CHAPTER II

TIENTSIN

The foreign settlement of Tientsin and the Chinese city are entirely separate, and lie some distance apart. The former, resembling more a European town than an alien lodgment in the heart of the Celestial Empire, boasts wide roads and well‐kept streets, large offices and lofty warehouses, good public buildings and comfortable villas, a racecourse and a polo‐ground. It is divided into the Concessions of the various nationalities, of which the English, in size and mercantile importance, is easily first. The difference between it and the next largest—the French—is very marked. The latter, though possessing a few good streets, several hotels, and at least one long business thoroughfare with fine shops, speaks all too plainly of stagnation. The British quarter, bustling, crowded, tells just as clearly of thriving trade. In it are found most of the banks, the offices of the more considerable merchants, and all the municipal buildings.

The Chinese city, perhaps, has more charm for the lover of the picturesque, though it is less interesting now than formerly, since the formidable embrasured wall surrounding it has been pulled down by order of the Allied generals. In it stands a grim memento of another outburst of fanaticism against the hated foreigner—the ruins of the Roman Catholic Cathedral, destroyed by the Chinese in 1870. The city itself is like unto all other Celestial cities. Narrow lanes, low houses, ill‐kept thoroughfares, gaudiness and dirt intermingled, stench and filth abominable. To it, however, was wont to go the seeker after curiosities, choice silks, or rich furs from Manchuria and Corea. But the retributive looting that fell on it after its capture has left it bare indeed.

On the platform of the railway station almost the first friendly face we saw was that of perhaps the best‐known man in North China, Major Whittal, Hyderabad Contingent. Interpreter in Russian, fluent in French and German, his linguistic abilities had been responsible for his appointment to the scarcely enviable post of Railway Staff Officer at Tientsin. In a town that held the headquarters of every foreign army, where troops and stores of all kinds were despatched or arrived daily in charge of representatives of the different forces, such a position required the possession of a genius for organisation and infinite tact and patience. Even as we greeted him, French, Russian, or German officers and soldiers crowded round, to harry him with questions in divers tongues or propound problems as to the departure of troop trains or the disposal of waggons loaded with supplies for their respective armies. The Britisher is usually supposed to be the least versed of any in foreign languages. But the Continental officers were very much surprised to find how many linguists we boasted in our expeditionary force. At every important railway station we had a staff officer who was an interpreter in one or more European languages. There were many who had passed examinations in Chinese. A French major remarked to me one day: “_Voilà, monsieur_, we have always thought that an Englishman knows no tongue but his own. Yet we find but few of your officers who cannot converse with us in ours. Not all well, certainly; but, on the other hand, how many of us can talk with you in English? Scarcely any. And many of you speak Russian, German, or Italian.” It was not the only surprising fact they learned about the hitherto despised Anglo‐Indian army.

Leaving Major Whittal surrounded by a polyglot crowd, and handing over the luggage to our sword orderlies, we seated ourselves in rickshas and set out in search of quarters. The European settlement is separated from the railway station by the Peiho River. We crossed over a bridge of boats, which swings aside to allow the passage of vessels up or down. At either end stood a French sentry, to stop the traffic when the bridge was about to open. The stream was crowded with junks loaded with stores for the various armies, and flying the flag of the nation in whose service they were employed. A steamer lay at a wharf—an unusual sight, for few ships of any draught can safely overcome the difficulties of the shallow river. Along the far bank ran a broad road, known as the Bund, bordered with well‐built warehouses and offices. Some of these bore eloquent testimony to the severity of the Chinese shell fire during the siege. The Tricolour flew over the first houses we passed, for the French Concession lies nearest the station. At the gates of those buildings, used as barracks, lounged men of the Infanterie Coloniale, clad in loose white or blue uniforms, with large and clumsy helmets. A few hundred yards farther down we reached the English settlement, and turned up a wide street, in which was situated the fine official residence of the British Consul‐General. We arrived at last at the mess of the Hong Kong Regiment, where two of us were to find quarters. It stood in a narrow lane surrounded by houses shattered by shells during the siege. Close by were the messes of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry in dark and gloomy Chinese buildings.

