Chapter 4

He was just a common or garden ordinary sort of chap. He was lying on hot, pointed, uncomfortable stones through which long tufts of coarse grass protruded. Drops of sweat were trickling down his face, and his hands left wet marks where they came into contact with the stock or barrel of his rifle. With elbows, with chest, with stomach, with legs, he was trying to press hard against the ground. It is a curious feeling, that lying down and trying to press against the ground. He wished to reduce himself to the substance of a postage-stamp. This was the day of his first fight, but since he had got up everything was unaccountably unlike his expectation. The reveille had sounded in the dark at three o'clock in the morning. It was bitterly cold outside the tents, and his hands trembled as he fumbled with his putties. He had had a hard struggle to turn out from under that warm rug where he had been dreaming the real soldier's dream. Detaille's picture is all rot--the soldier's dream is not the picture of victorious battalions with banners flying, marching through the clouds. He had been dreaming of tripe and onions. Visions of past good meals in comfortable quarters washed down with deep cooling draughts of bitter floated in procession through sizzling clouds of vapour smelling of invisible kitchens. As he fumbled with his putties the rumble of waggons came out of darkness from a road hard by, mingled with the sharper rattle that tells of the gunners already on the move. The vague rumours of last night, he felt, were going to shape into the actuality of fight; but what an hour to go out fighting! Why should they be hauled out to fight in the dark? Why could not men wait for light? Wait until the world was aired? He was thirsty and uncomfortable, with the taste of stale tobacco in his mouth, and joined in the variegated imprecations muttered by the men when he found there would be only a few minutes to get anything to eat and no time for hot coffee. Presently he is a unit in a long snake-like column of men that winds along the road through the dark into the unknown. As he plods on he speculates how the fight will start. Perhaps the kopjes on either side of the road may be already full of Boers. Perhaps the beginning of the fight will be to find that they have marched into another ambush. It was a nasty uncomfortable feeling, that tramping through the darkness into the unknown. He felt better as the light spread from the eastern hills, and felt companionship and security in being part and parcel of that great mass of men that extended before and behind him on the road as far as he could see. Suddenly there is the boom of a gun, and he comes into collision with the man in front of him, who has stopped dead at the sound. A strange tingling feeling goes up his spine. There is a hush! No one speaks. The whole essence of vitality strains to listen. A faint whir crescendoes rapidly into the shrill whoop of a steam-siren, and a great balloon-shaped cloud of smoke and dust has already arisen from amidst the marching mass of men ahead. There is no sign whence came the shot. Nothing can be more peaceful-looking than the shoulders of these hills lying bathed in the quiet morning light. There is no sign of an enemy. Sharp words of command ring out while the cloud of smoke and dust is still hanging in the air, and in a dazed and mechanical way he finds himself deploying over the ground, which shakes with the gallop of cavalry as they spread out fan-like on either side of the road. The artillery rattle and jolt over the stones, and the limbers toss like little punts towed through a choppy sea. His company advances in extended order across the stony ground tufted with grass, and are ordered to lie down. The captain says, "Any men who have got anything to eat, let them eat it now." He has a piece of bread in his haversack, but feels no inclination to eat that dry and crumby stuff; but he is thirsty, and takes a long and deep pull at his water-bottle. The sun has already become very hot. The artillery has already got into action on the left, and is engaged in a duel with the Boer gunners. The minutes of waiting seem hours to him. Then all the men watch with keen interest an officer with a red-banded German cap galloping towards them. The result of his arrival is an order for them to advance up the gradual slope of this rounded hill. Just as he starts there is a light keen whistle in the air overhead like the call of a bird, then another and another. Instinctively he feels that these are made by bullets flying overhead. As he goes on an occasional one rings with a sharp bitterness in its tone, and he ducks his head as one might duck to the swish of a riding-whip near the face. They go with knees and backs bent, and he longs for the order to halt and lie down again. A fellow drops out alongside of him, but he does not look to see what has happened--he is afraid to look. Just when they have reached the crest of the hill, and when the whistling sounds have become more plentiful than ever, they are ordered to lie down again. Looking through the streaky stems of grass immediately in front of him, he can see a similarly shaped hill about 1200 yards away. It looks absolutely deserted. Nothing moves upon the skyline. Little puffs of smoke momentarily appear above it, which he knows are caused by the bursting of our shrapnel. He begins to feel he is really in the fight, but it is just altogether opposite to what he expects. It is commonplace and disappointing to a degree. He sees the gunners busy on the left, the horses standing behind them as if all the whistling sounds are only a rain-shower. There is a small stone in front of him, just half the size of his helmet. He knows it is not half big enough to cover him. All his preconceived ideas of a fight are crumbling away. Here they are being led out to lie on the grass to be potted at, and not allowed to reply. But then, as he looks at the opposite hill, he sees nothing to fire at. A group of red-capped officers walk their horses along the line left behind them. He recognises the General in command. They stop, and one of the General's aides-de-camp dismounts and opens a paper parcel, from which the General takes a sandwich and bites a big semicircular piece out of it. He finds it hard to realise that this is a battle and that this is the General commanding. In all pictures of battles that he has seen from his youth upwards the General is seated on a horse poised on two legs, and waving a sword or pointing with a marshal's bâton. And here is a General with a sandwich with a big bite out of it, who points with the sandwich-hand instead. And then he begins to wonder, with all this multitudinous whistling, that nobody seems to be hit. Then the order is given to advance again. He feels a tremendous disinclination to leave the stone, and waits to see the other men around him get up. They all get up except the fellow on his right. Reaching over with his rifle, he pokes him in the ribs. He then hits him on the shoulder with it. Thinking he is asleep, he tips off his helmet from behind. His eyes are quite open; and then, like a douche of cold water, comes the consciousness that this man is dead. A feeling to get away from that corpse more than any other brings him amongst his comrades a few yards in advance, who are already firing and lying flat. He keeps blazing away mechanically at the innocent-looking hill opposite. His rifle is hot in his moist hands. An order to "cease fire" is given, and then there is another long interval of waiting. The whole business seems waiting. It isn't a bit like a proper sort of fight. There is nobody to fight; but still the bird-like notes are in the air above, and bitter little sounds against stones, and tiny little fountains of dust spurt from the ground around. And then a great feeling comes to him that he would like to be out of it all. There is no glory in it. The sun is hotter than he ever felt it before. His water-bottle is finished, and his mouth is clammy. A young subaltern with an eye-glass, no end of a toff, walks along the front of the line, and he watches with interested delight microscopic ducklets of his head, synchronising with whistles. Just as the toff is opposite him, he spins round suddenly, exclaiming, "By Jove!" and falls down like a sack of potatoes all of a heap. He begins to feel a strange sickness in the stomach, just the same as coming out on the transport. He feels it coming on. He knows he is going to be sick, and as he is going to be sick he wants to go away. There is no use in a sick man remaining in the fighting line. But then he feels as if he were held down there by the weight of the whirring air. There is no room in it for him to get up safely. There is no room to go away. Momentarily the noises increase. Men are firing about him, and he strains his eyes on the opposite hill to see something to shoot at, and empties his magazine at what looks like a man but may be a tree-trunk, and then stops again and gets sick. Another long period of waiting follows. All the water is gone from his water-bottle; an intolerable thirst is scorching his throat. He does not reload his magazine, and makes up his mind to say that his rifle is jammed, so that he need not go further with any fresh stupid advance that may be ordered. This is no time to care about what any one may think of him, it is just too awful for anything.

