Flashman and the Dragon. George Fraser MacDonald
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these fellows out of sight or being in Pekin next week, which you’d have got from some of our firebrand commanders. His doubts – about the French, and supply transport – were small ones. He would get Elgin and Gros to Pekin, without a shot fired if he could contrive it – but God help the Manchoos if they showed fight. Bar Campbell, there wasn’t a general I’d have chosen in his place. I asked him, what was the worst of it.
‘Delay,’ says he. ‘Chinese talk. Can’t have it. Drive on. Don’t give ’em time to scheme. Treacherous fellows.’
I asked him the best of it, too, and he grinned.
‘Elgin. Couldn’t be better. Clever, good sense. Goodbye, Flashman. God bless you.’
Perhaps he said more than that, but d’ye know, I doubt it – I can see him yet, bolt upright on his camp-stool, the lean, muscular arms folded across his long body, the grizzled whiskers like a furze-bush, chewing each word slowly before he let it out, the light eyes straying ever and anon to his beloved bull fiddle. As Wolseley strolled with me down to the jetty, we heard it again, like a ruptured frog calling to its mate.
‘The Paddy-field Concerto, with Armstrong gun accompaniment,’ says he, grinning. ‘Perhaps he’ll have it finished by the time we get to Pekin.’
I had learned all they could tell me, and since Hong Kong is a splendid place to get out of, I caught the packet up to Shanghai to present myself to Bruce, as directed. It was like going into another world – not that Shanghai was much less of a hell-hole than Hong Kong, but it was China, you understand. Down in the colony it was England peopled by yellow faces, and British law, and the opium trade, and all thoughts turning to the campaign. Shanghai was the great Treaty Port, where the Foreign Devil Trade Missions were – British, French, German, American, Scowegian, Russian, and all, but it was still the Emperor’s city, where we were tolerated and detested (except for what could be got out of us), and once you poked your nose out of the consulate gate you realised you were living on the dragon’s lip, with his fiery eyes staring down on you, and even the fog that hung over the great sprawling native city was like smoke from his spiky nostrils.
The Model Settlement was much finer than Hong Kong, with the splendid houses of the taipans, and the Bund with its carriages and strollers, and consulate buildings that might have come from Delhi or Singapore, with gardens high-walled to keep out the view – and then you ventured into the native town, stinking and filthy and gorged with humanity (with Chinese, anyhow), with its choked alleys and dung-heaps, and baskets of human heads hung at street-corners to remind you that this was a barbarous, perilous land of abominable cruelty, where if they haven’t got manacles or cords to secure a suspected petty thief, why, they’ll nail his hands together, you see, until they get him to the hoosegow, where they’ll keep him safe by hanging him up by his wrists behind his back. And that is if he’s merely suspected – once he’s convicted (which don’t mean for a moment that he’s guilty), then his head goes into the basket – if he’s lucky. If the magistrate feels liverish, they may flog him to death, or put the wire jacket on him, or fry him on a bed of red-hot chains, or dismember him, or let him crawl about the streets with a huge wooden collar on his neck, until he starves, or tattoo him to death.
This may surprise you, if you’ve heard about the fiendish ingenuity of Chinese punishment. The fact is that it’s fiendish, but not at all ingenious; just beastly, like the penal code of my dear old friends in Madagascar. And for all their vaunted civilisation, they could teach Queen Ranavalona some tricks of judicial procedure which she never heard of. In Madagascar, one way of determining guilt is to poison you, and see if you spew – I can taste that vile tanguin yet. In China, I witnessed the trial of a fellow who’d caught his wife performing with the lodger, and done for them both with an axe. They tried him for murder by throwing the victims’ heads into a tub of water and stirring it; the two heads ended up floating face to face, which proved the adulterers’ affection, so the prisoner was acquitted and given a reward for being a virtuous husband. That was, as I recall, the only Chinese trial I attended where the magistrate and witnesses had not been bribed.
