Part Two
4
Few Americans paid much attention as their navy and Marine Corps made one overseas landing after another during the course of the nineteenth century. In part this was because most of the landings were not very large; in part because Americans were not very interested in imperialism abroad; but also in part because the American press was for most of that time a dull, anemic beast, heavily dependent upon the financial favors of political parties. Mass circulation publications supported by advertising did not come into full flower until the 1890s. It is perhaps no coincidence that this decade also saw a marked increase in popular enthusiasm for overseas expansion. The two trends converged most spectacularly in 1898. William Randolph Hearst, the exuberant owner of the New York Journal, was exaggerating when he called the Spanish-American War “the Journal’s war,” but even if the Journal and other penny papers did not cause the conflict, they stirred frenzied public support for it.
Once Spain had been defeated, the “yellow press” had need of fresh crusades to boost circulation. The dirty, inglorious war against the Filipinos—the subject of the next chapter—did not fit the bill. Luckily for the newspaper barons, the perfect story emerged from the exotic depths of the Middle Kingdom, a tale of “savage, bitter, cruel barbarous warfare” pitting “Asiatic” hordes against embattled white Christians. All during the summer of 1900 American newspaper readers, like their counterparts in Europe, thrilled to the daily dispatches describing the Boxer uprising in China, the siege of the foreign legations (or embassies) in Peking, and the large relief expedition organized by the leading nations of Europe along with Japan and the United States.
Suddenly, with cruel finality, all hope was snuffed out: EUROPEANS FIGHT TO THE END BUT ARE OVERWHELMED IN LEGATIONS; MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN TORTURED BEFORE AWFUL DEATH! So read the front-page banner headline on Friday, July 13, 1900, in Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, whose masthead boasted that its “Circulation is Greater Than the Combined Circulation of All the Other New York Evening Newspapers.” Similar headlines, albeit less lurid, appeared in leading newspapers across the world. Over the next few days, they provided graphic details for readers. On July 16, the Evening Journal reported:
After killing their wives and children to prevent them from falling into the clutches of the frenzied Chinese, the foreigners in Pekin were mowed down.
The savages slew like beasts.
Pekin ran red with blood. History had a new horror, at which generations will shudder.
Not one of the 1,800 white men, women and children was left alive at Pekin. . . .
Penned in within the narrow walls of the legation buildings, the members of the Diplomatic Corps and their guards fought stubbornly and bravely the besiegement of the Boxers until at length their ammunition was exhausted, huge gaps were made in the walls of their buildings and the mutinous Chinese, with demon yells, poured in upon the gallant band.
But death had come before torture. The last white had died fighting, and the blood-maddened Mongolians had to wreak their hellish ingenuity on corpses.
Various other newspapers ran obituaries for the more notable figures killed in the legations, and a memorial service was arranged at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
There was only one small problem: None of the reports were true. The legations were still holding out. As the Evening Journal reported on July 17, without a trace of embarrassment: CHRISTIANS SAFE IN PEKIN.
The story of the nonexistent massacre apparently had been concocted by a shady American working as a special correspondent for London’s Daily Mail in Shanghai, far from Peking. That this fraud had been accepted so readily by so many vividly illustrates the vast chasm of ignorance and suspicion that separated (and still separates) China from the West. It was this morass of misunderstanding that had led to the senseless siege of the legations in the first place and to one of the odder expeditions in American military history.
Culture Clash
We have already seen how Britain, followed by the United States, France, and other major powers, bludgeoned China into setting aside treaty ports where foreigners could enjoy extraterritorial privileges. Diplomats, soldiers, and traders flocked to this growing list of ports, while missionaries, Catholic and Protestant, set up shop in the interior. By 1894 there were 2,000 foreign missionaries in China who claimed almost 800,000 native converts. They were a profoundly disruptive influence, for they brought with them not just Western religion but also Western civilization.
What you think of this depends on what you think of Western civilization. Many, perhaps most, Chinese did not think much of it. Modernity is always a disruptive influence on any traditional society. It is bound to be resented all the more when imposed from abroad, at the point of a gun. Tales spread of missionaries making medicines out of children’s eyes and hearts, or drinking women’s menstrual blood. The Chinese scarcely needed to invent imaginary grievances since the real injuries they suffered were serious enough. British and American traders imported tons of opium, creating millions of Chinese addicts, under the protective guns of the British and U.S. navies. Western imports destroyed the market for Chinese goods, while Western-built railroads (“iron centipedes”) put bargemen and porters on the Grand Canal out of work. Even worse, China’s defeat in an 1895 war with Japan—the only Asian state that modernized fast enough to attain parity with the West—accelerated the dismemberment of the Middle Kingdom. The Europeans carved out spheres of influence, with Britain taking the Kowloon New Territories and Weihaiwei harbor, Germany Kiaochow and Tsingtao, Russia Port Arthur and the Liaotung Peninsula, and the French Kwangchowan in southern China adjoining Indochina, the spoils of a previous conquest. The final partition of the Celestial Empire appeared imminent.
America alone refused to join the colonial race, although its mariners had helped open China to Western trade. By the turn of the century China still accounted for only 1 percent of U.S. foreign trade, but the dollar value of American exports there had more than tripled during the 1890s and promised to grow further still—as long as the Europeans and Japanese did not bar the way. In 1899 and 1900 Secretary of State John Hay issued his famous Open Door notes, committing the U.S. to maintain China’s territorial integrity and, more important from America’s standpoint, to preserve free trade for all comers—what Hay called “a fair field and no favor.” This policy’s genesis stretched all the way back to 1844 when America had demanded, and won, trade concessions from the Manchu court equal to those granted England after the First Opium War.
