THE END OF THE WILDERNESS
Have I named one single river? Have I claimed one single acre?
Have I kept one single nugget (barring samples)? No, not I.
Because my price was paid me ten times over by my Maker.
But you wouldn't understand it. You go up and occupy.
--The Explorer.
The victory at Yang-Tsun had come with a tremendous loss of life. To go on
now promised the cutting to pieces of the entire army. To stay here and
await reinforcements would mean the slaughter of all the foreigners in
Peking. In a council of war the next day English and Indian, Russian,
German, Japanese, Italian, and French, general after general declared for
the wisdom of waiting at Yang-Tsun for reinforcements.
Up spoke then General Chaffee of the American command:
"I will not wait while the Boxers massacre the helpless Christians. Stay
here or go back to your own countries, as you please. My army will go on
to Peking, if it must go alone."
And his will prevailed.
Followed then a memorable march, with the Stars and Stripes ever leading
the line. The strength of the force was thirteen thousand now and one
thousand of these fell by the way before the end of the journey.
After Yang-Tsun, for the only time in this ten days' campaign, the
soldiers undressed and bathed themselves like Christians in the
unchristian Peiho, and on the next day, which was the Sabbath, they
listened to the military chapel service. Six days they forged onward with
the same cruel heat, and scalding air, and alkali dust, and poison water,
over dreary plains, through deserted villages, twenty, twenty-five, and
even thirty miles a day, they pushed on toward the Chinese capital.
And ever before them the Boxers slowly receded, stinging grievously as
they moved. Sure were they that at last only dire calamity could await
that slender column moving across the plains, led under a flag of red,
white, and blue, with bands ever playing _The Star-Spangled Banner_, while
from line on line rolled out that weird battle cry of "Rock Chalk! Jay
Hawk! K U!" Sure were they that this stubborn little bands of soldiers
foolishly following the receding Boxer must at last crush itself like
dead-ripe fruit against the ancient and invincible walls of Peking.
On the evening of the sixth day from Yang-Tsun the twelve thousand men of
the Allied Armies, flower of the world's soldiery, stumbled into camp with
their outposts in sight of the great walls of the City of Peking. This had
been the longest and hottest of all the days, with the weariest length of
march. A great storm cloud was rising in the west and the air hung hot and
still before it.
Thaine Aydelot and his comrades threw themselves down, too exhausted to
care for what might happen next.
"This is the hottest day I ever knew," declared McLearn wearily, as he lay
prone on the ground looking up at the hot sky with unblinking eyes.
"I reckon you never hit the National pike on an August day, out between
Green Castle and Terre Haute down in Indianny," Binford suggested.
"Nor St. Marys-by-the-Kaw," Boehringer, a Kansas man, added. "There's
where you get real summery weather."
"Oh, kill him, Aydelot, he's worse than a Boxer. Don't you know I'm from
Boston originally, which is only a State of Mind?" Goodrich urged.
"No matter what state you are from originally, you are in China now, which
is in a state of insurrection that we must get ready for a state of
resurrection tomorrow. What are you thinking about, T. Aydelot? You look
like Moses and the prophets." McLearn half turned over with the question.
Thaine, who was lying on his side, supporting his head on his hand, quoted
softly:
"'Oh, the prairies' air so quiet, an' there's allers lots of room
In the golden fields of Kansas, when the
Sun
Flowers
Bloom.'"
A low boom of thunder rolled across the western sky; a twilight darkness
fell on the earth, and a long night of storm and stress began for the army
of deliverance encamped before Peking.
Outside the city the Boxers massed in numbers. Inside more than a hundred
thousand waited the coming of hardly more than one-tenth of their number.
No wonder they felt secure behind their centuries-old walls.
Thaine Aydelot was accustomed to sleeping tentless on the ground and to
being beaten by rains. He was a sound sleeper and he was very weary. But
tonight he could not sleep. The morrow would see world movements that
should change all future history; in which movements he was a tiny unit,
as every furrow that his father, Asher Aydelot, had run across the face of
the prairie had by so much won it from wilderness to fruitfulness.
All night long the rain poured in torrents upon the camp. A terrific
cannonade of thunder shook the earth. The lightning tore through the
clouds in jagged tongues of flame. Where Thaine lay he could see with
every flash the great frowning black walls of Peking looming up only a few
miles away. In the lull of the thunder a more dreadful cannonading could
be heard, hour after hour. Thaine knew that inside the walls the Boxers
were besieging the Compound. And inside that Compound, if he were yet
alive, was his old teacher, Pryor Gaines. He wondered if the God of
Battles that had led the armies all this long hard way would fail them now
when one more blow might bring deliverance to His children. He remembered
again the blessing with which his father had sent him forth:
"As thy day so shall thy strength be. The Eternal God is thy refuge, and
underneath are the everlasting arms."
