THE STRONGHOLD OF WUCHANG
It was to Wuchang that the country was now looking. The
Revolutionists knew it. Urged on by cleverly fashioned
proclamations, they fought as men have rarely fought. The
Imperialists knew it, and they, too, slept neither day nor night.
The Revolution was spreading. Unable to ascertain what was to
follow, foreigners from interior provinces came down to the coast and
the treaty ports for safety. Foreign warships came up one after
another, Japanese predominating in number, and at one time totalled
no less than fifteen, under nominal command of Rear-Admiral
Kawashima. Foreigners everywhere were doing volunteer duty.
Barricades had been built up, and all tiptoed in expectancy.
Fighting was desultory, with more Revolutionary losses than Imperial,
for several days. Eleven days after the great battle of Kilometre
Ten, more than the savage burning of the city, very little effective
work had been done. Firstly, they had not done what they led the
people to believe they would do. Promise after promise by Admiral
Sah to bombard had been broken, the army had marched on Tachimen and
captured it, Hankow had been shelled and the place left a mass of
charred ruins with five hundred thousand helpless people cruelly
turned adrift to seek shelter where they might--and there the
accomplishment was _in extenso_. Although they had tried, the
Imperialists had failed to capture Hanyang. Wuchang still stood {93}
as the stronghold of the Revolutionary party, with ever-brightening
prospects of power.
Those who had closely followed events here had been surprised greatly
by the manner in which the Loyalist Army had worked out this
campaign. Instead of smashing the Revolutionary Army in a few days,
which at the outset, after the first battle, seemed an easy thing for
them, they had dilly-dallied to such an extent that now they had a
greater task before them than they ever had--partly because of the
fact that trained rebel reinforcements had arrived from Hunan, and
partly because the _esprit de corps_ among the Revolutionists, which,
after their reverse, it would not have taken a great deal to have
knocked entirely out of them, had again wonderfully revived.
Yuan Shih K'ai, cutest of all Chinese in China, probably foresaw
this, and it may have been a part of his wisdom to stay his hand and
wait. He was waiting, but he hardly knew for what. He had hoped
probably that the first serious reverse would have knocked spirit out
of the men to such an extent that the Revolutionary Army would soon
have become disorganised, that the leaders would in true Chinese
fashion have been quarrelling among themselves, and that soon,
without money and supplies, the Revolutionary Army would have come
again to its senses. Meantime, people were saying that General Li,
the Revolutionary leader, was a fool, that he should have marched out
his men and fought a good fight. They could not see that Chinese had
met Chinese, and that both were playing their own game. Yuan was
looked upon as being the great man who could make no false moves; Li
was merely a trained soldier, and what could he know? He may not
have known much, but he knew enough. He knew, at any rate, how to
play his own game, and each night at sundown he congratulated himself
upon having held the capital city yet another day--for Wuchang was
still the stronghold, {94} and it was from Wuchang, as has been said,
that other places were taking the cue.
At last Yuan saw this. He also saw that city after city, almost
province after province, was falling into the Revolutionary line, and
he conceived a plan to stop the whole sad business. He began then to
parley. He wrote to General Li in most conciliatory terms.[1] {95}
He promised a new Government on constitutional lines; he promised
that the Manchu princedoms should be abolished; he promised free
pardon to all offenders against law and order--he expressed himself
ready to make any concession. But in his heart he realised that
virtually he was in no position to dictate. He had to play the
second fiddle, although trying to play thereon the notes of the first.
[Illustration: ESCAPED FROM WUCHANG. Foreigners taking to the boats
to cross to Hankow after being shut up in Wuchang for many awful
days.]
Li read his communique, smiled, joked about it with his second,
tossed it to the floor, and declared that he would not concede a
fraction. He did not concede. He replied that he would not then
talk peace. Expressing his kindly felicitations, he urged upon Yuan
Shih K'ai the necessity and wisdom of talking terms when the
Revolutionary forces were marching upon Peking--and not before. He
urged Yuan Shih K'ai to join the Revolutionary party, pointing out
that this would immediately end the strife. Li Yuan Hung added that
Yuan's previous history was such that no camp would fit him better,
and, if he would come over, he would be made provisional President of
the United States of China.
One must not expect, however, simply because Li would not talk peace
that he was strong enough to enforce peace. He was not. As soon as
Li's letter went {96} back to Yuan there was activity in the Imperial
camp, soldiers were to be seen moving away towards Hanyang, batteries
were shifted, trenching went on apace, a pontoon bridge was started
by the Imperialists across the Han and knocked to pieces by the
Hanyang Revolutionary guns, and it seemed as if a battle was
immediately imminent. And then it commenced again. One cannot
describe the conditions. The war was brought to our very doors.
