saw him? He spoke with you? What did he say?” He gripped my arm in his excitement, and I had sense enough to take time to reply.
“General Lee,” says I, gulping. “I’ve never seen or heard the like in my life.”
He let out a hissing breath, and then smiled slowly. “I knew it. I knew it. He is like God, is he not?”
“He’s certainly like nothing on earth,” says I, and caught a drift of tantalising perfume from the Bearer of Heavenly Decrees, who had edged up, all eyes and ears. I gritted my teeth and tried not to notice her. “D’ye mind sending her away?” says I hoarsely. “After such an experience I find her presence … distracting.” He snapped a word and she sped off, undulating in a way which brought sweat to my temples.
“I can see you are much moved,” says Lee gently. “It was inevitable, but I am uplifted beyond all expression.” He fairly glowed with holy zeal. “For now that you have seen him, you too have … faith.”
It didn’t sink in for a moment. “D’you mean to say,” I croaked, “…Šthat was why you had me brought … just to see … him?” I gaped at the man. “In God’s name! Did you have to kidnap me? I’d have gone willingly if you’d –”
“There was no time to explain. It was necessary to be secret and sudden – as you saw. I had learned that there were those who would have kept you from his presence if they could. Fortunately, they failed.”
“But … who were they? Why? See here, I might have had my throat cut by those swine, whoever –”
“It does not matter, now. For you have seen him, in his divinity. And now you, too, believe.” He studied my face. “For you do believe, do you not?”
“By God, I do!” cries I fervently. What I believed, I wasn’t about to tell him, which was that his Heavenly King and the whole kit-boodle of them were cracked beyond repair. I’d have a fine report to give Bruce, if ever I got out of their demented clutches. I shook my head like a man awe-struck. “General Lee,” says I solemnly, “I am in your debt. You have opened my eyes to the full.”
“No. He has done that,” says he, looking like Joan of Arc. “Now you can tell your people what manner of being leads the Taiping. They will share your faith.” He nodded, content. “And I can go to Soochow, and later to Shanghai, with a quiet mind. Whatever my enemies may wish, they cannot undo what has been done for you tonight.”
“Amen,” says I, and on that he said that henceforth I could stay at his brother’s place in perfect safety, for now I’d seen the Heavenly King no one would molest me. I assured him again that it had been the biggest thing in my life, and because I’m cursed with curiosity, I asked him: “General – you have been privileged to see the Heavenly King countless times. Tell me, does he usually receive visitors … alone? Or does he have … er … attendants with him?”
He frowned, and then slowly shook his head. “Whenever I have stood in his divine presence,” says he, “I have never been aware of any but him.”
Which suggested either that I had caught his majesty off duty, so to speak, or that his faithful followers were so besotted with worship that they didn’t notice, or didn’t care, when naked trollops climbed all over him. Some damned odd cabinet meetings they must have had. One thing was sure, they didn’t call Lee the Loyal Prince for nothing.
Now I’ve told you plain, at some length, of my first day and night in Nanking, because there’s no better way of showing you what the Taiping was like, and in the two long months I was with them everything I saw merely went to confirm that first impression. I saw much of their city, of their crazy laws and crazier religion, of the might and ruthlessness of the military (when I was with Lee at the capture and sack of Soochow), of the blossoming incompetence of their topheavy administration, of the abyss between the despotic, luxuriating rulers and the miserable slave populace in this glorious revolution dedicated to equality – it’s all in my Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life (one of the volumes D’Israeli’s bailiffs never got their hands on), and ain’t to the point here. Enough to say that I recognised the Taiping as a power that bade fair to engulf China – and was already mad and rotten at the heart.
Don’t mistake me; I don’t preach. You know my morals and ideals, and you won’t find the Archbishop shopping for ’em in a hurry. But I know right from wrong, as perhaps only a scoundrel can, and I’ll say that there was great virtue in the notion of Taiping – if it hadn’t somehow been jarred sideways, and become a perversion, so that the farther it went, the farther it ran off the true. One thing I knew I would tell Bruce: the Manchoos might be a corrupt, unsavoury, awkward crew, but we mustn’t touch this ship of fools with a bargepole – not even if the alternative was to go to war with them. And that was a daunting thought, for the one thing right about the Taiping was its army.
I saw that for myself when Lee took me to Soochow, the last big Imp foothold in the Yangtse valley, about thirty miles south of Nanking and one hundred and fifty from Shanghai. It was a strong place, with heavy fortifications on White Dragon Hill, and as soon as I saw them I put Lee down privately as a bungler who must have been lucky until now, for he’d brought hardly a gun with him. Twenty thousand good infantry, marching like guardsmen and chanting their war-songs, transport and commissariat as fine as you could wish for, the whole advance perfectly conducted – but when I looked at those crenellated walls, with the Imp gunners blazing away long before our vanguard came in range, and the paper tigers and devil banners being waved from ramparts crowded with men … well, it’s your infantry you’ll be wasting, thinks I. How long a siege did he anticipate, I asked him, and he smiled quietly and says:
“My banner will be on White Dragon Hill within three hours.”
And it was. He told me later he had close on three hundred infiltrators inside the walls, disguised as Imp soldiers; they’d been at work with friendly citizens, and at the given time two of the gates were blown open from within, and the Taiping infantry just rolled in like a wave. I’ve never seen the like: those long ranks of red coats simply thundered forward, changing formation as they went, into two hammerheads that engulfed the gates, up went the black death banners, and heedless of the storm of shot that met them those howling devils surged into the city and carried all before them. The battle lasted perhaps an hour, and then the Imps wisely changed sides, and they and the Taipings sacked the place, slaughtering and looting wholesale. I wasn’t inside the walls until next day, by which time it was a smoking, bloodstained ruin; if there was a living citizen left he wasn’t walking about, I can tell you.
“Nothing can withstand the might of the Tien Wang,” says Lee, and I thought, God help Shanghai. I realised then that my soldiering had been of the genteel, polite variety – well-mannered actions like Cawnpore and Balaclava and the Kabul retreat in which at least the occasional prisoner was taken. In China, the idea of war is to kill everything that stirs and burn everything that don’t. Just that.
I was a week at Soochow with Lee, and then he sent me back to Nanking, to ponder and count the weeks till my release. I won’t bore you with their passage; I was well housed and cared for at Lee’s palace, feeding of the best, but nothing to do except loaf and fret and improve my Chinese, and devil a wench to bless myself with, thanks to their godless laws. Which, when I considered what was going on in the Grand Palace of Glory and Light, was enough to make me bay at the stars.
The only diversion I had while I ate the beansprouts of idleness and brooded lewdly on the Bearer of Heavenly Decrees and the Tien Wang’s Heavenly Twins (I was never inside his palace again, by the way) was when Hung Jen-kan would have me over to his house for a prose. The more I saw of him, the better
