosphorus does in the sea. I can see it all, spreading away madly to the right, to the left, then again meeting in the centre. It tears cruelly along does this great belt of jagged flame, and soon will {83} meet its fellow. They seem to be racing, each section of that horrid fire appearing to be vieing with that other section in killing and burning, in slow death, many peaceable people who were unable to flee. On it goes again, and upwards, downwards, in, out, back, forth; sometimes it comes to a greater mass, which yields less readily, and there it sits, like some great bird of prey, until its conquest is at hand, and then goes forward again with a furious glee. I have asked you whether, imagining this, you could describe it. Here am I, seated on a lofty rooftop, and see it. It is here, in all its horrible reality, happening before my eyes as I write, making the history of our time, and it is my business to describe it; that is why I am here. And yet my pen falls helplessly. It baffles description. The phraseology will not come. The words stick, the pen remains unmoved; I cannot describe it. By far the worst thing I have ever known is this savage razing of a great city to become a city of the dead and a place of weeping.

But one thinks as one sees, far away in one corner of that deep, dense, disordered flaming mass, one small, straight line of smoke going up to the heavens, that that is the fitting sacrifice to the hand of Destiny henceforth to guide this downtrodden people into happier channels. That, however, will come with the years; now the fire is with us. In our own way, we who watched the war had talked about the burning of the city. After all, it is nothing much to burn a city of five hundred thousand souls to the ground. In China one walled city is hardly to be reckoned; and what, pray you, is it for five hundred thousand human beings among four hundred and thirty millions to be without home or shelter? When China burns, when she kills, when she does anything that people who call themselves civilised shrink from dreaming of, she shows the world that she is the past mistress in all things that we call savage. It is, to us, an act of cruellest {84} savagery. To us it is a sin against God and man wilfully to burn a city to the ground, wantonly to destroy hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of accumulated wealth; to us it is all a crime unthinkable. To China it is a good thing that by such acts of so-called savagery, of realest barbarism, of grossest, inhuman tactics the people, the common people, the hewers of national wood and the drawers of national water, are taught to know that they must keep their place, that the hand of the Government is strong, that the place in which Heaven has placed them must honourably be filled, and that towards Revolution they should have no leanings. To China the sweeping into eternity of thousands of fellow-mortals is for the benefit of those who remain, and the destruction of property in their national hysteria matters not a moment of passing thought. So to those of us who know China, and who cannot believe that all that we see and hear is true of the bewildering reform that is alleged to have caught the country and its people into its arms, it was not a great surprise to see the Imperialists carrying out their threat to burn the city to ashes. And it is fortunate that scores of thousands of people, who knew the national spirit and who expected the horrors of former rebellions to be repeated, packed up what little belongings they could and cleared out of gunshot by either land or water.

Throughout the long day the fire burned away, making a sight as wonderful as it was ghastly. From the fateful city the frightened people who had remained behind came in droves; or, at any rate, they made the attempt, only to be shot down by the soldiers who were waiting for them. If no satisfactory explanation was forthcoming from those terrified people, they were unmercifully bayoneted or shot dead. The streets were guarded by Imperialists, who seemed bent on having blood, and who, with frightful glee, carried out their mission with impunity. It is, perhaps, {85} needless to say more. It was a sight that Nero might have enjoyed, but to any one with any humanity left him, even to those people one occasionally meets in China who have no sympathies for the Chinese, and think that they should not be helped religiously or socially, but should be left to go on their ill-appointed way, the sight must have caused the greatest pain. People would come to the exits of the city hoping to find refuge on the Foreign Concessions; they had dropped on the way the little gear they could at the outset carry, and now they were hopeful, at all events, of saving their lives, and sought to come through the gates. But no, even this was denied them. Back they had to go, probably to their doom. The British bluejackets stationed at these exits told me that their hearts bled for the pitiful people, but their instructions were that none should come out. One of the greatest menaces confronting the British authorities was the looting which threatened the burning city. One road only separated the city from the British Concession, and when the people began to flee the looters were in an Eldorado. The scoundrels would come out with furs, silks, silver ware, and every sort and condition of valuable, deposit it in the Concessions, and go back for more, until it became necessary to prevent Chinese from coming on the Concessions. After a time, however, this rule was modified, and volunteers who could speak the language were stationed there to inquire the mission of those who were fleeing; but hundreds must have run from gate to gate, like rats in their holes, knowing that each moment the fire was encroaching ominously. At night the sight was watched by hundreds. Truly heartbreaking was it to look on one of the finest cities on the Yangtze being razed to the ground. When the darkness came on the wide expanse of red flame lit up the country for miles around. At the London Mission Hospital, adjoining the Concessions, there was a scare for fear that {86} the place would catch, for the wind veered slightly. All the patients were routed from their beds and carried to other places of refuge. Europeans and natives formed one large mutual band in carrying away the valuables. The sights we saw we shall never forget. The pitiable condition of the people, the indignation of the multitudes, who swore vengeance against the Government, and much more that one cannot hurriedly think of or relate, will live long in our memories.

