Flashman and the Dragon

‘Flashman.’ Another chord, and he put his fiddle by and turned to fix me with those wild, pale eyes that I hadn’t seen since Allahabad, when Campbell pinned the Cross on me. ‘Very good, Wolseley,’ says he to Joe, who was fidgeting behind me. He took my hand in his bony grip, nodded me to a stool – and then he stood and looked at me for two solid minutes without saying a word.

Now, I tell you that in detail to show you what kind of a man was Major-General Sir James Hope Grant. You don’t hear much of him nowadays; Wolseley, the boy who was sketching at the door, has ten times the name and fame6 – but in my time Grant was a man apart. He wasn’t much of a general; it was notorious he’d never read a line outside the Bible; he was so inarticulate he could barely utter any order but ‘Charge!’; his notions of discipline were to flog anything that moved; the only genius he possessed was for his bull fiddle; he could barely read a map, and the only spark of originality he’d ever shown was to get himself six months in close tack for calling his colonel a drunkard. But none of this mattered in the least because, you see, Hope Grant was the best fighting man in the world.

I’m no hero-worshipper, as you may have gathered, and my view of the military virtues is that the best thing you can do with ’em is to hang them on the wall in Bedlam – but I know cold fact when I see it. With sword, lance, or any kind of side-arm he was the most expert, deadly practitioner that ever breathed; as a leader of irregular cavalry he left Stuart, Hodson, Custer, and the rest at the gate; in the Mutiny he had simply fought the whole damned time with a continuous fury that was the talk of an army containing the likes of Sam Browne, John Nicholson, and (dare I say it?) my vaunted but unworthy self. Worshipped by the rank and file, naturally; he was a kindly soul, for all they called him the ‘Provost-Marshal’, and even charming if you don’t mind ten-minute silences. But as a hand-to-hand blood-spiller it was Eclipse first and the rest nowhere.7

He thought I was another of the same, never having seen me in action but believing what he was told, and we’d got on pretty well, considering my natural levity and insolence. He couldn’t make this out at all, and I’d been told on good authority that he thought I was insane – the pot calling the kettle ‘Grimy arse’, if you ask me. But it meant that he treated me as a wild, half-witted child, and grinned at my jokes in a wary sort of way.

So now he asked me how I did, pushed coffee and biscuits at me (no booze for maniacs, you see), and without any preamble gave me his views on the forthcoming campaign. This was what I’d come for: twenty words from Grant (and you were lucky if you got that many) were worth twenty thousand from another. I knew the rough of it – twelve thousand of ourselves and five thousand French to escort Elgin and the Frog envoy, Gros, to Pekin, in the teeth of frenzied Chinese diplomatic (and possibly military) opposition. Grant was fairly garrulous, for him.

‘Shared command. Montauban and I. Day about. Lamentable.’ Pause. ‘Supply difficult. Forage all imported. No horses to be had. Brought our own from India. Not the French. Have to buy ’em. Japan ponies. Vicious beasts. Die like flies.’ Another pause. ‘French disturb me. No experience. Great campaigns, Peninsula, Crimea. Deplorable. No small wars. Delays. Cross purposes. Better by ourselves. Hope Montauban speaks English.’

That would make one of you, thinks I. Would the Chinese fight, I asked, and a long silence fell.

‘Possibly.’ Pause. ‘Once.’

Believe it or not, I could see he was in capital spirits, in his careful way – no nonsense about beating these fellows out of sight or being in Pekin next week, which you’d have got from some of our firebrand commanders. His doubts – about the French, and supply transport – were small ones. He would get Elgin and Gros to Pekin, without a shot fired if he could contrive it – but God help the Manchoos if they showed fight. Bar Campbell, there wasn’t a general I’d have chosen in his place. I asked him, what was the worst of it.

‘Delay,’ says he. ‘Chinese talk. Can’t have it. Drive on. Don’t give ’em time to scheme. Treacherous fellows.’

I asked him the best of it, too, and he grinned.

‘Elgin. Couldn’t be better. Clever, good sense. Goodbye, Flashman. God bless you.’

Perhaps he said more than that, but d’ye know, I doubt it – I can see him yet, bolt upright on his camp-stool, the lean, muscular arms folded across his long body, the grizzled whiskers like a furze-bush, chewing each word slowly before he let it out, the light eyes straying ever and anon to his beloved bull fiddle. As Wolseley strolled with me down to the jetty, we heard it again, like a ruptured frog calling to its mate.

