"A wind of blight
From the mysterious far North-west we came,
Our greatness now their veriest babes have learned."
[Illustration: George Lynch Captured By The Boers.]
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.