Fellows had bullets whizzing in their bedrooms, shells dropped all
over the Foreign Concessions. It was never safe to be out on the
Bund or in the roads of the settlement. Revolutionists were dying in
thousands. All hospitals were full. The country was in utter
devastation.
Up to an early hour on November 10th fighting still raged more or
less fiercely. It was generally stated that the Revolutionists gave
the enemy a thoroughly bad time, and had taken up an advanced
position. The bombardment of Wuchang was hourly expected.
Immediately behind the British Concession, not more than a hundred
yards from the road dividing British from Chinese territory, three
big guns of the Imperialists had their noses cocked most
threateningly towards the capital city, and every one settled down to
wait. A peculiar turn of events now was the organisation of night
attacks. Invariably one's dinner hour was ushered in by the booming
of cannon from either side of the river. But during these days the
Imperialists again began indubitably to show their superiority as a
fighting force. The great drawback of the Republican Army was that
it was largely made up of nondescripts, as ignorant of warfare as is
possible to imagine, whilst in the Northern Army there were none but
highly trained men in whom were instilled strongly the absorbing
lessons of the army. They knew nothing else. They did nothing else.
They were fighting machines, and they fought on the same principle as
machines in good order work. In making this {97} statement I am
perfectly aware that there are certain great weaknesses in the
Chinese military organisation that have yet to be removed. But with
the Northern Army, that army which was founded by Yuan Shih K'ai
himself--and he was looked upon as the greatest military reformer of
the time--it had the minimum of these defects. The fact that the
army of each province is for all practical purposes a separate body
tells against efficiency. And it follows that the army that Yuan
created, and which was now mainly engaged in fighting the
Revolutionary enemy, was not so much a branch of the Chinese Army,
but Yuan's Army, moulded as he wanted it. His soldiers, first of
all, had been taught loyalty. What other soldiers in the world would
have stood the test of loyalty as did those northern soldiers during
the early days of November, when the only news they received was the
report that a number of cities had gone over to the cause they
themselves were fighting with their lives to quell?
They were primarily loyal--to what, as events later transpired, is
quite another question. But they were, at any rate, loyal to Yuan.
The photo of Yuan Shih K'ai was in every barrack-room, his name upon
every lip. Again and again as I moved about among the men was I
impressed with the hero-worship of man towards leader. Now, in
comparing these armies, one should compare the two Viceroys under
whom they served, for, with the independent provincial armies, the
Viceroy brought his army up to that standard which he considered
best. That is why the separateness about the branches of China's
Model Army has worked against efficiency. Any one who knew would be
ready to agree that, side by side and compared as armies, the
Imperialist Army would knock spots off the Revolutionary Army under
equal conditions, whilst the latter would not hit a target once in a
hundred rounds. But the conditions were not quite equal. Into the
argument, however, had to be brought another aspect. That aspect
{98} was of all the most serious, and tended towards the termination
of the war as much as any other factor. The Imperialists knew now
that, no matter how many battles they would be able to win here, no
matter how great their slaughter of the Revolutionists would be, the
cause of the Revolution was destined to win. This slowly began to
force itself upon them, and desertions were commonly reported.
Whilst people were talking about the promised bombardment the most
arrant nonsense went the rounds as to the number and the size of the
guns the Imperialists had at their disposal from the north. There
were twelve-inch howitzers, forty six-inchers, thousands of smaller
fry, such as three and four inch guns, and much more of the same
kind. Whether just then they had any of their 7.5 Schneider-Canet
guns here no one was in a position to know, but I believe they had
not. In the Northern Army, however, there were some forty or more of
these enormous guns--weapons so heavy that a team of twelve of the
heaviest American horses would be insufficient to drag one of them.
It is interesting to notice, as an authority recently tells us, in
the Chinese Army there are at least six variety of Krupps, including
1905, 1904, 1888, and 1872 models, with a few 7.5 Japanese guns,
Armstrongs, and Maxims. But when we come to the smaller arms we find
confusion worse confounded. There are 1888-model Mausers, 1872-model
Mausers, Mannlichers, and a few Lee-Metfords, and these again have to
be subdivided. And it was seen throughout this war how the
ammunition for presumably the same gun, captured by the enemy and
used as the same weapon, had been absolutely useless in action; it
wouldn't fit.
The nights were made hideous for foreign residents by the whizzing of
overhead shells and the buzzing of bullets constantly about them.