The ground has ceased trembling with the cavalry, who have dashed to the front. There is no longer any whizzing in the air. The "cease fire" is already sounding right along the line. The man who was afraid stands up with his comrades, who are already on their legs. The old Colonel trots along the line, mopping his red face with his handkerchief. "That was a hot business," he says to his Captain, and calls cheerily to us, "Well done, C Company! You are damned steady boys under as hot fire as I have ever seen." The man who was afraid opens his shoulders and pulls out the collar of his tunic and stoops down to wipe off the cakes of dirty earth that are sticking to his knees.

VII

THE DANCE OF DEATH IN CHINA

"A wind of blight From the mysterious far North-west we came, Our greatness now their veriest babes have learned."

It was the day after Tung-Chow had been occupied by the Allies. I was riding along a sunken road between the city wall and some high ground on which houses were built. There was a sheer drop of considerable height between the walls of the houses and the stony road below. The shouts of Russians mingling with screams could be heard proceeding from the houses. At the base of the cliff two Chinese girls were lying. Their legs were bundled under them in a way that showed they had jumped from the height above. From their richly embroidered silken tunics and trousers, their elaborate coiffure, and their compressed feet, they were evidently ladies. They were moaning piteously, and one of them appeared to be on the point of death. Their legs or hips had apparently been broken, or dislocated, by their jump. As I went towards them, the one who appeared least injured shrank from me with an expression of loathing and horror until I offered her a drink out of my water-bottle. Her delicate, childish little hand trembled violently on mine as she drank eagerly from it. The other was almost too far gone to swallow. The hoarse cries of the soldiers, mingled occasionally with a sobbing scream, came from the houses above, telling what they had tried so desperately to escape from. They lay there helpless, evidently in excruciating pain, under a brazen sun that beat down on the deserted dusty road. There was no one within reach to come to their assistance. And there was nothing for it but to leave them there, as many under similar circumstances had had to be left during our previous march of several days. This scene was typical rather than singular. In a large number of Chinese houses in the villages we passed through on our way up, at Tung-Chow, and in Pekin itself, it was no unusual sight to see an entire family lying dead side by side on the Kang, where they had suffocated themselves, or to see them suspended from the rafters of their houses, where they had committed suicide by hanging.