Not all of China’s troubles were the doing of outsiders—unless one counts the Manchu rulers as outsiders to Chinese society, which strictly speaking they were, since they came from Manchuria. By 1900 the decadent, despotic Ching dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644, was on its last legs. The government was so inept and corrupt that by comparison, one historian suggests, czarist Russia was “a model of dynamism and progressive thought.” In 1898 the sickly young Emperor Kuang-hsü, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Czar Peter the Great and the Emperor Meiji, launched a series of bold, modernizing reforms. This burst of activity was short-lived. After just 102 days, the emperor was ousted by his aunt, the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi, who had ruled on and off since 1861. A vast mythology has accreted around Tz’u-hsi; foreigners, who dubbed her Old Buddha, claimed that she was sexually wanton and morally depraved. Whatever the truth of the more sensational charges, there was no doubt that she was opposed to modernization and openness to the West.
Thus antiforeign elements were now dominant at court at the same time that the I-ho ch’üan, or the “Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” were spreading in the countryside. The Boxers, as they came to be known among foreigners because of their martial arts expertise, resembled other millennial movements elsewhere—the Sudanese Mahdists in the 1880s, for example, or the Sioux Ghost Dancers in 1890—among peoples whose traditional way of life was crumbling before the onslaught of modernity. The Boxers fed off hopelessness and despair, and there was plenty of both in north China in 1898–99. Catastrophic floods swept Shantung province in 1898, followed by drought that winter. Millions of peasants were left landless and hungry. They became prime recruits for the Boxers, who blamed all their troubles on the foreigners (Primary Devils), Chinese Christians (Secondary Devils) and collaborators with both (Tertiary Devils).
The Boxers spread placards that read: “Heaven is now sending down eight million spirit soldiers to extirpate these foreign religions, and when this has been done there will be a timely rain.” These spirit soldiers were said to possess the Boxers when they chanted magical incantations, supposedly making them invulnerable to bullets. Boxer leaders even fired blunderbusses loaded with blanks at their followers to demonstrate their powers. When Boxers were killed, their leaders invariably declared that the dead men had been insufficiently pious, or blamed some other cause.
MAP 4.1China and Korea, circa 1900
The Boxers had few leaders of stature; they were a spontaneous peasant uprising, instantly identifiable by their red banners, sashes, and turbans. Previous secret societies had been anti-Manchu, and some Boxers showed initial inclinations in that direction, but they were co-opted by xenophobic mandarins who particularly resented foreign missionaries. Their slogan became: Support the Manchus, Destroy the Foreign.
Originating in German-dominated Shantung province in 1898, where the Chinese governor was sympathetic, by early the next year the Boxers had spread next door to Chihli province, where Peking was located and where not coincidentally foreign missionaries had made the most inroads. Some governors battled the Boxers, but the reactionary elements at court encouraged the uprising. The Boxers were even incorporated into local government militias.
“Situation Extremely Grave”
By late May 1900, the Boxers were advancing on Peking, slaughtering Chinese Christians, ripping up railway and telegraph lines, burning churches and railroad stations along the way. Even as they drew ever closer to the Legation Quarter—an area three-quarters of a mile square squeezed between the walls of the Tartar City and the Imperial City, where the embassies of 11 nations were located—the diplomats inside were not overly concerned. Herbert Squiers, the American secretary, allowed his wife and children to travel to their summer home 15 miles outside Peking; they made it back just ahead of a Boxer mob that burned the house.
It was not until May 28 that the Western ministers summoned legation guards from the warships anchored off the Taku bar. With grudging permission from the Tsungli Yamen (foreign ministry), some 350 soldiers and sailors—56 Americans among them—made the 80-mile rail journey to Peking. American marines arrived at the train station without incident on the night of May 31, then marched down the streets of the capital past sullen, silent crowds of Chinese to reach the Legation Quarter. “Thank God you’ve come,” exclaimed U.S. Minister Edwin H. Conger. “Now we’re safe.”
Not quite.
Up to that point only one foreigner had been killed by Boxers—a missionary slain in Shantung province the previous December. After May 31 the Westerners’ situation worsened considerably. On June 3 the Boxers cut the railway between Peking and Tientsin. On June 9 they burned the grandstand at the foreigners’ racetrack outside Peking; in the ensuing melee an English student killed a Chinese. The next day the British summer legation went up in flames. On June 11 a Japanese diplomat ventured outside his legation and was hacked to pieces by imperial soldiers. On June 13 Boxers rampaged through Peking, burning foreign churches and Chinese stores and homes amid bloodcurdling chants of “Sha! Sha!” (Kill! Kill!). A pall of gray smoke hung above the ancient city. Missionaries and Chinese Christians sought refuge in Peking and the treaty ports. Young bucks from the legations, as if going on a big-game hunt, would venture outside to “bag” Boxers and rescue Christians. Westerners killed hundreds of Chinese in these forays, sometimes without provocation, further enflaming the situation.
On June 9, Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister, sent a desperate telegram to Vice Admiral Sir Edward Seymour in Tientsin: “Situation extremely grave. Unless arrangements are made for immediate advance to Pekin, it will be too late.”
The Seymour Expedition
Admiral Seymour, who as a midshipman 40 years before had fought in China during the Second Opium War, hastily organized a relief expedition cobbled together from the allied troops in Tangku and Tientsin. On the morning of June 10, the first of four troop trains chugged out of Tientsin, heading for Peking. Aboard were 2,100 officers and men, among them a 29-year-old naval officer named David Beatty who would go on to command the British battle cruiser fleet at the Battle of Jutland in World War I. The American contingent was made up of 112 bluejackets and marines under Captain Bowman McCalla, skipper of the USS Newark. The officers took full dress uniforms, expecting to be in Peking no later than the next evening.
The column advanced unopposed until it had almost reached Lang-fang, a railway station halfway between Tientsin and Peking. Just outside Lang-fang, on the afternoon of June 11, the foreign troops were swarmed by Boxers wearing red sashes and waving swords, pitchforks, and clubs. Although Chinese troops generally had up-to-date Western guns, the Boxers did not. What they lacked in firepower they made up in suicidal courage. Henry Savage Landor, a British war correspondent, described how the Boxers, “in a state of hysterical frenzy,” dashed straight into the guns of the allied troops, “exposing themselves with bare chests to the bullets of foreign rifles.” At least 35 Boxers were killed by the steady cracking of the troops’ Maxim guns and rifles.