‘The Paddy-field Concerto, with Armstrong gun accompaniment,’ says he, grinning. ‘Perhaps he’ll have it finished by the time we get to Pekin.’

I had learned all they could tell me, and since Hong Kong is a splendid place to get out of, I caught the packet up to Shanghai to present myself to Bruce, as directed. It was like going into another world – not that Shanghai was much less of a hell-hole than Hong Kong, but it was China, you understand. Down in the colony it was England peopled by yellow faces, and British law, and the opium trade, and all thoughts turning to the campaign. Shanghai was the great Treaty Port, where the Foreign Devil Trade Missions were – British, French, German, American, Scowegian, Russian, and all, but it was still the Emperor’s city, where we were tolerated and detested (except for what could be got out of us), and once you poked your nose out of the consulate gate you realised you were living on the dragon’s lip, with his fiery eyes staring down on you, and even the fog that hung over the great sprawling native city was like smoke from his spiky nostrils.

The Model Settlement was much finer than Hong Kong, with the splendid houses of the taipans, and the Bund with its carriages and strollers, and consulate buildings that might have come from Delhi or Singapore, with gardens high-walled to keep out the view – and then you ventured into the native town, stinking and filthy and gorged with humanity (with Chinese, anyhow), with its choked alleys and dung-heaps, and baskets of human heads hung at street-corners to remind you that this was a barbarous, perilous land of abominable cruelty, where if they haven’t got manacles or cords to secure a suspected petty thief, why, they’ll nail his hands together, you see, until they get him to the hoosegow, where they’ll keep him safe by hanging him up by his wrists behind his back. And that is if he’s merely suspected – once he’s convicted (which don’t mean for a moment that he’s guilty), then his head goes into the basket – if he’s lucky. If the magistrate feels liverish, they may flog him to death, or put the wire jacket on him, or fry him on a bed of red-hot chains, or dismember him, or let him crawl about the streets with a huge wooden collar on his neck, until he starves, or tattoo him to death.

This may surprise you, if you’ve heard about the fiendish ingenuity of Chinese punishment. The fact is that it’s fiendish, but not at all ingenious; just beastly, like the penal code of my dear old friends in Madagascar. And for all their vaunted civilisation, they could teach Queen Ranavalona some tricks of judicial procedure which she never heard of. In Madagascar, one way of determining guilt is to poison you, and see if you spew – I can taste that vile tanguin yet. In China, I witnessed the trial of a fellow who’d caught his wife performing with the lodger, and done for them both with an axe. They tried him for murder by throwing the victims’ heads into a tub of water and stirring it; the two heads ended up floating face to face, which proved the adulterers’ affection, so the prisoner was acquitted and given a reward for being a virtuous husband. That was, as I recall, the only Chinese trial I attended where the magistrate and witnesses had not been bribed.

So much for the lighter side of Chinese life, which I’m far from exaggerating – indeed, it was commonplace; after a while you hardly noticed the dead beggars in the gutters and cesspits, or the caged criminals left to starve and rot, or even the endless flow of headless corpses into the chow-chow water of the Yangtse estuary off Paoshan – a perpetual reminder that only a short way upriver, no farther than Liverpool is from London, the Imperials and Taipings were tearing each other (and most of the local populace) to pieces in the great struggle for Nanking. Imp gunboats were blockading the Yangtse within fifty miles, and Shanghai was full of rumours that soon the dreaded Chang-Maos, the Long-Haired Taiping Devils, would be marching on the Treaty Port itself. They’d sacked it once, years ago, and now the Chinese merchants were in terror, sending away their goods and families, and our consular people were wondering what the deuce to do, for trade would soon be in a desperate fix – and trade profit was all we were in China for. They could only wait, and wonder what was happening beyond the misty wooded flats and waterways of the Yangtse valley, in that huge, rich, squalid, war-torn empire, sinking in a welter of rebellion, banditry, corruption and wholesale slaughter, while the Manchoo Emperor and his governing nobles luxuriated in blissful oblivion in the Summer Palace far away at Pekin.

‘The chief hope must be that our army can reach Pekin in time to bring the Emperor to his senses,’ Bruce told me when I reported at his office in the consulate. ‘Once the treaty’s ratified, trade revived, and our position secure, the country can be made stable soon enough. The rebellion will be ended, one way or t’other. But if, before then, the rebels were to take Shanghai – well, it might be the last straw that brought down the Manchoo Empire. Our position would be … delicate. And it would hardly be worth going to Pekin, through a country in chaos, to treat with a government that no longer existed.’

