Winning the Wilderness

“You must learn to be a Christian. You must know what service for humanity means. You need not hunt for the opportunity to prove this. The opportunity is hurrying toward you now out of the Unknown.”

“It is here, the opportunity,” he murmured. “Oh, God, make me a fit soldier for Thy service.”

He did not pray for safety from danger and death; he asked for fitness to serve and in that moment his great lesson was learned. There came an instant’s longing for Dr. Carey; then the battle storm burst and he did not think any more, he fought. It were useless to picture that struggle.

Nothing counts in warfare till the results are shown. For six hours the fighting did not cease, and not at Valley Forge, nor Brandywine, Lake Erie, nor Buena Vista, Gettysburg, nor Shiloh, San Juan Hill, nor in any jungle in Luzon did the American flag stream out over greater heroes than it led today on the plains beside the Peiho river before Yang-Tsun.

At last the firing ceased, the smoke lifted above the field; the Boxers, gathering their shattered forces together, retreated again before the little line of Allied Troops invading this big strange land. And the last hours of that long hot day waned to eventide.

There were only a few of its events that Thaine could comprehend. He knew Little Kemper had received his death wound, blowing his bugle calls again and again after he had been stricken, till the last reveille sounded for him. The plucky little body with the big soul, who had found his brief fifteen years of life so full of “doing.”

Thaine knew that in the thick of the fight the native Indian Infantry, the Sikhs and Sepoys, had fallen in cowardly fear before the Boxer fire. He remembered how big Schwoebel, and Tasker, and Binford, Goodrich, and McLearn, with himself and another man whom he recalled afterward as Boehringer, a Kansas man, had clubbed self-respect into a few of them and kicked the other whining cowards from their way. He knew that Schwoebel had been grievously wounded and was being taken back to Tien-Tsin with many other brave fellows who had been stricken that day. He knew that near the last of the fray a man whom he had admired and loved second to Lieutenant Alford, big Clint Graham, of a royally fine old family of state builders in far-away Kansas, had fallen by the mistaken shot of Russian cannon, and the weight of that loss hung heavy about the edge of his consciousness wherever he turned. But what followed the battle Thaine Aydelot will never forget.

Twelve hundred men rose no more from that bloody field before Yang-Tsun. The fighting force, sixteen thousand strong, was wearing off at the rate of almost a regiment and a half a day, and it was yet a hundred miles to Peking.

All about Thaine were men with faces grimy as his own; their lips, like his, split and purple from the alkali dust. They had had no water to drink in all that long day’s twelve miles of marching and six hours of fighting. Fearful is the price paid out when the wilderness goes forth to war! And heroic, sublimely heroic, may be the Christianity of the battlefield.

“We must help these fellows,” Thaine said to his comrades as the wail for water went up from wounded men.

“The river is this way,” McLearn declared. “Hurry! the boys are dying.”

So over countless forms they hurried to the river’s brink for water. Thaine and Tasker and Boehringer were accustomed to muddy streams, for the prairie waters are never clear. But Goodrich from Boston had a memory of mountain brooks. The Pennsylvania man, McLearn, the cold springs of the Alleghanies, and for Binford there was old Broad Ripple out beyond Indianapolis. All these men came down with dry canteens to the Peiho by Yang-Tsun. The river was choked with dead Chinamen and dead dogs and horses. They must push aside the bodies to find room to dip in their canteens.

“You have one more lesson. You must learn to be a Christian.”

Somehow the words seemed to ring round and round just out of Thaine’s mental sight.

“Vasser! Vasser!” cried a big German soldier before him.

Thaine stooped to give him a drink, and as he lifted up the man’s head he saw the stained face of Hans Wyker.

“It’s very goot,” Hans murmured, licking his lips for more. “Wisky not so goot as vasser,” and then he trailed off into a delirium. “Don’t tell. Don’t tell,” he pleaded. “I neffer mean to get Schmitt. I not know he would be der yet. I hide for Yacob, an’ I get Schmitt in der back and I only want Yacob. He send me to der pen for sure yet next time. I hate Yon Yacob.”

A little silence, then Hans murmured:

“I didn’t go to Kansas City. I coom back to Gretchen’s home by Little Wolf. I hide where I watch for Yacob. I shoot twice to be sure of Yacob, an’ Schmitt, hidin’ in der crack by der roat, get one shot. So I coom to Yermany and enlist. Gretchen, she coom too an’ she stay der. Vell! I help fight Boxer some. Mine Gott, forgif me. I do once some goot for der world dis day.”

And that was the last of Wyker.

The twilight hour was near. The wounded had been borne away by busy Red Cross angels of mercy. Wide away across the Chinese plain the big red sun slipped down the amber summer sky into a bath of molten flame. Then out of sight behind the edge of the world it turned all the west into one magnificent surge of scarlet glory, touching to beauty the tiny gray cloud flecks far away to the eastward; while long rivers of golden light by rivers of roseate glow mingled at last along the zenith in one vast sweep of mother-of-pearl. A cool breeze came singing in from the sea – fanning the fevered faces of the weary soldiers. The desolate places were hidden by the deepening shadows, and the serenity of the twilight hour fell on the battlefield.

Then the men of each nationality went out to bury their dead. Swiftly the little brown Japanese digged and filled up the graves into which their comrades were deftly heaped. The Russian and Siberian Cossack lunged their fallen ones in heavily and unfeelingly. The Bengalese and Sikhs thrust their own out of sight as they were planting for an uncertain harvest. Each soldier from France who lost his life on that battlefield fell on his own grave and there his countrymen covered him over, an unmarked spot in a foreign land.

Thaine straightened a minute above his spade. The cool breezes were grateful to his heated brow. The after-sunset glow seemed like the benediction of the Infinite on the closing act of the day. He saw the hurried and unfeeling dumping of bodies into the holes awaiting them. Then his heart grew big with something unspeakable as he noted how in all that irreverent and unsympathetic action the American and English soldiery alone were serving as brother for brother. In the long trenches prepared for them their dead were laid with reverent dignity and gentleness. Each one’s place was carefully marked with a numbered slab that in a future day the sacred dust might be carried back to the soil of the homeland. As the sunset deepened to richer coloring and the battlefield grew still and still, far along the lines the bands of the English Royal Artillery and the Welsh Fusiliers, with the bagpipes of the Scottish Highlanders, mingled their music with the music of the splendid band of the Fourteenth American Infantry in the sweet and sacred strains of the beloved old hymn:

Nearer, my God, to Thee,Nearer to Thee.E’en though it be a crossThat raiseth me.Still all my song shall beNearer, my God, to Thee,Nearer to Thee.

And Thaine Aydelot knew that his last and biggest lesson was learned.

CHAPTER XXIII

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 roomIn the golden fields of Kansas, when theSunFlowersBloom.’”

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.