The expedition never got beyond Lang-fang. Ahead, the tracks were torn up and advance parties were mauled by Boxers. Seymour refused to abandon the trains, and they became a magnet for more Boxer attacks. On June 14, 400 to 500 Boxers armed only with swords and spears charged the column while many of Seymour’s men were resting or washing their clothes. The soldiers emptied their magazines at the brave Boxers but still they kept coming. Only a Maxim gun managed to stop the human wave attack, leaving 88 dead Boxers littering the battlefield.
That same day Boxers cut the tracks between Lang-fang and Tientsin, leaving the Seymour column stranded. This happened because the leaders of the French and German contingents had refused Seymour’s request to take a train back to the rear to keep open the column’s line of communication; they were afraid that if they did so, the British and American contingents would have the honor of entering Peking first.
Finding his advance blocked, his rear harassed, his provisions running out, and his ammunition dangerously low, Seymour was forced to make a fighting retreat. The column fell back on Yangtsun on June 18. Here they found the tracks leading back to Tientsin completely torn up. The Chinese attacks increased, now coming not just from Boxers but also from the better-trained and -armed regulars of General Tung Fu-hsiang’s and General Nieh Shih Cheng’s army divisions. On the morning of June 19, the Seymour column abandoned the trains and began marching on foot toward Tientsin, 30 miles away, with the supplies and wounded men being transported in four junks down the Pei-ho River. As they slowly retreated, the men of the Seymour expedition had to deal not only with Chinese cavalry, infantry, and artillery attacks but also with blinding dust storms kicked up by savage winds. Casualties quickly mounted. The Americans led by Captain McCalla bore the brunt of the fighting, because they had been given a place of honor in the lead.
On June 21, Seymour’s expedition stumbled onto the imperial armory at Hsiku, located just a few miles north of Tientsin. The foreigners had no idea of the existence of this 40-acre complex, which gives some sense of how inadequate their intelligence was. The allied troops stormed the compound early the next morning, or at least the Royal Marines did, assisted by the Americans and Germans; the French and Russians refused to cooperate with Seymour’s plan. Inside, Seymour’s men discovered copious stores of modern guns and ammunition as well as plenty of rice. Though Tientsin was only a few miles away, the men were tired and the compound was surrounded by Chinese troops, so Seymour elected to hole up and await relief. The would-be rescuers were now in desperate need of rescuing themselves.
Since the telegraph lines had been severed on June 13, Westerners in Tientsin and Peking had no idea where the admiral’s forces had gone. These 2,100 men seemed to vanish off the face of the earth; many assumed they had been wiped out. The Chinese concluded, not unreasonably, that they had scored a resounding victory in cutting off this Western advance.
Taku Forts
While Seymour tried in vain to reach Peking, allied warships steamed to the Taku bar, the entrance from the Gulf of Chihli to the Pei-ho River, which leads to Tientsin and then to Peking. It was protected by four forts, two on each side of the river, that had been rebuilt by German engineers after being captured by Franco-British forces in 1860. On June 16, 1900, a council of allied officers met aboard a Russian warship and decided that the forts had to be neutralized in order to begin the relief of embattled Westerners in Tientsin. They demanded that the Chinese surrender the forts within 24 hours, or else. The naval commanders took this precipitous step, tantamount to a declaration of war, entirely on their own authority. When Sir Claude MacDonald, the British minister, learned of it days later he fretted that they had “sounded the death knell of the foreigners in Peking.”
Although the allies precipitated the battle, it was the Chinese who fired the first shot. At 12:50 A.M. on June 17, just as the deadline was about to expire, the Taku forts opened fire with their Krupp artillery. A Russian vessel that inexplicably turned on its searchlight suffered heavy casualties in the ensuing nighttime bombardment. Allied gunboats returned fire, but their light cannons made little dent on the thick fortress walls, until a couple of lucky shots blew up two of the forts’ powder magazines. At dawn a landing force composed of British, Italian, German, Russian, Austrian, and Japanese sailors and marines landed in the mud flats and marched 1,300 yards to the northwest fort. The first man over the ramparts, a courageous Japanese officer, was killed. But the rest of the allied troops would not be stopped, and just 15 minutes later the first fort fell. By 6:30 A.M., after almost six hours of combat, all the Taku forts had been taken, at a cost of only seven allied dead and 15 wounded (another 24 sailors were killed in the nighttime artillery exchange).
By all rights the poorly planned and badly coordinated allied amphibious attack against entrenched positions should never have succeeded. That it did is a testament to the poor quality of leadership among the Chinese soldiers. Thanks to these troops’ failure to hold the strong positions at Taku, the way was now open for the allies to advance into the interior of the Celestial Kingdom.
The U.S. took no part in the attack. Rear Admiral Louis Kempff, the senior U.S. Navy officer in the area, decided that he could not initiate hostilities against a sovereign state without direct orders from Washington. The USS Monocacy, an ancient paddle-wheel steamer (she had been part of the Rodgers expedition to Korea three decades earlier), was anchored away from the battle and used as a safe haven for Western women and children. It suffered one hit from a Chinese shell, which didn’t cause much damage. After the battle, the Monocacy’s skipper complained to Kempff, “I feel a natural regret, shared no doubt by the officers, that duty and orders prevented old Monocacy from giving her ancient smooth-bores a last chance.”
Kempff sent off a telegram to Washington requesting permission to join future operations on the grounds that China’s government had, in effect, declared war on America by backing the Boxers and firing on the Monocacy. President McKinley, then in the middle of a reelection campaign during which imperialism was the major issue, agreed. Without consulting Congress, he committed the U.S. to fighting the Boxers and dispatched some 5,000 troops for that purpose (only about half of them would arrive in time to see any action).