He was a cool, knowledgeable hand, was Bruce, for all the smooth cheeks and fluffy hair that made him look like a half-witted cherub; he might have been discussing Sayers’s chances against Heenan rather than the possible slaughter of himself and every white soul on the peninsula. He was brother to Elgin, who was coming out as ambassador, but unlike most younger sons he didn’t feel bound to stand on his dignity.8 He was easy and pleasant, and when I asked him if there was a serious possibility that the Taipings might attack Shanghai, he shrugged and said there was no way of telling.

‘They’ve always wanted a major port,’ says he. ‘It would strengthen their cause immensely to have access to the outside world. But they don’t want to attack Shanghai if they can help it, for fear of offending us and the other Powers – so Loyal Prince Lee, the ablest of the rebel generals, writes me a letter urging us to admit his armies peacefully to Shanghai and then join him in toppling the Manchoos. He argues that the Taipings are Christians, like ourselves, and that the British people are famous for their sympathy to popular risings against tyrannical rulers – where he got that singular notion I can’t think. Maybe he’s been reading Byron. What about that, Slater – think he reads Byron?’

‘Not in the original, certainly,’ says the secretary.

‘No, well – he also extols the enlightened nature of Taiping democracy, and assures us of the close friendship of the Taiping government when (and if) it comes to power.’ Bruce sighed. ‘It’s a dam’ good letter. I daren’t even acknowledge it.’

For the life of me I couldn’t see why not. A Taiping China couldn’t help but be better than the rotten Manchoo Empire, whose friendship was doubtful, to say the least. And if we backed them, they’d whip the Manchoos in no time – which would mean the Pekin expedition was unnecessary, and Hope Grant and Flashy and the lads could all go home. But Bruce shook his head.

‘You don’t lightly overthrow an Empire that’s lasted since the Flood, to let in an untried and damned unpromising rabble of peasants. God knows the Manchoos are awkward, treacherous brutes, but at least they’re the devil we know. Oh, I know the Bishop of Victoria sees the finger of divine providence in the Taiping Rebellion, and our missionaries call them co-religionists – which I strongly suspect they’re not. Even if they were, I’ve known some damned odd Christians, eh, Slater?’

‘South America, what?’ says Slater, looking glum.

‘Besides, could such people govern? They’re led by a visionary, and their chief men are pawnbrokers, clerks, and blacksmiths! Talk about Jack Cade and Wat Tyler! Lee’s the best of ’em, and Hung Jen-kan’s civilised, by all accounts – but the rest are bloody-minded savages who rule their conquered provinces by terror and enslavement. Which is no way to win a war, I’d say. They’d be entirely unpredictable, with their lunatic king liable to have a divine revelation telling him to pitch out all foreign devils, or declare war on Japan!’

‘But suppose,’ I ventured, ‘the Taipings win, in the end?’

‘You mean,’ says Bruce, looking more cherubic than ever, ‘suppose they look likely to win. Well, H.M.G. would no doubt wish to review the position. But while it’s all to play for, we remain entirely neutral, respecting the Celestial Emperor as the established government of China.’

I saw that, but wondered if, in view of the possible Taiping threat to Shanghai, it mightn’t be politic to jolly along this General Lee with fair words – lie to him, like.

‘No. The Powers agree that all such overtures as Lee’s letter must be ignored. If I acknowledged it, and word reached Pekin, heaven knows what might happen to our forthcoming negotiations with the Imperial Government. They might assume we were treating with the rebels, and Grant might even have a real war on his hands. We may have to talk to the Taipings sometime – unofficially,’ says he, thoughtfully, ‘but it will be at a time and place of our choosing, not theirs.’

All of which was of passing interest to me; what mattered was that Elgin wasn’t due out until June, and as his personal intelligence aide I could kick my heels pleasantly until then, sampling the delights of Shanghai diplomatic society and the more robust amusements to be found in the better class native sing-songs and haunts of ill-repute. Which I did – and all the time China was stropping its dragon claws and eyeing me hungrily.