At the time of the fire's outbreak it was thought that thousands must have perished in that modern Sodom and Gomorra. The Imperialists were mad for the lusts of war. A day or two previous Yuan Shih K'ai had offered a large reward for the recapture of Hankow, and the men were hot for the spoils. Their dead, truckloads piled up irreverently, were all deposited in the flames, and over the Concessions on the second day of the fire came the rank smell of smouldering human flesh. During those days Europeans witnessed a hell from their rooftops. At the back of the British Concession, at the back of the French, and at the back of the German were batteries; the Imperialists were winning their way over towards the Han River, their goal, and from their batteries an incessant shelling was vigorously kept up.

No one would forget those days. But lest they should, as it seemed, the big guns from Tachimen kept hard at it, planking shells into the city of Hanyang and anywhere else where soldiers were likely to lay ambushed. The guns boomed away for an hour, and then there came again dead silence, disturbed only by those who were still rescuing the wounded and the helpless. But the calm lasted not for long. Soon from the corner of the city nearest the Foreign Concessions there came fresh wreaths of black smoke, showing that the deadly work had recommenced. Soon the flames leaped up again, the wind blew them farther inwards to the houses still standing, shells inconsequently {87} fell near by; there was the same pathos and the same panic--the city was on fire again. And so it continued for three days, and one could see all over again what he might imagine in that prairie fire.

The wrath of Hades seemed to be upon the people. All around the countryside they were scared--and well they might have been, for in their fury the Imperialists burned everything as they went along. In the midst of the huge conflagration, a general invitation was sent out to foreigners to go into the city by way of the Maloo--the big road skirting the city--to bring out eighty blind boys and the wounded from the Wesleyan Mission Hospital. First impressions were that the hospital and school and all that the Mission possessed had been gutted. "We have £10,000 in the Mission," I overheard one of the missionaries say, "but that's not so important as my blind boys." Meantime permission by the Red Cross authorities had been secured for the rescue party to go into the city. Each man as he volunteered knew he went at great personal risk. Fighting was still heavy, but every moment made a difference--and who knew but that those blind boys were being burnt alive? By dark they had, however, been rescued--only those who went knew at what cost.

On November 3rd a significant lull took place.

These lulls are dangerous forerunners of evil in China.

The Imperialists had captured Hankow, and were known to be ready to forge ahead towards Hanyang, the great stronghold of the Revolutionists--a city almost impregnable in itself, with a high hill sheltering the town behind, and reached only after fording a rapid river some hundred yards wide at the narrowest. To the north-west a range of hills literally bristled with Revolutionary big guns; the Hanyang Hill itself was practically one shell-proof cover, and noses of guns of all sizes pointed in every direction. At Wuchang all {88} the hills were fortified, and along the river-front big guns were lined for many miles above and below the town. But in the actual fighting, as has been said, there came a lull. That it was a dangerous lull and that it came before the storm was firmly believed. No one better than the Chinese can wait--they are all past-masters in the art of dilly-dallying--and it was believed that a few days would see either the end of the war and the establishment of a new rule under Yuan's dictatorship or the re-establishment of Imperial rule with some modifications, or there would come about a state of affairs infinitely worse than anything yet seen.

With the Revolutionists repeatedly beaten back, although at considerable loss to the Imperialists, with two-thirds of Hankow city nothing but a heap of black, charred ruins, with thousands and tens of thousands of people wandering with no home and no food, with women maltreated and ravished, with looting and massacring proceeding at a devilish pace, the casual onlooker would have concluded that the Revolutionists had had enough. They had seen that the Imperial hand in dealing with them was inclined to come down with extreme force, and if need be, to crush and totally annihilate them--if it could. But, strangely, the Revolutionists, despite their sad plight, with most of their best men killed or wounded, and a haphazard army only at the command of the new leader, were still more enthusiastic.