Imperial Council
While the battle of the Taku forts was raging, the Boxers were swarming all over Peking, and the Seymour expedition was floundering away, a momentous meeting had convened amid the faded splendor of the Forbidden City. From June 16 to 19, 1900, Empress Tz’u-hsi met with 100 of her top mandarins, princes, and generals to decide on a course of action regarding the Boxers. There was a sharp division between those, led by General Jung-lu and the Southern viceroys, who wanted to suppress the Boxers and save the foreigners, and the xenophobic mandarins led by the bold and brash Prince Tuan who wanted to wipe out the “foreign devils.” Prince Tuan, who had recently been appointed head of the Tsungli Yamen, replacing the anti-Boxer Prince Ching, presented the empress with a high-handed ultimatum that he said came from the Western ministers. It was a forgery, but she had no way of knowing that, and she was angered by the barbarians’ supposed impertinence. When news arrived on June 19 of the allies’ (real) ultimatum to the Taku forts, this sealed her decision. She decided to declare war on the foreigners.
What had started as an internal rebellion in China now metamorphosed into a war pitting north China against the combined might of the West plus Japan. (Southern and central China remained peaceful; the imperial authorities there simply ignored the empress’s decree.) There is much debate among historians over what pushed the empress into this hopeless confrontation. Some argue that she genuinely believed that the Boxers possessed magical powers that would allow them to wipe out the “hairy ones.” Others suggest that she feared the Boxers more than the West. Perhaps she reasoned that her troops were incapable of suppressing the Boxers, and that if she did not propitiate them the Ching dynasty would be overthrown. Whatever her reasoning, the empress’s decision to support the red-sashed rebels proved catastrophic not only for her family but for China.
There is even more debate over what responsibility the allies must bear for this declaration of war. Some historians suggest that if the legation guards had not been summoned, if the Seymour expedition had not been dispatched, if the Taku forts had not been attacked—if, if, if—then a bloody confrontation could have been avoided. Perhaps. Or the legations might have been wiped out. It was not a chance the foreigners in Peking were willing to take. They remembered all too well how the European men, women, and children of Cawnpore had been slaughtered during the 1857 Indian Mutiny.
Following the imperial council’s meeting on June 19, 1900, the Tsungli Yamen sent identical notes to each of the legations notifying them that China was breaking diplomatic relations, and that if they didn’t evacuate to Tientsin by 4 P.M. the next day, their safety could no longer be assured. There was much confusion inside the Legation Quarter over what to do. Most of the ministers leaned toward following the Tsungli Yamen’s demand, even if this meant abandoning countless Chinese Christians to a gruesome fate.
Baron Clemens von Ketteler, the hotheaded, dashing German minister, decided to go to the Tsungli Yamen to stall for more time. He set out at 10 A.M. on June 20, calmly puffing on a giant Havana cigar and perusing a book, as he was borne away in his sedan chair by coolies (as native workers were derisively called). He refused to take any German marines with him and was accompanied only by a couple of servants and his interpreter, following in another sedan chair. Von Ketteler did not seem to care that he had been a marked man for several days, ever since he had thrashed a Boxer he had caught in the Legation Quarter. Just a few minutes after leaving the foreigners’ compound, von Ketteler was surrounded by imperial soldiers from the Peking Field Force and shot in the back of the head. He was killed instantly; his interpreter was wounded but made it back alive. (When the allies took Peking, the Germans identified an army corporal named En Hai as the culprit and decapitated him on the spot where von Ketteler had died. He claimed to have acted under orders.)
“When the story of Von Ketteler’s murder had been confirmed, a shiver of horror shook each and every foreigner then in Peking,” wrote Polly Condit Smith, a young American woman visiting the U.S. legation, “and we realized, perhaps for the first time, the horror of our position.” Any talk of evacuation was now abandoned; all feared they would share the baron’s fate if they ventured outside. There was also no sign of Admiral Seymour’s expedition; one wag in the British legation joked that he should be renamed “Admiral See-no-more.” The foreigners had no choice but to dig in and await Chinese attacks.
Sir Claude MacDonald and another man from the British legation were standing near the gate when, at 4 P.M. on June 20, right on schedule, the firing started. “It must have been on the stroke of the hour when ‘whiz,’ the almost forgotten sound, followed by another and yet another,” MacDonald later recalled, “and then some summer leaves from the trees above fell slowly to the ground, then a bullet struck the coping of the canal a few inches from where I stood and with as much dignity as we could command we walked back into the kindly shelter of the main gate.” Huberty James, an elderly British professor who had long resided in China, was not as lucky. He wandered outside to the Chinese positions and was shot to death.
The siege of the foreign legations, which would last for 55 days, had begun.
The legation area covered 85 acres, bounded on the south by the Tartar City wall and on the north by the wall of the Forbidden City, the whole bisected by a smelly open sewer canal called the Jade River. Besides legations representing 11 foreign powers, there were also numerous businesses serving the foreign community. Into this compound were jammed almost 900 Europeans—including 148 women and 79 children—plus at least 3,000 Chinese Christians. (Thousands more Chinese Catholics took refuge in Peitang Cathedral outside the Legation Quarter.) The European women and children, along with many of the male missionaries, were moved into the British Legation, which had the biggest and most secure buildings. The Chinese Christians were shuffled off to the mansion and 14 acres of grounds (called the Fu) belonging to Manchu Prince Su, located opposite the British legation, but only after the Europeans had looted the palace of any valuables. It would be the Chinese Christians who would suffer the most during the siege, because the Europeans hoarded the stocks of food.
By the end of the siege, the starving Chinese converts were reduced to eating tree bark and leaves, while the Europeans still enjoyed free-flowing champagne. The chief complaint among the Westerners was that all the fresh meat was consumed in the first few days; thereafter they were forced to dine on tinned foods and fresh horsemeat. The prize racing ponies belonging to the diplomats were carved up at the rate of two or so a day. “The all important question now is not if ‘Cochon’ will win more cups in the future,” joked Polly Condit Smith about a prize horse, “but if his steaks will be tender.”
It was almost tolerable if one could ignore the bullets whizzing around, the stifling temperatures (over 100 degrees), and the nauseating smells that emanated from dead dogs, horses, and people. “The temperature is like a Turkish bath without the clean smell,” Miss Smith complained. The men constantly puffed cigars and cigarettes to mask the smell and some of the more daring ladies followed suit. The women took care of the young and wounded, prepared food, and sewed sandbags at a feverish pace, many from Prince Su’s fine linens. It was one of the few times in history that soldiers would shelter behind sandbags made with lace flourishes.