In the burden of corpses which the river Pei-ho carried downwards from Pekin towards the sea were to be seen the bodies of many Chinese girls and women. One day I myself counted five. There is no question whatever that they had committed suicide. And close to Tung-Chow girls were actually seen walking into the shallow water and deliberately holding their heads under the surface till they were drowned. Such a tale seems very terrible. But to any one who had the opportunity of judging of the conduct of portions of the Allied troops it was not in the least surprising. Under similar circumstances our sisters and wives would have done likewise.

The Russians and French carried off the palm for outrages on women during the original march, and subsequently the Germans similarly distinguished themselves. This was more particularly the case with small bodies of men who were detached from the main force. In a village on the way to Paoting-fu, for instance, through which a body of Germans had just passed, three girls were taken by our troops out of a well, into which they had been thrown before the Germans left. They were still alive. This method of disposing of their victims was frequently adopted by the soldiers as the safest way of hiding their misdeeds and escaping the consequences.

News travels fast in China, and in advance of our march the people seemed to be thoroughly aware of the fate that probably awaited them. Although nearly the whole population cleared off before our advance, there were many, especially women, who could not get away, and who were unable to travel with their tiny compressed feet except in carts or on the backs of their servants. And it was principally these who finally, in the last extremity, committed suicide.

As the Chinese have agreed to erect a monument to Baron von Ketteler in Pekin in commemorative apology for his murder, it appears to me that there is an opportunity for the Allies to erect one also. It might be of pure white jade, which the Chinese women love, which in its translucent depths seems to hold the bright Eastern sunlight with the detaining lingerage of a caress, and might bear an inscription saying that it was erected in honour of the memory of the women and girls of the province of Pechili who had sacrificed their lives to save their honour.

All the way from the sea to Pekin, and for miles around Pekin itself, the whole country was deserted by the inhabitants. A wave of fear and horror preceded the advent of the Allies to such an extent that hundreds of miles of what was the most thickly populated part of China was absolutely deserted. After the relief of the Legations, the people who ventured timorously to return were inspired with fresh fear owing to the conduct of the Germans, who made up for being late for the original expedition by availing themselves of every possible opportunity of starting punitive expeditions on any possible pretence. Coming at the time of the autumn harvest, the actual loss of money to the inhabitants has been enormous.

From August to November a great tract of country was left deserted by the inhabitants, who should have been employed in gathering in the harvest. When I came down from Pekin in November there was no sign whatever of life across the plains on either side as far as the eye could reach. Thousands of acres of millet lay prone on the ground, and their carefully-tended vegetable gardens were scored with black lines, showing where the produce had rotted. When the Germans arrived in September I heard one of their officers saying to Major Scott, who was in charge of the river station at Tung-Chow, pointing to the fields of millet which surrounded the camp, "Why don't you burn down all these crops?" Major Scott replied that, besides not wanting to make life harder for these unfortunate farmers, they wanted the fodder for their own cattle. But, as a matter of fact, the destruction effected by the absence of the people was just as great as if the wish of that German had been carried out.

In all the discussions of the question of the amount of indemnity we never hear anything of the amount of counterclaim which the Chinese might rightfully make against us. The greater part of all this destruction was absolutely contrary to every rule of civilised warfare. In a district of about the extent of from London to Oxford the inhabitants have lost the entire produce of the harvest, all the villages and towns on either side of the river have been burned, so that on the march up our path at night was literally torch-lit with burning villages.

As was natural to expect, and as we have subsequently learned, many of the inhabitants have been forced by the absolute necessities of subsistence to band themselves together in companies of brigands, whose depredations afford a fresh excuse to the Germans for continuing hostile operations. The losses inflicted on the country in this way are entirely outside the irreparable losses which were inflicted by the destruction and despoiling of temples and innumerable works of art which it will be impossible to replace. As regards these last outrages, there was no officer in command of any section of the Allies who personally exerted himself to a greater degree for the preservation, or at least to prevent the destruction, of the art heirlooms of the country than did General Sir Alfred Gaselee.