So much for the lighter side of Chinese life, which I’m far from exaggerating – indeed, it was commonplace; after a while you hardly noticed the dead beggars in the gutters and cesspits, or the caged criminals left to starve and rot, or even the endless flow of headless corpses into the chow-chow water of the Yangtse estuary off Paoshan – a perpetual reminder that only a short way upriver, no farther than Liverpool is from London, the Imperials and Taipings were tearing each other (and most of the local populace) to pieces in the great struggle for Nanking. Imp gunboats were blockading the Yangtse within fifty miles, and Shanghai was full of rumours that soon the dreaded Chang-Maos, the Long-Haired Taiping Devils, would be marching on the Treaty Port itself. They’d sacked it once, years ago, and now the Chinese merchants were in terror, sending away their goods and families, and our consular people were wondering what the deuce to do, for trade would soon be in a desperate fix – and trade profit was all we were in China for. They could only wait, and wonder what was happening beyond the misty wooded flats and waterways of the Yangtse valley, in that huge, rich, squalid, war-torn empire, sinking in a welter of rebellion, banditry, corruption and wholesale slaughter, while the Manchoo Emperor and his governing nobles luxuriated in blissful oblivion in the Summer Palace far away at Pekin.
‘The chief hope must be that our army can reach Pekin in time to bring the Emperor to his senses,’ Bruce told me when I reported at his office in the consulate. ‘Once the treaty’s ratified, trade revived, and our position secure, the country can be made stable soon enough. The rebellion will be ended, one way or t’other. But if, before then, the rebels were to take Shanghai – well, it might be the last straw that brought down the Manchoo Empire. Our position would be … delicate. And it would hardly be worth going to Pekin, through a country in chaos, to treat with a government that no longer existed.’
He was a cool, knowledgeable hand, was Bruce, for all the smooth cheeks and fluffy hair that made him look like a half-witted cherub; he might have been discussing Sayers’s chances against Heenan rather than the possible slaughter of himself and every white soul on the peninsula. He was brother to Elgin, who was coming out as ambassador, but unlike most younger sons he didn’t feel bound to stand on his dignity.8 He was easy and pleasant, and when I asked him if there was a serious possibility that the Taipings might attack Shanghai, he shrugged and said there was no way of telling.
‘They’ve always wanted a major port,’ says he. ‘It would strengthen their cause immensely to have access to the outside world. But they don’t want to attack Shanghai if they can help it, for fear of offending us and the other Powers – so Loyal Prince Lee, the ablest of the rebel generals, writes me a letter urging us to admit his armies peacefully to Shanghai and then join him in toppling the Manchoos. He argues that the Taipings are Christians, like ourselves, and that the British people are famous for their sympathy to popular risings against tyrannical rulers – where he got that singular notion I can’t think. Maybe he’s been reading Byron. What about that, Slater – think he reads Byron?’
‘Not in the original, certainly,’ says the secretary.
‘No, well – he also extols the enlightened nature of Taiping democracy, and assures us of the close friendship of the Taiping government when (and if) it comes to power.’ Bruce sighed. ‘It’s a dam’ good letter. I daren’t even acknowledge it.’
For the life of me I couldn’t see why not. A Taiping China couldn’t help but be better than the rotten Manchoo Empire, whose friendship was doubtful, to say the least. And if we backed them, they’d whip the Manchoos in no time – which would mean the Pekin expedition was unnecessary, and Hope Grant and Flashy and the lads could all go home. But Bruce shook his head.
‘You don’t lightly overthrow an Empire that’s lasted since the Flood, to let in an untried and damned unpromising rabble of peasants. God knows the Manchoos are awkward, treacherous brutes, but at least they’re the devil we know. Oh, I know the Bishop of Victoria sees the finger of divine providence in the Taiping Rebellion, and our missionaries call them co-religionists – which I strongly suspect they’re not. Even if they were, I’ve known some damned odd