The defense of the compound fell to 408 soldiers and 125 male volunteers. They had few heavy weapons: the American marines had brought a Colt machine gun, the British a Nordenfelt five-barrel gun, the Italians a one-pound cannon, and the Austrians a Maxim gun. That was all they had to face countless thousands of attackers. The area under defense gradually diminished as the siege wore on but never amounted to less than 2,100 yards of perimeter, which left the defenders stretched perilously thin. Under the direction of a Methodist missionary who had been trained as an engineer at Cornell, the defenders erected elaborate barricades around the legations. After a few days, overall command was given to the British minister, Sir Claude MacDonald, a gaunt-faced, veteran British infantry officer who had fought tribesmen in Africa before joining the diplomatic corps. But though Sir Claude was nominally the commander, he did not always manage to convince the various national contingents to obey his orders.
The most immediate threat was fire. In the first four days of the siege the Chinese tried to burn out the defenders. And indeed they succeeded in ruining the French, Austrian, Italian, Belgian, and Dutch legations. On June 23 they even set ablaze the Hanlin Library, the leading repository of ancient Confucian texts in the world, in an attempt to destroy the British legation next door. This was an act of vandalism so at odds with the Chinese reverence for learning that it shocked the old China hands among the defenders. They tried to save some of the ancient manuscripts, but with little luck. As the defenders passed buckets of water back and forth to douse the flames, Chinese sharpshooters kept up a steady pinging. The flames were put out, just barely, but the gunfire continued unabated.
Every night came what the defenders called “the serenade”: steady bulleting into the compound from Chinese rifles and cannons. Since the Chinese abjured using their modern artillery, their firing created a “hellish” noise and commotion but caused relatively little damage. The most dangerous areas were the grounds of the Fu, defended by Japanese and Italian marines, and the Tartar Wall, 40 feet high and 40 to 50 feet thick, held by Americans, Germans, and Russians. If the Chinese commanders had coordinated their attacks they could have overwhelmed these meager defenses. But they never did.
Why the Chinese failed to press home their attack has been a subject of debate for more than a century. We still do not know with certainty what went on at the highest reaches of the imperial government, and likely never will, but the speculation of contemporaries and historians alike is that some of Tz’uhsi’s mandarins were less than eager to slaughter the “foreign devils.” The Boxers, who had started all the trouble in the first place, were not involved in the attack on the legations; a U.S. Marine officer trapped inside noted, “I never saw a yellow-sashed, fist-shaking Boxer . . . during the entire siege.” The most ferocious and effective besiegers were the Kansu Braves, a Muslim army unit led by General Tung Fu-hsiang. But many of the other Chinese soldiers, under the command of General Jung-lu (said to have been the empress’s former lover), often seemed to aim high. They also refused to employ the modern Krupp artillery that could have reduced the legations to rubble in short order. General Yuan Shih-kai, governor of Shantung province and commander of the best-trained division in the entire Chinese army, refused to attack the legations altogether.
This ambivalence on the part of the attackers gave much of the siege a stilted, unreal feel, akin to a Peking opera performance. But if the Chinese soldiers were simply playing with the legations, as a cat does with a mouse, it was nevertheless a dangerous game for all concerned.
On the Tartar Wall
The American contingent of 56 marines was the third largest in the Legation Quarter, behind the British and Russians. Their commanding officer was Marine Captain John Twiggs Myers. Like many officers of his day (and ours), soldiering ran in his family: His grandfather was General John Twiggs, a Revolutionary War hero; his father, Abraham C. Myers, served as quartermaster general of the Confederate army. Jack Myers was born in 1871 while the family was living in exile in Germany following the Civil War. After returning home, he graduated from the Naval Academy.
His postgraduate education included a great deal of colonial fighting. As a second lieutenant Myers was in command of the marine detachment aboard the USS Charleston in 1898 when it was dispatched from California to the Philippines to fight the Spanish. Along the way the cruiser stopped at Guam, a Spanish possession. The ship fired a dozen shots at the ancient Spanish fort guarding the capital. There was no return fire. Instead a Spanish officer came out to the cruiser to apologize for not having any powder; otherwise, he declared politely, the fort would reply to the Charleston’s “salute.” When the poor fellow heard that Spain and America were at war, he promptly surrendered. Myers led a landing party that disarmed the Spanish garrison and secured Guam for the United States.
After fighting Filipino insurrectos, 29-year-old Jack Myers had been sent to Peking along with the rest of the marine detachment from his new ship, the Oregon. He now threw himself into the task of defending the U.S. section of the Tartar Wall. Every day the marines, with the help of Chinese workers, would strengthen their barricades. And every night the attackers would push their own barricades closer to the marine positions. Myers would often stay awake for days at a time directing the defense. A German soldier who served alongside the marine captain later wrote: “He never leaves the barricade, day or night, and in the most critical moments, he is as calm as others are after a good dinner.”
That calmness came in handy on Sunday, July 1, 1900, when the Germans, whose position was next to the Americans, were temporarily driven off the wall by a surprise Chinese attack. Seeing their flank exposed the Americans also withdrew, but the Chinese for mysterious reasons did not occupy their positions. Myers led his men back onto the wall an hour later, and they fortified themselves against an attack from the Chinese-occupied German positions in their rear. The next day the Chinese got bolder and pushed their barricades close enough so that they were literally a stone’s throw from the Americans. They also began building a tower on the wall that would allow them to fire straight down into the legations. Sir Claude MacDonald decided there was no choice but to destroy the tower, already 15 feet tall.
Captain Myers assembled 23 British marines, 15 Russians, and 15 of his own men for the job. At 3 A.M. on July 3, they scrambled over the ramparts and attacked the Chinese, driving them off in hand-to-hand combat. At least 20 Chinese were killed, at a cost of only three dead allied soldiers. Sir Claude later praised this as “one of the most successful operations of the siege, as it rendered our position on the wall, which had been precarious, comparatively strong.”
