his recruitment of the soldiers and sailors who were at one time the backbone of his force; it was also feared that his activities might endanger British neutrality. Ward's biographer, Cahill, is reasonably indignant at the scant credit which the American has received in comparison to Gordon, but seems to spoil his case by overstatement; to say that Ward was 'a military genius who helped change the history of China' may be defensible, but to call him Gordon's superior as an organiser, strategist, and diplomat, and 'unquestionably the greatest foreign soldier who fought in the Taiping Rebellion', is perhaps to exaggerate.
Flashman's account of Ward seems fairly accurate as far as the facts of his career go. A native of Salem, Mass., he was a mate on merchant ships when he was only 16, and had military experience in Central America, Mexico, and the Crimea with the French forces (he spoke French, but not Chinese). He came to China, apparently with romantic notions of joining the Taipings; there is no record of his ever having run guns or opium, but in the spring of 1860 he was mate of a Yangtse steamship, and fought a successful action against pirates when his vessel grounded. He was later mate of an Imperial gunboat in Gough's flotilla, before forming his own private army to defend Shanghai; for the Manchus; in this he was financed by China merchants including Yang ('Takee') Fang, whose daughter he married. Flashman's account of Ward's initial battles is entirely accurate; after his second defeat at Chingpu, and the loss of Sungkiang which followed, he went to France to recuperate, returning to China and fighting with growing success (but not without controversy) until his death: he was killed leading an attack on Tse-kee, on September 21, 1862. Then came Gordon, to inherit his army, and at least one of his gestures: it is a small thing, but while it is Gordon who is remembered as the general who led his men into battle carrying only a cane, the practice seems to have originated with Ward.
He was a small man, active and wiry, with intense dark eyes and a mild, pleasant manner. Little is known of his personality except that he was cheerful and amiable, but he must have had a remarkable gift of leadership, if only to hold his little army together through its early reverses, especially the first assault on Sungkiang, when his entire force arrived in action in an advanced state of intoxication. It may well be that he was as genially eccentric as Flashman suggests; by his own account, he did once fall overboard while pursuing a butterfly, and it is a matter of record that he was carried to the second attack on Chingpu, with his five wounds heavily bandaged, in a sedan chair. (See Yankee Adventurer, by Holger Cahill, 1930; The Ever-Victorious Army, by Andrew Wilson, 1868; With Gordon in China, by Thomas Lyster, 1891; History of China, vol iii, by D. C. Boulger, 1884; Gordon in China, by S. Mossman, 1875.)
The man in the Norfolk jacket, described by Flashman, was probably Henry Burgevine (1836-65), Ward's lieutenant, who briefly commanded the Ever-Victorious Army in the interval between Ward's death and Gordon's appointment. An explosive eccentric from the American South, Burgevine had served in the Crimea, and changed sides several times during the Taiping Rebellion. He lost the command of the E.V.A. after assaulting an official for withholding his troops' pay, went over to the rebels, subsequently deserted and rejoined Gordon (with whom he seems to have been on good terms), tried to change sides again, but was arrested and subsequently met his death by drowning in mysterious circumstances.
20. French travellers to Soochow, including priests and missionaries, had assured Lee of a warm welcome in Shanghai, and since he set great store by the Christian bond between Taipings and Europeans, he advanced on the city in high hopes of a peaceful occupation, only to be thunderstruck when he was opposed. A rumour later arose that Roman Catholic priests, who detested the Taiping religion, had encouraged his advance in the hope that he and his army would be destroyed.
21. Admiral Hope's failure to force a passage at the Taku Forts on June 25, 1859, is a forgotten imperial incident; it was also probably the first occasion on which British and American servicemen fought side by side, if unofficially. Hope's gunboats came under heavy bombardment from the Chinese batteries, and one, the Plover, lost thirty-one out of her crew of forty, her commander was killed, the admiral was wounded, and the remaining nine seamen were fighting their guns against hopeless odds. It was too much for the elderly Commodore Josiah Tattnall, watching from the neutral deck of his U.S. Navy steamer Toeywhan; as a young midshipman he had fought against the British in the War of 1812; now, disregarding his country's non-belligerent status, he took a boat in under fire and offered Hope his help. Hope accepted, and Tattnall's launch brought out the British wounded; only later did he discover several of his men black with powder smoke. 'What have you been doing, you rascals?' he asked, and received the reply: 'Beg pardon, sir, but they were a bit short-handed with the bow gun.' The old commodore made no excuses, for himself or his men, in reporting the incident to Washington. 'Blood,' he wrote, 'is thicker than water.' (See A. Hilliard Armitage, The Storming of the Taku Forts, 1896.)
Hope's failure at Taku met with less sympathy from the London correspondent of the New York Daily News, Karl Marx. Reporting the subsequent debate in Parliament, he wrote: 'The whole debate in both Houses on the China war evaporated in grotesque compliments showered … on the head of Admiral Hope for having so gloriously buried the British forces in the mud.' (See Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China, 1964). Marx was a trenchant commentator on Chinese affairs; he it was who likened the dissolution of the Manchu Empire to that of a mummy in a hermetically-sealed coffin brought into contact with the open air.
22.
Flashman had witnessed one of the most dramatic moments of the China War, and its most famous heroism, when Moyes, 'the drunken private of the Buffs', who had been captured along with an Irish sergeant of the 44th and some coolies (one version says Sikhs), flatly refused to kow-tow to his Chinese captors, and was cut down in cold blood. Yet but for Sir Francis Doyle's poem the incident might hardly have been heard of; today it is largely forgotten, and the facts behind it are difficult to trace. The story rests on the sergeant's authority, and there seems no reason to doubt him, or Flashman—or for that matter, Doyle's poem, which only errs (possibly deliberately) in presenting Moyes as a young Kentish country boy, when in fact he was a fairly disreputable Scot, old enough, it is said, to have been broken from the rank of colour sergeant for insubordination—which seems characteristic. Not much more is known of Moyes, whose presence in the Buffs (the East Kent Regiment) was presumably a matter of chance. A rumour that he died of drink in captivity seems to have no foundation; he was in the hands of the Chinese for barely one day, and the sergeant's account, which Doyle obviously accepted, is consistent with the experience of later prisoners.
It is just possible that Doyle, who was Matthew Arnold's successor as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, had the Moyes story from a most authoritative source—Lord Elgin himself. They had been contemporaries at Eton and Christ Church, where both took Firsts in Classics in 1832, belonged to the small circle of Gladstone's intimates (Doyle was his best man), and may have met again after Elgin's return to Britain in 1861.
23. The hoot of the tawny owl, the chat huant, was a recognition signal among the peasant guerrilla fighters of Britanny ('les Chouans') who remained loyal to the crown in the French Revolution. Probably only Flashman, hearing the words at such a critical moment, would have known (or bothered to note) that the speaker was presumably a Breton.
24. According to British Army custom, the most smartly turned out member of a guard was (and possibly still la) excused guard duty, and given the light task of orderly to the guard. This is known as 'taking the stick', possibly because the orderly would carry a cane rather than a weapon. The practice of carrying the guard on to parade was still occasionally seen in India in the editor's time, forty years ago.