Pleasuring apart, the time hung heavy enough for me to do some light work with the politicals of the consulate, for we maintained an extensive intelligence-gathering bandobast, and it behoved me to know about it. It consisted mostly of strange little coolies coming to the back door at night with bits of bazaar gossip, or itinerant bagmen with news from upriver, the occasional missionary’s helper who’d been through the lines at Nanking, and endless numbers of young Chinese, who might have been students or clerks or pimps – all reporting briefly or at length to swell the files of the intelligence department. It was the most trivial, wearisome rubbish for the most part – there wasn’t, alas, an An-yat-heh among the spies to cheer things up – and devilish dull for the collators, who passed it on for sifting and summary by the two Chinese supervisors whose names, I swear to God, were Mr Fat and Mr Lin. By the time they’d pieced and deduced and remembered – well, it’s surprising what can emerge from even the most mundane scraps of information.

For example, it was the strangest thing that enabled us to foresee the end of the great siege of Nanking in April ’60. The Imperialists had huge entrenchments circling the city, and the river blockaded on both sides, but couldn’t breach the rebel defences. The Taipings, hemmed within the city, had various forces loose in the countryside, but nothing apparently strong enough to raise the siege. It was such a stalemate that a great fair had actually been established between the Imp lines and the city walls, where both sides used to meet and fraternise, and the Imps sold all manner of goods to the Taipings! They brought food, opium, women, even arms and powder, which the Taipings bought with the silver they’d found in Nanking when they captured it back in ’53.

A ludicrous state of affairs, even for China; it took my fancy, and when one of our spies sent down particulars of the market trading, I happened to glance through it – and noted an item which seemed a trifle odd. I ain’t given to browsing over such things, you may be sure, and I wish to heaven I’d never seen this one, for what I noticed proved to be a vital clue, and set Bruce thinking earlier than he need have done, with the most ghastly consequences to myself.

‘Here’s a rum thing, Mr Fat,’ says I. ‘Why should the Taipings be buying bolts of black silk? Dammit, they spent 500 taelsfn1 on it this week – more than they spent on cartridge. Are they expecting funerals?’

‘Most singular,’ says he. ‘Mr Lin, have the goodness to examine the return for last week.’

So they did – and the Taipings had bought even more black silk then. They clucked over it, and burrowed into their records, and came to an astonishing conclusion.

Whenever the Taipings undertook any desperate military action, they invariably raised black silk flags in every company, which their soldiers were bound to follow on pain of death – they even had executioners posted in the ranks to behead any shirkers, which must have done wonders for their recruiting, I’d have thought. And when we learned presently that the black silk had been sent out of the city to two of the Taiping armies in the field – the Golden Lions of the famous Loyal Prince Lee, and the Celestial Singers under Chen Yu-cheng – it was fairly obvious that Lee and Chen were about to fall on the Imp besiegers. Which, in due course, they did, and our knowing about it in advance enabled the Hon. F. W. A. Bruce to plan and scheme most infernally, as I said. (If you wonder that the Imps didn’t realise the significance of the black silk they were selling the Taipings – why, that’s the Imperial Chinese Army for you. Even if they had, they’d likely just have yawned, or deserted.)

I was fool enough to be mildly pleased at spotting the item – Fat and Lin regarded me with awe for days – but I wasn’t much interested, having discovered far more important matter in the secret files, which enabled me to bring off a splendid coup, thus:

It appeared that Countess H—, wife of a senior attaché at the Russian mission, paid weekly visits to a Chinese hairdresser, and, under the pretext of being beautified, regularly entertained four(!) stalwart Manchoo Bannermen in a room above the shop, later driving home with a new coiffure and a smug expression.

[Official conclusion by Fat and Lin: the subject is vulnerable, and may be coerced if access should be required to her husband’s papers. Action: none.]

[Unofficial conclusion by Flashy: the subject is a slim, vicious-looking piece who smokes brown cigarettes and drinks like a fish at diplomatic bunfights, but has hitherto been invulnerable by reason of her chilly disdain. Action: advise subject by anonymous note that if she doesn’t change her hairdresser, her husband will learn something to her disadvantage. Supply her with address of alternative establishment, and arrange to drop in during her appointments.]

So you see, you can’t overestimate the importance of good intelligence work. Fascinating woman; d’you know, she smoked those damned brown cigarettes all the time, even when … And kept a tumbler of vodka on the bedside table. But I digress. Bruce was preparing his bombshell, and it was on my return from an exhausting afternoon at the hairdresser’s that he informed me, out of the blue, that he was sending me to Nanking.