Myers saw no more combat in the siege of Peking. During the attack he stumbled onto a spear and wounded his leg. Later he contracted typhoid fever and almost died. He recovered, just barely, and went on to have an illustrious career, serving in Cuba, Mexico, World War I, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. He retired as a major general and died at a ripe old age in Coconut Grove, Florida, in 1952. Charlton Heston portrayed a fictionalized version of the marine captain in the 1962 film Fifty-Five Days at Peking.
With Jack Myers out of action, the command of the marines in Peking passed to Captain Newt Hall. He did not command much respect among his hard-drinking and boisterous men; they thought him too timid and dithering. Luckily other marines more than made up for Hall’s deficiencies. Chief among them was Dan Daly, who would later be described by Marine Commandant John Lejeune as “the outstanding Marine of all time.” A 25-year-old private, he was a tough Irish-American from the streets of Manhattan, where he had sharpened his fighting skills while employed as a newsboy in the days when circulation wars weren’t just metaphorical. He was a small man, just 5 foot 6 inches tall and 132 pounds, but he had ramrod straight posture and piercing gray eyes that, wrote an anonymous marine biographer, “looked upon danger without fear.” Like many other young men, he had enlisted in order to fight the Spanish but never got a chance. Instead he had been shipped to Peking.
On July 15, 1900, Captain Hall was told by the American minister, Herbert Squiers, to expand the U.S. position on the Tartar Wall by erecting a new barricade 100 yards in front of the marines’ current position. He and Private Daly crawled out to reconnoiter the area. They expected that other marines and coolies would then appear with sandbags to fortify the position. But none showed up. Hall decided to go back and get help. He told Daly: “I can’t order you to stay here. But if the Chinks can be held back tonight, we can dig in so they’ll never break through.”
Daly spat a stream of tobacco juice and laconically replied, “See you in the morning, Captain.” The private was left alone behind a low stone parapet, clutching his Lee straight-pull 6 millimeter rifle and a bandoleer of ammunition. The Chinese attacked all night in groups of one or two. Daly calmly picked them off, firing at the silhouettes framed by the flames leaping out of nearby houses. At dawn on July 16, Daly was relieved by other marines. He climbed down off the wall and asked his buddies, “Anybody know what ‘Quonfay’ means? They were calling me that all night.” Someone replied, “It means devil.” For his valor Daly won his first Medal of Honor; he would win another one 15 years later in Haiti.
The Japanese, under their outstanding commander, Colonel Goro Shiba, performed even more heroic feats defending the Fu, where the Chinese Christians were camped out, but they were being pushed back by the weight of Chinese attacks. By July 13, they had given up three-quarters of the Fu grounds to the enemy. Everywhere the defenders were being ground down. Casualties mounted (mainly among the Chinese Christians and legation guards), dysentery swept the compound, morale flagged. If the war of attrition continued, the defenders feared, they would not last much longer. The more gloomy men talked of killing their wives and children should the Chinese burst through, in order to spare them “violation” and torture. Polly Condit Smith, not being married, walked around with a pistol to use on herself “if the worst happens.”
Rumors of imminent relief or impending disaster swept the compound on a daily basis. Still cut off, they had no idea whether a relief force would reach them in time.
Tientsin
From the West’s standpoint things were not much better outside Peking. Southeast China remained calm, but in north China bedlam reigned. In June and July, the Boxers went on a rampage, killing more than 200 missionaries and countless Chinese Christians. A number of European women and children were murdered, but some of the grisliest violence was reserved for the second-class devils. Ai Sheng, a resident of a small town in Chihli province, recalled years later that when Boxers came on June 4 they burned dozens of Chinese Christian families to death. “When one young woman escaped from the flames, her belly was cut open with a sword by the Boxers. One could hear the sound of skin separating from bones. Several Boxers grabbed the woman by the thighs and arms and threw her back into the flames. The savagery was unspeakable.”
Those Westerners, mainly missionaries and railroad engineers, who could not reach the Peking legations headed for Tientsin, 84 miles away, which had a sizable foreign concession located south of the walled city. By June 15 the Chinese city of Tientsin had fallen to the Boxers. Two days later Boxers, along with imperial troops, opened a siege of the mile-long concession. At first there were only 1,700 or so Russian troops to defend the settlement against perhaps 50,000 attackers. The Chinese brought up artillery that poured at least 60,000 shells into the Western Settlement. “To show oneself in the streets was to be shot at,” wrote British Methodist missionary Frederick Brown, “and only the fact that these Boxer sympathizers were untrained in the use of arms prevented an immense loss of life.”
Help was on the way. Having secured the Taku forts, Western troops set out to relieve Tientsin. In the vanguard was a U.S. Marine battalion, eight officers and 132 enlisted men, sent from the Philippines under the command of Major Littleton W. T. Waller. One of his young lieutenants was Smedley D. Butler, of whom the world would hear much more before long. They landed on June 19, just two days after the Taku forts had fallen. The next day they entrained for Tientsin, 31 miles away, with no maps to guide them.
Along the way, they bumped into 400 Russian soldiers marching in the same direction. The Russians hopped aboard the train, but the journey was a short one since the bridge ahead was found to be destroyed. They bivouacked on the night of June 20 about 12 miles from Tientsin. In the distance they could hear “the dull booming of cannon and the crash of rifle-fire.” The Russian colonel woke up Waller at 2 A.M. the next day and insisted on advancing on Tientsin immediately. Waller did not feel that 540 men could get through but reluctantly joined in. By daylight, having reached the outskirts of Tientsin, they found themselves under attack on two sides from a much larger Chinese force. “I thought we were finished,” Smedley Butler confessed.
The Russians retreated, leaving the 140 marines with one Colt machine gun to face some 2,000 Chinese. Already three marines had been killed and nine wounded. The Americans had no choice but to retreat. For the next four hours, they trudged down the railroad track, pursued by Chinese cavalry. Along the way Smedley Butler, another lieutenant and four enlisted men rescued a private who was lying in a mud ditch, severely wounded and about to be killed by the enemy. They carried the wounded man for 17 miles. The four enlisted men received Medals of Honor, but until 1914 such medals were not given to naval and marine officers, so Butler had to be satisfied with a battlefield promotion. The marines suffered four killed and nine wounded in this ill-fated advance.