Some curious things happened in his efforts in this direction. On the Paoting-fu expedition, for instance, when the troops were to pass in the neighbourhood of the Imperial Tombs, a few British soldiers were sent on in advance, and quietly informed the custodians that the Germans were coming. Readily acting on the information, they removed all the jewels and easily portable valuables from the tombs, and they were kept concealed in a village on the other side of the hill under the guard of a few Bengal Lancers until the Germans had passed. In recognition of this friendly message the Chinese wanted to make a present of some magnificent strings of pearls to Captain Maxwell, a nephew of Lord Roberts.

In civilised warfare there is generally some little respect shown for the priests and places of worship of the conquered people, but here there was none whatever. Horses were stabled in the temples, and the art heirlooms of thousands of years of the nation's life to be found therein were frequently mutilated and destroyed when they were not stolen. In the street where I lived in Pekin for a whole week were to be seen, day by day, carts passing backwards and forwards laden with books which were being brought to be consumed in a huge fire kept burning in a yard outside the palace wall. Thousands of books were thus treated, so that the whole street was littered with their fluttering leaves to such an extent that I could not get my little Chinese pony to pass there without getting off and leading him, for he shied continually at the fluttering papers. Day after day this literary holocaust continued. When the wind was in the direction of my house a fine black snow kept perpetually falling, and covered the roofs and courtyards with these ashes of dead thoughts. Hundreds of the books were written in the quaint characters which showed that they belonged to, and were written by, Lama priests; many of them had probably found their way there from the bleak steppes of far Tibet.

They were printed with those wooden blocks by which these barbarians practised the art of printing for centuries before the time of Caxton. Many of them also were in manuscript, which must have meant years of labour, and hand-painted pictures illustrating some were occasionally to be found. They were all alike consigned to the same funeral pyre, and thousands of volumes of unascertained, but perhaps considerable, value were thus lost to the world for ever. As the bleak, cold winds from the plains swept down the deserted street at night, and moaned dolorously through the ruined houses, rattling doors, and flapping paper windows, it lifted these torn book-leaves, and swirled them round in a fantastic dance of death, until one could almost imagine one heard the lamentation of the ghosts of their long-dead authors--priests, hermits, and scholars--mourning over the ashes of their life-work.

The whole of this campaign is the reverse of flattering to our Western civilisation. Many of the details of the conduct of the Russian, French, and German soldiers do not bear publication. But what it broadly amounts to is the treatment of a venerable civilisation absolutely foreign to our own as if its members belonged to a low class of pestiferous beasts whose most desirable fate would be extermination.

VIII

CERTAIN COMPARISONS

After spending five months with the British forces in the early part of the war in the Transvaal, and then having an opportunity of campaigning with the allied forces in China, it was extremely interesting to make comparisons between them. The greater number of the troops we employed in China were drawn from the Army of India. As regards the French forces, they, at all events during the original march to the relief of the Legations, were drawn from the troops which were stationed at Tonkin. But the French troops that subsequently arrived direct from France, as well as the German contingent, may naturally be taken as average samples of their respective armies. It is true that outside the siege of Tientsin there was very little serious fighting. The engagements on the march up were not severe ones, except that outside the eastern gate of Pekin itself. The action here, however, was entirely confined to the Japanese. If this campaign did not afford opportunities of observing the various troops under severe strain of battle, it made up for it in a way by testing their qualities, resources, and equipment for campaigning under exceptionally trying circumstances. The weather during August, when the march for the relief took place, was exceptionally hot, far surpassing anything that I experienced in South Africa. The roads, where there were any that might be dignified by that name, were extremely bad, the dust was intense, the supply of water of the most inferior quality, and the expedition, not being under the command of one general, added irksome difficulties by the uncertainty of the movements of its constituent parts from day to day.

Fighting is not the sole duty of soldiers in the field, and in almost all their other duties apart from that we had ample and varied opportunities of contrasting their merits. The Japanese infantry were a surprise and a revelation to most of the Allies. Notwithstanding the enormous trouble they have taken with their cavalry, it is immensely inferior to every other arm of their service. This is not to be wondered at when we reflect how little the Japanese are accustomed to horse-riding at home, and what small opportunities they have of acquiring that knowledge of the management of horses which comes instinctively to the English groom, to the Irish farmer's son, or to the field labourer. The defect of a want of efficient cavalry is with the Japanese largely compensated for by the extreme mobility of their infantry. They appear to do everything at the double. All their soldiers seem to be perpetually kept in the best of hard training. If they have not horses at home, they have plenty of rickshaw men, who consider thirty to thirty-five miles of running not an excessive day's work.