would be a public service if he did!” exclaimed Bruce. “That Yankee upstart is a greater embarrassment than the French priests!”20
“He might buy you a few days if he’s strong enough,” I reminded him. “I’d turn a blind eye to his recruiting, anyway, if I were you.”
He sniffed, but said he’d make a note of it, and then told me with some satisfaction how he’d been urging the consuls and the Imps for weeks past to put the city in a state of defence; now that they had definite word, and a date, his hand would be strengthened tremendously, and by the time they had improved the fortifications and called in more troops, Lee could whistle for Shanghai, however many Taipings he had at his back. For which, he said handsomely, they were deeply indebted to me, and Lord Palmerston should know of it.
Well, I always say, credit and cash, you can never have too much of either, but the best news he gave me was that he was sending me north without delay to join Elgin, who had just made his landing at the mouth of the Peiho with Grant’s army, and was preparing to advance on Pekin. “There is nothing you can do here, now, my dear Sir Harry, to compare with what you have already done,” says he, all smiles, “and it is of the first importance that Lord Elgin himself should have your account of the Taipings without delay. There will be endless chin-chinning with the Emperor’s people, you may be sure, before he reaches Pekin, and your intelligence will be of incalculable value.”
I heard him with relief, for I’d been fearful that he’d want to keep me by him to advise about Lee’s army, and if there was one place I’d no desire to linger just then, it was Shanghai. You see, Bruce, like Jen-kan, might be certain that Lee was going to get a bloody nose, but I wasn’t; I’d seen his long-haired bastards making mincemeat of Soochow, and I’d no wish to be among the gallant defenders when their black flags went up before our walls. So I looked knowing and serious, and admitted that I’d be glad to get back to proper campaigning again, and he and Slater exchanged glances of admiration at this soldierly zeal.
They couldn’t wait to be rid of me, though; I’d been looking forward to a few days loafing and being lionised, and several restorative romps with my Russian man-eater at the hairdresser’s – I hadn’t had a woman since my last bout with Szu-Zhan (God, what an age ago that seemed) and I didn’t want to forget how it was done. But no; Bruce said I must take the fast steam-sloop for the Peiho that very morning, because Elgin would be in a sweat to have me on hand, and mustn’t be kept waiting. (It’s astonishing, how even the best men start falling over themselves in a fret when it’s a question of contenting their elder brother.)
So now you find Flashy beating nor’-west by south or whatever the proper nautical jargon may be, thundering amain o’er the trackless waste o’ waters – which I did by dossing for fourteen hours straight off, and if there was a typhoon it was all one to me. For the first time in months – since I boarded the steamer Yangtse, in fact – I was free of all care, content to be tired, with nothing ahead but a safe, leisurely campaign in good company, while behind lay the nightmare, ugly and confused; not near as bad as some I’ve known, but disturbing enough. Perhaps it was those unreal weeks in Taipingdom that made the memories distasteful; stark danger and horror you can either fight or run from, but madness spreads a blight there’s no escaping; it still made me feel vaguely unclean to think of Lee’s sharp, crazy eyes, or the blank hypnotic gaze of the arch-lunatic on that incredible night, with the joss-stench like a drug, and those wonderful satin bodies writhing nakedly … by Jove, there’s a lot to be said for starting a new religion. Or the Bearer of Heavenly Decrees, maddeningly out of reach … and far better, the lean face smiling wickedly above the chain collar, and the long bare-breasted shapeliness lounging at the rail. And then the crash of shots, the screaming faces and whirling blades surging out of the mist … masked figures and steel claws dragging me through the dark … red-coated legions stamping up the dust like Jaggernauts … black silk flags and burned corpses heaped … a fat, smiling yellow face telling me I knew too much to live … a crippled figure swathed in bandages urging on his fools to die for a handful of dollars … that same boy’s face distorted with horror as a cageful of poor wretches was plunged to death in a mere spiteful gesture. Surely China must have exhausted its horrors by now?
So I thought, in my drowsy waking, like the optimistic idiot I was. You’d think I’d have known better, after twenty years of counting chickens which turned out to be ravening vultures. For China had done no more than spar gently with me as yet, and the first gruesome round of the real battle was only three days away.
That was the time it took from the Yangtse to the mouth of the Peiho, the great waterway to Pekin, and you must take a squint at the map if you’re to follow what happened to me next. The mouth of the Peiho was guarded by the famous Taku Forts, from which we had been bloodily repulsed the previous year, when the Yankees, watching on the touchline, had thrown their neutrality overboard in the crisis and weighed in to help pull Cousin John Bull out of the soup.21 The Forts were still there, dragon’s teeth on either bank, and since Elgin couldn’t tell whether the Manchoos would let us pass peacefully or blow us to bits, he and Grant had wisely landed eight miles farther up the coast, at the Pehtang, from whence they and the Frogs could march inland and take the Forts from the landward side, if the Chinks showed any disposition to dispute our passage.
From the Peiho mouth to the Pehtang the sea was covered with our squadrons; to the south, guarded by fighting ships, were the river transports waiting to enter the Peiho when the Forts had been silenced; for the moment they lay safe out of range. Farther north was the main fleet, a great forest of masts and rigging and smoking funnels – troop transports with their tow vessels, supply ships, fighting sail, steamships, and gunboats, and even junks and merchantmen and sampans, with the small boats scuttling between ’em like water-beetles, rowed by coolies or red-faced tars in white canvas and straw hats. It takes a powerful lot of shipping, more than two hundred bottoms, to land 15,000 men, horse, foot, guns, and commissariat, which was what Grant and Montauban had done almost two weeks earlier, and by all accounts it was still bedlam at the Pehtang landing-place.
“Won’t have you ashore until tomorrow, colonel, at this rate,” says my sloop commander, and being impatient by now to be off his pitching little washtub, I took a look at the long flat coast-line a bare mile away, and made a damned fool suggestion.
We were about half-way between Peiho and Pehtang, in the middle of the fleet, but over on the coast itself there seemed to be one or two flat-bottoms putting in, landing horses on the beach. “Could your launch set me down yonder?” says I, and he scratched his head and said he supposed so, with the result that half an hour later we were pitching through the surf to an improvised landing-stage where a mob of half-naked coolies were manhandling a pontoon from which syces were leading horses ashore – big ugly Walers, they were, rearing and neighing like bedamned as they shied at the salt foam. There was a pink-faced youth in a red turban and grey tunic cussing the handlers richly as I splashed ashore.
“Get your fingers in his nose, can’t you?” squeaks he. “Oh, my stars! He ain’t a sheep, you know!”
I hailed him, and his name was Carnac, I remember, subaltern in Fane’s horse, an enterprising lad who, like me, had decided to come in by a side door. The Walers were remounts for his regiment, which he reckoned was somewhere on the causeway between Pehtang and Sinho – a glance at the map will show you how we were placed.
“Fane don’t care to be kept waiting,” says he, “and we’ll need these dam’ screws tomorrow, I imagine. So I’m going to take ’em over there while the tide’s still out –” he gestured north over the mud-flats which stretched away for miles into the misty distance. “Our people ought to be in Sinho by now. That’s over there.” And he pointed dead ahead. “About