The memory brought peace, and at length, wrapped round in the blessing of
an absolute trust, he fell asleep.
Inside of the City of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the
Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving
for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of
water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury possessing the
demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the
streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the
Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. For such as these the missionary is
offered up. A human jungle, untamed and waiting, to whose wilderness the
soldier became a light-bearer, albeit he brought the gospel of gunpowder
to aid him.
The great walls about Peking enclose an area some fourteen miles in length
and twelve miles in width. Within these walls lie several cities,
separated from each other by walls of lesser strength, intended, with one
exception, in the opening of the twentieth century, not so much for
defense as for boundary lines.
The exception is the Imperial City, inside whose sacred precincts it was
firmly believed a foreigner might not set foot and not be stricken dead by
the gods. This City within a city had defenses the allied armies were yet
to come against. It lies on the north, inside the great wall. Just east of
it, along the north wall, was the Foreign Legation, whose south and east
bounds were lesser structures of brick and earth. Here all the foreigners
and many native Christians had been shut in for six long weeks, with the
infuriated Boxers hammering daily at their gates, mad for massacre.
Here they had barricaded themselves with all the meager means available.
They had fortified every gate with whatever might stop a bullet or check a
cannon ball. They filled up the broken places in the walls with piles of
earth; they dug deep trenches inside these walls, and inside these
trenches they had built up heaps of earthworks. Daily they strengthened
the weaker places and watched and prayed. No word from the big world
outside seemingly could come to them--a little handful of the Lord's
children, forgotten of Him, and locked dungeon deep from human aid. They
had sent out a cry for help and had sent up prayers for deliverance. How
far that cry had gone they could not know. Frowning walls besieged by
enemies lay all around them. They could only look up and lift up helpless
hands in prayer to the hot, unpitying August skies above them. Sickness
stalked in over the walls. Hunger tore its way through the gates. Death
swooped down, and sorrow seeped up, and despair lay in wait. But hope, and
trust, and faith, and love failed not.
They ate dogs and horses. They went half naked that they might make sand
bags of their clothes for greater defense. They exhausted every means for
protection and life, but they forgot not to pray.
On this August night, while unknown to the besieged the Allied Armies
encamped only six miles away, the reign of terror reached its height for
the little Christian stronghold.
The storm beat pitilessly on the starved and ragged captives. The rain
softened the earthworks and the rivers of water in the trenches threatened
to undermine the walls. Across these walls the incessant attack of cannon
and roar of rifles was beyond anything the six weeks' siege had known, and
only the power of Omnipotence could stay the bloody hands. So the long
hours of the dreadful night dragged on.
At length came daydawn. The storm had rolled away. A lull in the besieging
guns gave the Legation a little rest of mind. Hungry and helpless, it
waited the passing of another day. A silence seemed to fill the city and
the wiser ones wondered anxiously what it might portend.
Suddenly, in the midst of it, a great gun boomed out to the northeast.
Another gun, and another. Then came a pause and the besieged listened
eagerly, for their own walls felt no shock. Again came the bellow of
cannon, nearer and heavier, repeated and repeated, and the roll of smoke
and the rattling fusillade of bullet shots told that a battle was on.
Outside the gates! An army come against Peking! The Army of Deliverance!
They were here fighting for the Christians! Oh, the music of birds' song,
of rippling waters, of gently pulsing zephyrs, the music of old cathedral
chimes, of grandest orchestras--nothing of them all could sound so like to
the music that the morning stars sang together as this deafening peal of
cannon, this rippling rhythm of Krag rifles.
With bursting hearts they waited and watched the great wall to the north.
It is sixty feet high and fully as wide at its base, tapering to
twenty-five feet across the top. Could the gates be stormed? Could this
wall be shaken? From the highest points inside the Compound eager eyes
scanned the northeast as the battle raged on with crash of shells and whir
of bullets. Then down to the waiting ones came a message that seemed to
fly to every ear in the besieged city, making men and women drop to the
ground in a very ecstasy of joy.
"They've run up the Stars and Stripes on the northeast wall!"
The sword of the Lord and of Gideon was come again to Peking, as it came
once long ago to the Valley of Jezreel.