Several Chinese were shot dead in the streets of the British
Concession, and others more or less seriously wounded, and the wonder
{99} was not that any one was killed but that so many escaped with
their lives in the midst of such danger. It was the common belief
among the Chinese that the bullets had eyes. "See," they would yell,
"'tis a heavenly inspiration that the shells do not touch us ... they
have eyes ... they will not strike us!" And among Revolutionary
admirers this was a common belief of the common people. They had
never seen modern warfare before.
The Imperialists were now forging ahead towards the Han. Their task
seemed an altogether impossible one. It took them three weeks to do
it, and it needed only a stroll out each morning to see the
truckloads of dead being taken along the railway line northward to
realise at what cost their slow progress was being made. General
Huang Hsuin[2] was now directing military operations against them.
Each day junkloads of men were coming down from Hunan to join the
Revolutionists--trained troops from the Hunan Army--and from them
great things were expected. Everywhere one went he heard the boom of
cannon, the whizz of shell, the ping of rifle shot. There was no
escape. Foreigners were not allowed out of the Concessions, found it
unsafe to go outside their houses, suffered shocks so great that all
were on tenterhooks of excitement. Never before in any country were
foreigners living as neutral parties to a war so near. But there is
so much of general interest in the Revolution that much space cannot
be devoted in this volume to battlefield descriptions. China was
making history. Wars have often been described in history, but a
Revolution such as this war was heralding had never been known. It
was moving, and moving at one stroke, a quarter of the whole human
family.
The battlefield was spread from Kilometre Ten to Hanyang on the left
bank of the river, from the Kinshan Forts to Wuchang on the right
side. One could hardly {100} believe it possible that in a fortnight
such utter devastation could be wrought. Villages near by, with
their inhabitants either routed or perished in the ruins, were burned
to the ground; fields of crops were all trampled down, rice-beds were
dug out for trenches, and now all was destruction for miles around in
the country. Little black patches told the sad story of where a band
of happy thriving villagers, once living at peace, was now deserted
and devastated.
When in the early days of the war I used to wander down there and
watch the operations I hardly thought it possible that an army
professedly of forty thousand men could be removed from such an
apparently formidable position. The railway was at hand, and the
whole of Kilometre Ten was so strategically situated that it seemed
an impossibility for the Imperialists, far away in the middle of flat
country, to remove their enemy from such a strong position. But they
did. How and why the Revolutionists left has already been told, and
the commander who ordered the retreat paid the price with his life,
being decapitated by his own men.
Meantime Admiral Sah all this time had been sitting on the fence. It
was known that Li Yuan Hung, as a younger man, had been a pupil of
the Admiral, and each entertained considerable affection towards the
other. Sah had declined to reply to Li Yuan Hung's invitation to
take over control and leadership of the Revolution. He preferred to
sit and wait. When he received a long communication from the
scholars of Hankow, Hanyang, and Wuchang he is reported to have
become disconcerted, and it is to this appeal, which is given in a
footnote,[3] that his conversion to the Revolutionary cause may be
traced.
{101}
As the Admiral, on November 12th, steamed away his ships were
observed to pull down the Dragon Flag and run up a white one. It was
taken to mean that the Admiral and his fleet had gone over to the
Revolutionists.
[1] The following is a translation of Yuan Shih K'ai's communication
to General Li:--
"YOUR EXCELLENCY,--I have already written you twice, but, having
received no answer, I am not aware whether the letters reached you or
not. In accordance with the Imperial instructions I have now to
state that an Edict has been issued offering, first, full pardon for
all past offences; second, that constitutional government will be
established; third, that an amnesty will be granted to political
offenders; fourth, that members of the Imperial Club will not be
employed in high office.
"The above points being granted, in my opinion the government of our
country can be renovated and prosperity be brought back to China. I
hasten to communicate this to you and desire that a method may be
devised by which the present difficulties may be peacefully settled.
The sooner the war is stopped, the sooner will the people and the
country enjoy peace. Otherwise, if fighting goes on, whoever is
victorious or whoever is defeated, not only will the people perish
but the resources of the country will be wasted, until, should the
matter be unduly prolonged, affairs will get into such a state that
the country itself will be ruined. Further, on both sides the
soldiers are Chinese and those who suffer are all Chinese. Whether
the one side or the other succeeds, it is the Chinese that must foot
the bill.
"Personally I have been a long time dissatisfied with the Government
and therefore went into retirement, never intending to accept office
again. In leaving my retirement now my only object was to be
instrumental in composing the present differences. Further, the
Government is now repentant as it never was before. I admit that but
for your valorous actions, the present proposals would never have
been made. The merit of them belongs to you, and in my humble
opinion nothing could be better than to take advantage of this
opportunity and, by concluding a peace, secure the realisation of the
Throne's proposals. We can at least see how the Throne will act,
and, if it is honest, then we will unitedly use our utmost efforts to
promote the reforms. If it is not honest, we can still in
consultation devise other plans, and, as far as I can see there can
be no failure to secure the full fruition of our hopes. This is my
view, and I would ask you to send me an answer in agreement with this
so that I may be able to report the matter to the Throne and carry
out the necessary arrangements.