Allied reinforcements finally arrived, and at noon on June 24 the marines led more than 2,000 soldiers through a dust storm into the Tientsin foreign concession. One of the men who greeted them was a 25-year-old American mining engineer named Herbert Hoover who, along with his wife, had taken refuge in Tientsin. In his memoirs the former president later wrote: “I do not remember a more satisfying musical performance than the bugles of the American Marines entering the settlement playing ‘There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.’”
The first order of business was to rescue the woebegone Seymour Relief Expedition, trapped at the Hsiku Arsenal, eight miles from Tientsin, since June 21. Seymour tried to communicate with Tientsin by dispatching Chinese messengers through the Boxer lines. After three messengers had failed, a fourth finally made it through. On the morning of June 25 a relief column of 2,000 men (including Waller’s marine battalion) set out for Hsiku and escorted Seymour’s expedition back to Tientsin. Of 2,100 men who had set out with the admiral, 62 had been killed and 280 wounded. The remainder joined the swelling allied force at Tientsin.
By July 11, more than 12,000 allied troops were in the city, half of them Russian and Japanese, and the allied commanders decided to conquer the Chinese City a half-mile away in order to “silence the pestiferous Boxer batteries.” Among the last allied troops to arrive in time for the attack were two battalions of the 9th U.S. Infantry Regiment—15 officers and 575 men—and the 1st Marine Regiment—18 officers and 300 men—both dispatched from the Philippines. Since they were latecomers, Colonel Emerson H. Liscum, the 9th’s commander, and Colonel Robert Meade, the new marine commander, had no opportunity to take part in the planning of the attack. This was done by the British, French, Russian, German, and Japanese commanders—not, as it turned out, very well—and they simply told the Americans where to go. The American soldiers, who agreed to operate under British General Arthur Dorward of the Royal Engineers, would soon pay the price for the allies’ lack of planning and coordination.
In the early morning hours of July 13 the battle of Tientsin began, pitting 6,000 allied troops against perhaps 30,000 defenders dug in behind 50-foot stone walls. The Americans, French, British, and Japanese moved out to attack the southern gate of the walled city, while the Germans and Russians went around to the east. Coalition warfare proved a mess. The 9th Infantry was supposed to be on the left of the allied attack but due to a mix-up and lack of clear orders, Colonel Liscum led his men to the right. The infantrymen had to advance across open ground, broken by ponds and mudholes, ditches, and embankments. In their dark blue shirts they made excellent targets for Chinese defenders armed with modern Mauser, Mannlicher, and Winchester rifles sold to them by Western arms companies.
Before long the 9th Infantry was pinned in water up to their waists, trapped under the blazing sun, their ammunition running low. “The shelling was more terrific than any I experienced during the Civil War,” wrote U.S. Consul J. W. Ragsdale, who observed the attack, “and I served under General Sherman.” In the hours that followed almost a quarter of the men in the 9th’s two battalions were killed or wounded. One of the casualties was Colonel Liscum, who had survived the Civil War, the Indian campaigns, the Spanish-American War, and the Philippine War. He saw the 9th’s standard-bearer fall and rushed to grab the colors, only to be shot in the abdomen. He died clutching the Stars and Stripes. The onset of darkness allowed the 9th to retreat, after 23 men were killed and 73 wounded.
The marines fared little better. Guided by Herbert Hoover, who knew the area and had volunteered to help, they advanced by rushes to support the Royal Welsh Fusiliers on the extreme left of the allied line. Before long their advance was halted by a swamp. Here they sat, being picked off by Chinese gunners. Smedley Butler ventured out of the trench to rescue a wounded man and was wounded himself. He was carried to the rear by another officer, but the rest of the marines would be trapped in the rice paddies till nightfall “with the Chinese guns thundering an unceasing death tattoo.” “The bullets came like hail,” a marine enlisted man recalled. “I had the heel shot from my shoe and a hole through my hat . . . and that was the hardest five hours I think I ever spent.”
The whole allied advance was stalled and might have been thrown back were it not for the daring Japanese. Early on the morning of July 14, Japanese sappers attached explosives to the South Gate of Tientsin. They tried to light the fuse three times but each time it went out. Finally a Japanese engineer ran forward with a box of matches to set off the powder, blowing himself and the gate to pieces. As Japanese and other allied troops poured into the city, Chinese resistance crumbled. Boxers and imperial soldiers alike fled through two gates the allies had left deliberately unguarded for this purpose. It had been a costly victory, however. The allies suffered 750 men killed and wounded, almost half of them Japanese.
After Tientsin was taken, allied troops and civilians launched an orgy of murder, rape, and theft. An American missionary noted that “those who remained have been treated as if they were all Boxers or spies, and have been freely looted, their houses burned, and themselves driven out to any fate that might await them.” The Germans and the Russians were the worst offenders; some of them would rape women and bayonet them afterward. British war correspondent Henry Savage Landor noted a breakdown along national lines in the objects of the looting. He thought that the Japanese were the only soldiers who showed “any natural and thorough appreciation of things artistic.” The Americans, by contrast, showed no appreciation “for artistic embroideries, nor for rare bronzes and china ware.” Like most of the soldiers, they stuck to grabbing gold, silver, and jewelry. “Sweet lessons in ‘western civilization’ we are giving to the Chinese,” one foreigner trapped in Peking later commented.
A Truce
With Tientsin in their hands, the allies could prepare for an offensive to take Peking. But would they be in time? In mid-July 1900, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, newspapers around the world headlined (in the words of the New York Evening Journal) ALL WHITE PEOPLE IN PEKIN MASSACRED. Ironically, the news of the legations’ fall came just when their position was rapidly improving. Pressure on the Legation Quarter eased almost at once after the fall of Tientsin. There had always been two parties in the Imperial Court, one in favor of destroying the legations, the other opposed. The success of the Western forces at Tientsin gave the upper hand to those forces in the government, especially the southern Chinese governors, determined to spare the legations.