There was a time when the notion of intruding on the mutual slaughter of millions of Chinese would have had me squawking like an agitated hen, but I knew better now. I nodded judiciously, while my face went crimson (which it does out of sheer funk, often mistaken for rage and resolution) and my liver turned its accustomed white. Aloud I wondered, frowning, if I were the best man to send … a clever Chinese might do it better … one didn’t know how long it would take … have to be on hand when Elgin arrived … might our policy not be compromised if a senior British officer were seen near rebel headquarters … strict neutrality … of course, Bruce knew best …

‘It can’t be helped,’ says he briskly. ‘It would be folly not to employ your special talents in this emergency. The battle is fully joined before Nanking, and there’s no doubt the Taipings will crush the Imps utterly in the Yangtse valley, which will alter the whole balance in China; at a stroke the rebels become masters of everything between Kwangsi and the Yellow Sea.’ He swept his hand across the southern half of China on his wall map.

‘I said some weeks ago that a time might come when we must talk to the Taipings,’ says he, and for once the cherub face was set and heavy. ‘Well, it is now. After this battle, Lee’s hands will be free, and it’s my belief that he will march on Shanghai. If he does, then we and France and America and Russia can ignore the Taipings no longer; we’ll be bound to choose once and for all between them and the Manchoos.’ He rubbed a hand across his jaw. ‘And that’s a perilous choice. We’ve avoided it for ten years, and I’m damned if I want to see it made now, in haste.’

I said nothing; I was too busy recalling, with my innards dissolving, that at the last great battle for Nanking, when the Taipings took it in ’53, the carnage had been frightful beyond contemplation. Every Manchoo in the garrison had been massacred, 20,000 dead in a single day, all the women burned alive – and it would be infinitely worse now, with both Taipings and Imp fugitives joining in an orgy of slaughter and pillage, raping, burning, and butchering everything in sight. Just the place to send poor Flashy, with his little white flag, crying: ‘Please, sir – may I have a word …?’

‘We can only maintain a de facto neutrality by keeping ’em at a distance,’ Bruce was saying. ‘If they advance on Shanghai, we’re bound either to fight – and God help us – or come to terms with them, which the Manchoos would regard as a flagrant betrayal – and God help our Pekin expedition. So it is our task to see that the Taipings don’t come to Shanghai.’

‘How the deuce d’you do that?’ I demanded. ‘If they beat the Imps at Nanking, and have blood in their eye, they won’t stand still!’

‘You don’t know the Taipings, Sir Harry,’ says he. ‘None of us does – except to know that with them anything is possible. I think they’ll come to Shanghai – but this crazy king of theirs is capable of declaring a Seven Year Tranquillity, or some such stuff! Or launching his armies west to Yunnan. It is possible they may do nothing at all. That’s why you must go to Nanking.’

‘What can I hope to accomplish?’ I protested, and he took a turn round the room, fingered a few papers, sat down, and stared at the floor. Devising some novel means of plunging me into the soup, no doubt.

‘I don’t know, Sir Harry,’ says he at last. ‘You must persuade ’em not to march on Shanghai – at least for a few months – but how you’re to do it …’ He lifted his head and looked me in the eye. ‘The devil of it is, I can’t send you with any authority. I’ve not replied to Lee’s letter, but I’m having a verbal hint discreetly conveyed to him that he may expect a … an English visitor. No one official, of course; simply a gentleman from the London Missionary Society who wishes to visit the Heavenly Kingdom and present his compliments. Lee will understand … just as he will understand what is meant when the gentleman expresses the opinion – merely the opinion, mind you – that while a Taiping attack on Shanghai would destroy any hope of British co-operation, restraint now would certainly not incline us to a less favourable view of their overtures in the future.’

‘I can see myself putting that in fluent Mandarin!’ says I, and he had the grace to shrug helplessly.

‘It is the most I can authorise you to convey. This is the most damned ticklish business. We have to let them see where we stand – but without provoking ’em into action, or offending ’em mortally (dammit, they may be the next government of China!), or, above all, being seen to treat with them in any official way whatsoever. That’s why your presence is a gift from God – you’ve done this kind of business in India, with considerable success, as I recall.’ Well, that was so much rot; my diplomatic excursions had invariably ended in battle and beastliness on the grand scale, with my perspiring self barely a length ahead of the field. He got up and glowered at the map, chewing his lip.