"As regards your associates, who are all men of great ability, not
only will no fault be found with them, but I can guarantee they will
be appointed to high positions to assist in carrying out the reforms.
The Throne trusts me as one whose word can be relied on, and you
also, I hope, believe that I would on no account go back on it with
respect with you and your associates. I understand that the Throne
is issuing another Edict which will reach you within a few days. I,
because of the many important affairs which I cannot venture to
neglect, would urge you to send me an early answer by the hand of the
bearer of this letter.
"This is my respectful prayer. Wishing you peace and prosperity."
[2] General Huang Hsuin was a famous military leader in China at this
time.
[3] The following is a translation of an appeal to Admiral Sah by the
students of Hanyang, Wuchang, and Hankow:--
"SIR,--To such a person as Admiral Sah with world-wide fame and noble
principles, we humbly submit this letter to him asking him to read it
and consider it with patience and wisdom. China is now in a critical
position. The people have shown great enthusiasm and determination
for the overthrow of the Manchu yoke and to gain back their
independence. But the Manchus are sure to oppose the cause of the
people, so war is inevitable. But is there no way to avert it? Is
there no way to save the lives and property of millions of people?
Yes, there is, and that way is to be decided by you alone. To speak
plainly, the salvation of the people depends upon whether you will
join General Li to help in the present operations of the Republican
Army. Suppose you do not join the Republicans, they are determined
not to submit, but to continue the fight until they have gained their
liberty or met their fate. The word Revolution can never be effaced
from the minds of Chinese, and there could be no hope for peace.
What a horrible thing it will be if you would refuse to join and
remain indifferent. On the other hand, if you join them after the
perusal of this letter, things can be settled easily and quietly.
There will be no civil war along the Yangtze Valley. All that our
brethren will have to do is to march northward to Peking and take
over the control of our Empire from the Manchus. Our Kingdom will be
managed by our own people. What a noble heroic and patriotic work
you so great a man have to do for the independence of our country.
On the brink of joining the Republicans perhaps you will be doubting
the behaviour of the soldier. We can assure you that it is noble and
righteous. How they have been well treating their brethren and
friendly in protecting foreigners is a thing which has never appeared
in our history during the time of civil war. All our brethren here
have shown their intense enthusiasm in offering assistance to the
Republican Army and sharing their sympathy with the cause. Foreign
settlements have approved their action, recognised their right and
yield to their reasonable demands. This bears an evident witness
that they are not rebels of any kind, but the Army of the sacred
salvation of four hundred millions of their brethren in China.
Again, Sir, perhaps you will hesitate to join the Republicans when
you think it ungrateful to turn disloyal to the Manchus, and it might
be that you will think you have derived much benefit from the
Manchus, but, Sir, the benefit which seems to be derived from them is
in reality obtained indirectly from the Han people, who are the
source of all wealth, prosperity and official honour. Moreover, your
duty, Sir, is to profit the many, not the few, to save the people,
not to destroy them, to help your own race and not the alien, and to
stand by the righteous and not by the wicked. The Manchurian yoke
has been the barrier against the growth and development of the Han
people. It is the Manchus who would not send many students abroad at
an earlier date in order to acquire Western civilisation and
education. It is the Manchus who will not put the returned students
into proper position. It was the Manchu that roused the Boxer
Revolt, which has weakened the Empire and made it poor. And it is
the Manchus who are misappropriating the loans raised from Foreign
Powers. They have squandered the funds from the imposition of taxes
for their private sensual pleasures, such as the construction of
parks and the building of beautiful residences. They have encouraged
squeezes, practised villainies, sold offices and brevet ranks, and
demoralised the Customs. They have decided cases unjustly, and what
not?
"Therefore, Admiral, we appeal to your general sympathy and wisdom
and plead for the safety and welfare of four hundred million souls
for the free growth and development of the Chinese, who, if allowed
to be free, are bound to make a wonderful contribution that will go
to enrich the civilisation of the whole world. If you would disarm
your gunboats and cruisers and steam up to Hankow, all the people in
these three cities will be enraptured to welcome you with wild
enthusiasm and intense honour."
{102}
[Transcriber's note: In the source book, this page contained the
final portion of what is now this chapter's footnote 3.]
{103}