In the afternoon we paid our first visit to the Tientsin Club. It was crowded with representatives of almost every nationality. Britishers, Americans, French, Russians, and Austrians were clinking glasses amid a chorus of “A votre santé!” “Good health!” “Svatches doróvia!” and “Here’s how!” Even an occasional smart little Japanese officer was to be seen. Naval uniforms were almost as much in evidence as military garb; for the officers of the Allied Fleets lying off Taku varied the monotony of riding at anchor, out of sight of the land, by an occasional run ashore and a visit to Tientsin and Pekin. The utmost good fellowship prevailed among the different nationalities. French was the usual medium of intercourse between Continental officers and those of the English‐speaking races. Britishers might be seen labouring through the intricacies of the irregular verbs which had vexed their brains during schooldays, or lamenting their neglect to keep up their early acquaintance with the language of diplomacy and international courtesy. The bond of a common tongue drew the Americans and the English still more closely together, and the greatest friendship existed between all ranks of both nationalities. The heroic bravery of the sailors and soldiers of the great Republic of the West earned the praise and admiration of their British comrades, who were justly proud of the kinship that was more marked than ever during those days when the Stars and Stripes flew side by side with the Union Jack. The famous saying of the American commodore, “Blood is stronger than water,” and the timely aid given by him to our imperilled sailors in this same vexed land of China, were green in our memory. The language difficulty unfortunately prevented much intercourse with the Japanese officers. Some of them, however, were acquainted with English, and these were readily welcomed by British and Americans.

The club stands in the broad, tree‐shaded Victoria Road. Next to it is the Gordon Hall, a handsome structure famous as the refuge of the women and children during the bombardment. It contains a theatre and a public library, and is the scene of most of the festivities in Tientsin. Before its door stands an object‐lesson of the siege—two small guns of Seymour’s gallant column flanked by enormous shells captured from the Chinese. The two tall towers were a conspicuous mark for the hostile artillerymen, as was the even loftier German Club facing it. Close by are the small but pretty Public Gardens, where, in the afternoons, the bands of the various regiments used to play. Nearer the French Concession stands a large hotel, the Astor House; its long verandah was the favourite resort of the foreign officers. The groups in varied uniforms sitting round the small marble tables gave it the appearance of a Continental _café_—an illusion not dispelled by the courtesy which prevailed. As each new‐comer entered he saluted the company present, who all rose and bowed in reply.

Behind the Victoria Road runs the famous, or infamous, Taku Road, the scene of so many disgraceful brawls between the Allied troops. For part of its length it is lined by commercial buildings, but towards the French Concession were many houses tenanted by the frail sisterhood. Their presence attracted the worst characters among the men of the various armies, and disorder was rife. It culminated at length in a wanton attack on a small patrol of the Royal Welch Fusiliers by a drunken mob of Continental soldiers. A Japanese guard close by turned out to the aid of their English comrades, and, wasting no time in parley, dropped at once on the knee to fire into the aggressors. They were restrained with difficulty by the corporal in charge of the British patrol, who vainly endeavoured to pacify the mob. Forced at length to use their rifles in self‐defence, the Fusiliers did so to some effect. Two soldiers were killed, eight others wounded, and the remainder fled. Naturally enough, great excitement and indignation were aroused at first among the troops to which these men belonged; but it died away when the truth was known. An international court of inquiry, having carefully investigated the case, exonerated the corporal from all blame and justified his action. Such unfortunate occurrences were only to be expected among the soldiers of so many mixed nationalities, and the fact that they did not happen more frequently spoke well for the general discipline. At the end farthest from the French Concession the Taku Road ran through a number of small _cafés_ and beer‐saloons, much patronised by the German troops, whose barracks lay close by.

The sights of the city and the foreign settlement were soon exhausted. But one never tired of watching the moving pictures of soldier life, or of visiting the scenes of the deadly fighting memorable for ever in the history of North China. The long stretches of mud flats lying between the Chinese town and the Concessions, over which shot and shell had flown for weeks; the roofless villages; the shattered houses; the loopholed and bullet‐splashed walls. There, during long days and anxious nights, the usually pacific Chinaman, spurred on by fanatic hate and lust of blood, had waged a bitter war with all the devilish cunning of his race. There the mad rushes of frenzied Boxers, reckless of life, hurling themselves fearlessly with antiquated weapons against a well‐armed foe. There the Imperial soldiers, trained by European officers, showed that their instruction had borne fruit. From every cover, natural or improvised, they used their magazine rifles with accuracy and effect. Lieutenant Fair, R.N., Flag‐Lieutenant to Admiral Seymour, told me that he has often watched them picking up the range as carefully and judiciously as a Boer marksman. And his Admiral, conspicuous in white uniform and dauntlessly exposing himself on the defences, escaped death again and again only by a miracle while men fell at his side. Nor was the shooting of the Chinese gunners to be despised. Lieutenant Hutchinson, H.M.S. _Terrible_, in a redoubt with two of his ship’s famous guns, engaged in a duel at three thousand yards with a Chinese battery of modern ordnance. Of six shells hurled at him, two struck the parapet in front, two fell just past his redoubt, and two almost within it. Fortunately none burst. Had the mandarins responsible for the munitions of war proved as true to their trust as the gunners, the _Terrible’s_ detachment would have been annihilated; but when the ammunition captured afterwards from the enemy was examined, it was found that the bursting charges of the shells had been removed and replaced by sand. The corrupt officials had extracted the powder and sold it. A naval ·450 Maxim was most unpopular in the defences. Its neighbourhood was too unsafe, for whenever it opened fire the smoke betrayed it to the Chinese gunners, and shells at once fell fast around it. It had finally to be withdrawn.