Probably the most remarkable feature of the whole Revolution in the immediate centre of the three cities around which the active operations were concentrated was the behaviour of the Revolutionary troops. This to the Westerner who has never been to China may not be deemed as important. But the student of Chinese affairs and the readers of Chinese history will be aware that in past revolts in this country the soldiery, such as it had been, had not startled the world with their clean conduct at any period. The reverse had been {89} the case. Previous rebellions had been made famous for the amount of looting, stealing, ravishing, and general lawlessness that had prevailed. But in the Revolution which was led by General Li there was none of this. Throughout, the magnificent manner in which the troops, both trained and untrained, had behaved was a credit to every one concerned in the revolt.

The following edict, one of several published during the first days, will go to show the spirit of the leaders:--

"Li, commander-in-chief of the Chinese People's Army, by authority of the military Government, a special proclamation:

"By the command of the army administration, I desire you the people of my country to know that wherever our patriotic troops come you need have no occasion for the least suspicion or anxiety. I come to save you and with no idea of acquiring merit or personal profit, but to pull you out of fire and water, and to cure you of your cankering maladies. Hitherto you have been bitterly oppressed and drowned in a sea of misery through being under the government of an alien race who treat you as bastards and not as children. You must know that the present day Manchu slaves do not belong to the family of Han, and we, being animated by heaven-high patriotism, will not spare them their well-deserved retribution. On this account I could not but raise our patriotic flag in order to give you deliverance by causing all the people to unite their strength and drive them out, together with the traitorous Chinese robbers whom I will not permit to continue long. These robbers have hitherto eaten our flesh and now we will sleep in their skins. Whoever is animated by patriotic sentiments let him quickly come and join our ranks, and together gain the glory of delivering the country. The day of the revival of the Han people is arrived with the establishment of the Chinese republic with which you my brethren will have no cause to be ashamed. Scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants, let all unite their efforts with ours to drive out the Manchu barbarians. Wherever our army goes it will be under perfect control and troops and people will be treated alike without the least partiality to either. I desire you my beloved uterine brothers every one to respectfully listen to my exhortation.

"Dated the 18th day of the first year of Hwang Ti, being the 4609th year of China."

The other side of the question was eloquently put {90} in an Imperial edict, published about the same time, and which reads:--

"For over a month the various provinces have been greatly disturbed. The causes for this have not been all alike, and it is necessary to discriminate in again proclaiming Our intentions to the Empire. Those who are in favour of reforming the Government by revolutionary methods have been making impossible demands upon the Throne, yet We recognise that they have been called forth by a patriotic love for their country and are sincere; and also that the country is thrown into confusion and distress because We have failed to make progress in Governmental reform. We have repeatedly proclaimed that a reformed and Constitutional Government shall be established, and We have granted an amnesty to all who formally have been guilty of political crimes, also allowing Revolutionists to form themselves into a political party to be used in the service of the State. But with regard to those Revolutionists, who ferment race hatred, who desire to create a feeling of enmity between the Manchus and the Chinese, they are not working for the reformation of the Government, but are simply dealing out ruin all round in order to gratify their private hate, and for this there is no justification. We are labouring for the prosperity of the kingdom and the happiness of the people, and We cannot make the Government a constitutional one till the Empire is at peace. If these men are allowed to excite the people with their mischievous speeches and pernicious ideas the disturbances will increase, the people will be scattered and miserably perish. When the four classes of the people lose their occupation, the whole country is thrown into confusion. There will be no end to the calamities. We would, therefore, earnestly and sincerely impress upon you scholars, gentry, army and people, the necessity of understanding the principle of reforming the Government and repressing disturbances. The Throne loves and respects the people, and wishes them to seek after improvement, but as for those who act in opposition to this and keep on creating disturbances, they are the enemies of the public and a danger to all. Although they are but a minority, My people ought to put them down with a strong hand, yet if they will repent their former crimes, they should be pardoned and their past offences not brought up against them. But bad characters, who seize the opportunity to burn, kill, rape and plunder, cannot be allowed to escape by any law of reason. They must be rooted out and hunted down with all speed till they are utterly exterminated in order that the good and peaceful people may be protected. Therefore, let the Tartar Generals, commanders-in-chief, viceroys, governors and all who are in military authority respect my will and, discriminating between {91} the political parties put down the irreconcilables. The Army and the people will understand this intention, and let all above and below with one mind labour for improvement. Then will the country be fortunate and the people enjoy felicity without limit.

"Let this Edict, together with the Edict of the 14th [Nov. 4th] be printed on yellow paper and posted, so that all may be informed. Respect this."

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