The Allied Armies broke camp early on the morning of August fourteen in
the year of nineteen hundred. Six miles away stood the most impassable
defense an army of the West might ever storm. Yet the twelve thousand men
did not hesitate. With General Chaffee's troops in the front of the line
they fought through fiercely skirmishing forces up to the hoary old city's
gates, the Fourteenth United States Infantry leading the way. The American
guns cleared the Chinese soldiery from the top of the walls, and the
American cannon were in line ready to blow open the huge gates.
"I want to know what's on the other side before I open up the gates,"
General Chaffee declared.
So the command was given for a volunteer to scale the wall, to stand up a
target for the Chinese rifles! To be blown to pieces by Chinese cannon!
Yet the armies must know what awaited them. There must be no debouching
into a death-trap for a wholesale massacre.
Thaine Aydelot had cherished one hope since the twilight hour on the
battlefield at Yang-Tsun--that when this day should come the American
might lead the way through the Peking gates and be first to enter the
strange old city. Not merely because he was an American patriot, but
because to him the American soldiers with all their sins and follies of
youth and military life were yet world missionaries.
Thaine knew his comrades shared his hope, whether for the same high
purpose he could not have asked. He had no longer dreams of military glory
for himself. His joy was in achievement, no matter by whose hand.
"There's an order for somebody to go up on the wall."
The word was passed along the line. Before it reached Thaine and his
comrades a young soldier had leaped forward to obey the order.
"Glory be, America first!" Goodrich said fervently.
"And a Kansan. A Jayhawker!"
Thaine did not know who said it. He saw the soldier, young Calvin Titus, a
Kansas boy, leap after the Japanese coolies who ran forward toward the
wall with the long bamboo scaling ladders. And for one instant's flash of
time the old level prairies came sweeping into view, the winding line of
Grass River with the sand dunes beyond; the wheat fields, the windbreaks,
the sunflowers beside the trail, and far away the three headlands veiled
in the golden haze of an August morning. A Kansas boy the hero of the
day--first of all that army to stand on top of that hoary old wall! The
prairies had grown another name for the annals of history.
Before him were the little brown coolies holding the ladder, and up its
slender swaying height, round by round, went young Titus nimbly as a
squirrel up a cottonwood limb.
The Kansas men went wild.
"Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U! oo!" they shouted again and again, ending in
the long quavering wail as the University yell must always end.
Up and up went Titus, sixty feet, to the top of the wall. Then as he stood
above the strange old Oriental city, rilled now with frenzied fighters;
above the poor starving Christians in their Compound--saved as by a
miracle; above the twelve thousand soldiers sent hither from the far
homelands beyond the seas to rescue human beings from deadly peril. As he
stood over all these, a target for a hundred guns, the khaki-clad young
Kansan lifted his right hand high above his head and swung out the Stars
and Stripes to all the breezes of that August morning.
Then came the belching of cannon, the bursting of huge timbers, the
groaning of twisting iron, and through the splintered gates the Allied
Armies had entered the city.
Inside the walls the hundred thousand Boxers renewed the strife. The walls
and gates of the Foreign Legation were as stubbornly defended by the
Chinese fanatics on the outside now as the besieged Christians had
defended them against the Chinese on the inside. Entrance was made at last
through the sluiceway, or open sewer, draining out under the city walls.
It was a strange looking line of creatures who came crawling, waist-deep
in filth, through the sewer's channel. The old Aydelot sense of humor had
saved Thaine many a time. And he wondered afterward if he had not seen by
chance the ludicrous picture of himself in a huge mirror, if his heart
would not have burst with grief when Pryor Gaines came toward him, mute
and pallid, with outstretched hands.
The little group of soldiers who had fought and marched together had not
had off their clothes for seven days. A stubby two weeks' beard was on
each face. Their feet were raw from hard marching. Rain and dust and mud
and powder smoke had trimmed their uniforms, and now the baptism by
immersion in the Compound sewer had given them the finishing touches. But
the gaunt-faced men and women, the pitiful, big-eyed children, whose
emaciated forms told the tale of the six weeks' imprisonment, made them
forget themselves as these poor rescued Christians hugged and kissed their
brave rescuers.
Thaine hadn't kissed any woman except his mother since the evening when he
and Leigh Shirley had lingered on the Purple Notches in a sad-sweet moment
of separation. It lifted the pressure crushing round his heart when he saw
Goodrich, with shining eyes, bending to let a poor little missionary
stroke his grimy cheek.