But the desperate losses among the Boxers opposed to Seymour’s gallant column, the heavy fighting around Tientsin, and the capture of the city broke the back of the Chinese resistance. And when the Allied Army advanced on Pekin, no determined stand was made after the first battle. The capital, with its famous and formidable walls, fell almost without a blow. A sore disappointment to the British Siege Train, who, hurried out to South Africa to batter down the forts of Pretoria, found their services uncalled for there; and then, despatched to China for the siege of Pekin, arrived to learn that there, too, they were not needed.

The interest of the Foreign Settlement lay in the crowds that thronged its streets. Never since the occupation of Paris after Napoleon’s downfall has any city presented such a kaleidoscopic picture of varied uniforms and mixed troops of many nations. I know few things more interesting than to sit for an hour on the Astor House verandah and watch the living stream. Rickshas go by bearing officers of every army, punctiliously saluting all other wearers of epaulettes they pass. An Indian tonga bumps along behind two sturdy little ponies. After it rumbles a Russian transport cart, driven by a white‐bloused Cossack. A heavy German waggon pulls aside to make way for a carriage containing two Prussian officers of high rank. A few small Japanese mounted infantrymen trot by, looking far more in keeping with the diminutive Chinese ponies than do the tall Punjaubis who follow them. Behind them are a couple of swarthy Bombay Lancers on well‐groomed horses, gazing with all a cavalryman’s disdain at the “Mounted Foot” in front of them. And surely never was trooper of any army so picturesque as the Indian _sowar_. A guard of stolid German soldiers tramps by. A squad of sturdy Japanese infantry passes a detachment of heavily accoutred French troops swinging along with short, rapid strides. And at each street corner and crossing, directing the traffic, calm and imperturbable, stands the man who has made England what she is—the British private. All honour to him! Smart, trim, well set‐up, he looks a monarch among soldiers, compared with the men of other more military countries. Never have I felt so proud of Tommy Atkins as when I saw him there contrasted with the pick of the Continental armies; for all the corps that had been sent out from Europe had been specially selected to do credit to their nations. _He_ was merely one of a regiment that had chanced to be garrisoning England’s farthest dependency in the East, or of a battery taken at random. In physique, appearance, and soldierly bearing he equalled them all. Even his cousin, the American, sturdy and stalwart as he is, could not excel him in smartness, though not behind him in courage or coolness in action. The British officer, however, in plain khaki with no adornments of rank, looked almost dowdy beside the white coats and gold shoulder‐straps of the Russian or the silver belts and sashes of the German. But gay trappings nowadays are sadly out of place in warfare.

And though within a few miles the broken Chinese braves and routed Boxers, formed into roving bands of robbers, swooped down upon defenceless villages, and heavily accoutred European soldiers trudged wearily and fruitlessly after them over impossible country, life in Tientsin flowed on unheeding in all the gay tranquillity of ordinary garrison existence. Entertainments in the Gordon Hall, convivial dinners, polo, races, went on as though the demon of war had been exorcised from the unhappy land. Yet grim reminders were not wanting; scarcely a day passed without seeing a few miserable prisoners brought in from the districts round. Poor wretches! Many of them were villagers who had been driven into brigandage by the burning of their houses and the ruin of their fields as the avenging armies passed. Some were but the victims of treacherous informers, who, to gain a poor reward or gratify a petty spite, denounced the innocent. And, with pigtails tied together, cuffed and hustled by their pitiless captors, they trudged on to their doom with the vague stare of poor beasts led to the slaughter. A hurried trial, of which they comprehended nothing, then death. Scarce knowing what was happening, each unhappy wretch was led forth to die. Around him stood the fierce white soldiers he had learned to dread. Cruel men of his own race bound his arms, flung him on his knees, and pulled his queue forward to extend his neck. The executioner, too often a pitiful bungler, raised his sword. The stroke fell; the head leapt from the body; the trunk swayed for an instant, then collapsed on the ground.

Yet for many of them such a death was all too merciful. No race on earth is capable of such awful cruelty, such hellish devices of torture, as the Chinese. And the unfortunate missionaries, the luckless wounded soldiers who fell into their hands, experienced treatment before which the worst deviltries of the Red Indian seemed humane. Occasionally some of these fiends were captured by the Allies; often only the instruments, but sometimes the instigators of the terrible outrages on Europeans, the mandarins who had spurred on the maddened Boxers to their worst excesses. For these no fitting punishment could be devised, and a swift death was too kind. But in the latter days of the campaign too many suffered an unmerited fate. The blood heated by the tales of Chinese cruelty at the outbreak of the troubles did not cool rapidly. The murders of the missionaries and civil engineers, of the unhappy European women and children, could not be readily forgotten. The seed sown in those early days of the fanatical outburst bore a bitter fruit. The horrors that war inevitably brings in its train were aggravated by the memory of former treachery and the difficulty of distinguishing between the innocent and the guilty. A very slight alteration of dress sufficed to convert into a harmless peasant the Boxer whose hands were red with the blood of defenceless Europeans, or of Chinese Christians whose mangled bodies had choked the river.