The Boxers retired by degrees before the superior force, entrenching
themselves inside the Imperial City. Never in its history, centuries on
centuries old, had this Imperial City's sacred precincts been defiled by
foreign feet. Here the Boxer felt himself secure. Here the gods of his
fathers would permit no foreigner to enter. On these hoary old walls no
Christian would dare to stand. On three sides of the Imperial City these
walls were invincible. The fourth was equipped with six heavy gates.
In a council of the powers the impossibility of storming these gates
was fully made clear. The number of soldiers was carefully
estimated--American, Japanese, Russian, German, French, and Italian,
Sikh and Sepoy, Bengalese, Scotchman, Welsh, and Royal Englishmen. All
had suffered heavily in this campaign. None more grievously than the
American.
The decision of the council was overwhelming that the Imperial City could
not be taken by this little force outside its battlements. Only General
Chaffee protested against giving up the attempt.
"Can your men take those walls?" The query came from the leaders.
"My men can take hell," General Chaffee replied, with less of profanity
than of truth in his terms. And the attempt was given over to the
Americans.
One of the six gates stood wide open, a death-trap laid by the wily Boxer,
believing that the foreign forces would rush through it to be shot down
like rats in a hole. Beyond it was a paved court some five hundred yards
wide, reaching up to a second wall, equipped likewise with six great
gates.
Thaine's company was singled out to go inside the open gate and draw the
Boxer fire toward themselves while the American army stormed the closed
gates. The little group of men lay flat on the pavement, defending
themselves and harassing the enemy. They knew why they had been sent in,
but they were seasoned soldiers. Thaine looked down the line of less than
a hundred men, McLearn, and Boehringer, Tasker, Goodrich, and Binford, all
were in that line. He felt a thrill of soldier pride as he said to
himself:
"We are fit. They have chosen us for the sacrifice. We'll prove
ourselves." Then he thought of nothing else but duty all that day.
The capture of the first wall opened the way to a second with a paved
court beyond it, and beyond that lay a third, and a fourth, and a fifth;
wall and court, wall and court, through which, and across which the
American army forced its way by heaviest bombarding under heaviest fire,
leaving a clean rear for the other armies to follow in. Only the sixth and
last wall remained. General Chaffee's men had not failed. The flag of red,
white, and blue had led steadily on 'mid a storm of shells and a deluge of
bullets.
One more onslaught and the last gates would burst wide open. Eagerly the
American soldiers waited the command to finish the task. But it was not
given. The leaders of the other armies had counseled together and
prevailed against further advance, whether moved by military prudence or
governed by jealousy of the ability of General Chaffee and the magnificent
record of the American soldiers in the Orient, the privates could not
know.
Just as the command to retire was sounded Japanese coolies had run with
scaling ladders to the last wall. It was the supreme moment for Thaine
Aydelot. He was only a private, but in that instant all the old dominant
Cavalier blood of the Thaines, all the old fearless independence of the
Huguenot Aydelots, all the calm poise and courage of the Quaker
Penningtons throbbed again in his every pulse-beat. He threw aside his
soldier obligation and stood up a man, guided alone by the light within
him.
"It is a far cry from the green Kansas prairies to the heart of old
China," he declared to himself. "Yet I'll go to the heart of that heart
now, and I'll show it the Stars and Stripes of a free people, so help me
God!"
He turned and sped to the last wall, snatching the flag from a
color-bearer as he ran. At the foot of the ladder the men holding it
wavered a little. Thaine threw the flag up to a coolie who was already
climbing.
"Take it up. If I don't get up, wave it there if you die for it," he cried
as he sprang up the ladder behind the color-bearer.
The shots were thick about them as up and up they went until at last
Thaine stood beside the indomitable little Japanese who had carried the
American flag up the ladder.
Below the Kansas boy lay the holy city of an ancient civilization in all
its breadth of ingenuity and narrowness of spirit. Standing there, a
target for every gun, waving the Star-Spangled Banner out over that old
stronghold, he cried:
"This is the end of the wilderness! Look up and see the token of light and
hope and love. Other hands than mine will bear them to you, but I have
shown you their symbol. I, Thaine Aydelot, of Kansas, first of all the
world, have dared to stand on your most sacred walls with Old Glory in my
hand. Wherever its shadow falls there is life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. In God's good time they will all come to you in peace as they
have come to you now in warfare. Mine today has been the soldier service,
and mine today the great reward."