The echoes of a greater struggle at the other side of the globe filled the ears of the world when the defenders of Tientsin were holding fanatical hordes of besiegers at bay. And so, few in Europe realised the deadliness of the fighting around the little town where hundreds of white women and children huddled together in terror of a fate too dreadful for words. The gallant sailors and marines who guarded it knew that on them alone depended the lives and honour of these helpless ones. Day and night they fought a fight, the like of which has scarcely been known since the defenders of the Residency at Lucknow kept the flag flying in similar straits against a not more savage foe. Outmatched in armament, they opposed small, almost out‐of‐date guns to quick‐firing and large‐calibre Krupps of the latest pattern. Outnumbered, stricken by disease, assailed by fierce hordes without and threatened by traitors within, they held their own with a heroism that has never gained the meed of praise it deserved. From the walls of the Chinese city, a few thousand yards away, and from the ample cover across the narrow river, shells rained on the unprotected town, and its streets were swept by close‐range rifle fire. All national rivalries forgotten, Americans, Russians, British, French, Germans, and Japanese fought shoulder to shoulder against a common foe. Admiral Seymour’s heroic column, baffled in its gallant dash on Pekin, and battling savagely against overwhelming numbers, fell slowly back on the beleaguered town. The Hsi‐ku Arsenal, a few miles from Tientsin, barred the way, guarded by a strong and well‐armed force of Imperial soldiers. The desperate sailors nerved themselves for a last supreme effort. Under a terrible fire the British marines, under Major Johnstone, R.M.L.I., flung themselves on the defences and drove out the enemy with the bayonet. Then, utterly exhausted, its ammunition almost spent, the starving column halted in the Arsenal, unable to break through the environing hordes of besiegers who lay between it and Tientsin. A gallant attempt made by two companies of our marines to cut their way through was repulsed with heavy loss. The Chinese made several attempts to retake the Arsenal. A welcome reinforcement of close on two thousand Russian troops from Port Arthur had enabled the besieged garrison of Tientsin to hold out. A relieving force was sent out to bring in the decimated column, utterly prostrated by the incessant fighting. An eye‐witness of their return, Mr. Drummond, Chinese Imperial Customs, who fought with the Tientsin Volunteers throughout the siege, told me that the condition of Seymour’s men was pitiable in the extreme. Worn out and weak, shattered by the terrible trials they had undergone, they had almost to be supported into the town. For sixteen days and nights they had been battling continuously against a well‐armed and enterprising foe. Their provisions had run out, and they had been forced to sustain life on the foul water of the river, which was filled with corpses, and on stray ponies and mules captured by the way. Out of 1,945 men they had 295 casualties. As soon as the sailors and marines of the returned column were somewhat recovered from their exhaustion, the Allied Forces moved out to attack the native city of Tientsin, which was surrounded by a strong and high wall, and defended by over sixty guns, most of them very modern ordnance. Covered by a terrific bombardment from the naval guns, which had come up from the warships at Taku, the little army, 5,000 strong, hurled itself on the doomed city. But so fierce was the Chinese defence that for a day and a night it could barely hold its own. But before sunrise the Japanese sappers blew open the city gate, under a heavy fire. The Allies poured in through the way thus opened to them, and the surviving defenders fled, having lost 5,000 killed and wounded. The Allies themselves, out of a total force of 5,000, had nearly 800 casualties. The enemy’s stronghold captured, the siege of the European settlements was raised after a month of terrible stress.

Between the railway station and the river lies a small stretch of waste ground, a few hundred yards in extent. Here arose the famous “Railway Siding incident.” The Russians claimed it as theirs “by right of conquest,” although it had always been recognised as the property of the railway company. An attempt to construct a siding on it from the station brought matters to a crisis. A Russian guard was promptly mounted on it, and confronted by a detachment of Indian troops under the command of Lieutenant H. E. Rudkin, 20th Bombay Infantry. The situation in which this young subaltern was placed demanded a display of tact and firmness which might well have overtaxed the resources of an older man. But with the self‐reliance which the Indian Army teaches its officers he acquitted himself most creditably in a very trying position. Then ensued a period of anxious suspense when no man knew what the morrow might bring forth. But calm counsels fortunately prevailed. These few yards of waste ground were not judged worth “the bones of a single grenadier,” and the question was taken from the hands of the soldier and entrusted to the diplomat.