The result was a truce that broke out on July 17. The Westerners were startled to find that the Chinese troops who had been sniping at them the day before were now selling them eggs and even giving tours of their fortifications. The Tsungli Yamen sent over conciliatory messages, as well as fresh fruit and vegetables, and allowed some of the Western ministers to send telegrams, which is how the outside world came to find out that reports of the legations’ demise had been much exaggerated.
The truce was short-lived. The anti-Western elements once again won the upper hand in the imperial court and executed five senior mandarins who favored a more conciliatory stance. The firing on the legations had never totally ceased, and by early August it had resumed with a renewed ferocity.
By this time the suffering inside had increased. Condensed milk was running out and babies were dying of malnutrition. The Chinese Christians, who did not have as many provisions as the Westerners, were slowly starving. Still, hope of salvation was increasing. On August 2, the legations received a message from London, relayed by the Tsungli Yamen, informing them that troops were on the way to Peking. “Keep up heart,” implored the telegram.
Through the Cornfields
The besieged would have taken less heart if they had known how slowly and chaotically the relief column was being organized. Lack of troops wasn’t the problem. Countless Western warships were anchored off the Taku bar, disgorging thousands of men. By the end of July, 28,000 soldiers had arrived in Tientsin. Though few were first-rate—most came from various Asian colonial garrisons: the British troops from India, the French from Indochina, the Americans from the Philippines—even so, they were better officered, better armed, and better trained than their Chinese foes. But the allied generals, like most generals of every age, never felt they had enough forces available. Some suggested that 60,000 men would be needed to take Peking. The generals were finally stirred into action when they received messages smuggled out of Peking informing them of what dire straits the legations were in.
Some 20,000 men set out for Peking on the afternoon of August 4, 1900. There were 9,000 Japanese, 4,800 Russians, 2,900 Britons, 2,500 Americans, 1,200 French, and a few hundred Austrians, Germans, and Italians. The Rev. Frederick Brown, a missionary attached to the force as an intelligence officer, described the long, narrow column moving out:
From its winding form it gave one the idea of a serpent wriggling its way along. At its head were the picturesque uniforms of the Generals and staff, followed by the fine Indian soldiers, mounted on their beautiful horses. Then came the gallant Welsh Fusiliers; while the well-set, business-like United States infantrymen marched next, burning to avenge the slaughter the 9th infantry had suffered ten days before. Then came the Japanese general, with his soldiers in white clothes...
And so on. Accompanying the men were 70 field guns and a long line of supplies pulled by horses, ponies, donkeys, mules, even a few camels shipped by the Russians from Central Asia.
The nominal commander of this polyglot force was British Lieutenant-General Sir Alfred Gaselee, a veteran of the Indian army. But all officers of the Allied Expeditionary Force were loath to take orders from any other nation. Some of the national contingents got along fine; the American and British soldiers, for example, affectionately referred to each other as “damned lime juicers” and “damned Yankees.” But in general, mutual suspicion was rife. As a result the cardinal military principle of unity of command was violated, the expedition’s orders being hashed out every night in a meeting of the various generals.
The American commander was Major General Adna Romanza Chaffee, a dour 48-year-old cavalryman with a fierce countenance, bushy mustache, bronzed skin, and a puffed-out chest festooned with ribbons won in his numerous campaigns. He had enlisted as a Union private in 1861, suffering wounds at Gettysburg and Brandy Station, and had spent much of his career fighting Indians. In 1874, serving as a captain in the 5th Cavalry, he had played a major role in winning the Red River War against Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa warriors. Chaffee had inspired his men with a memorable exhortation: “Forward! If any man is killed I will make him a corporal.” Chaffee had been promoted to general officer rank only in 1898 upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. One person who met the general noted: “He has a high forehead, deepset dark eyes and high cheek bones slightly scarred from smallpox. His years in the cavalry have caused him to be slightly bowlegged and butt-sprung. He walks with his feet wide apart pointing inward and this gives him a mincing crablike gait. . . . His natural habitat is astride a horse.”
His command consisted of the 9th and 14th Infantry Regiments, a marine battalion, a 6th Cavalry troop, and Reilly’s Battery (six 3.2-inch guns from Light Battery F, 5th Artillery, commanded by Captain Henry J. Reilly)—about 2,500 men in all. Although these were regular army and marine regiments—all the state-organized volunteers mobilized to fight the Spanish in 1898 had already been disbanded—most of these soldiers had little experience. Colonel A. S. Daggett of the 14th Infantry estimated that only about 10 percent of his men were veterans, but this experience, being concentrated among the officers and noncomissioned officers (corporals and sergeants), was to prove invaluable. It is hard to get an objective impression of how the American troops compared to other nationalities since observers naturally tended to describe their own country’s troops in glowing terms and to disparage the others. Several observers praised the Americans for their marksmanship and logistics, but the only universal point of agreement was that the Japanese were the bravest and most disciplined fighters.
The expedition followed the Pei-ho River, the same route the Anglo-French force had taken in 1860. The Chinese army made only two determined stands, the first (at Peitsang) broken largely by Japanese troops, the second (at Yangtsun) by Americans. (After suffering these defeats, the Chinese commanders, Yu-lu and Li Ping-heng, committed suicide.) In the latter battle, the Americans suffered eight men killed and nine wounded when a Russian cannon accidentally shelled their position. It seems that the Russian gunners had asked the British Royal Artillery for the range and were given the number in yards. However the Russians assumed it was in meters, since they used the metric system. This was one of the more costly pitfalls of coalition warfare.
But even if there was little resistance on the 10-day march to Peking, the advance was not easy. The temperature was constantly above 100 degrees during the day, and the men had to march through cornfields 10 to 15 feet high, which eliminated any breeze. Many were prostrated by the heat, dust, and sun. Dysentery and typhoid fever also ravaged the ranks. “It was a nightmare,” recalled one marine.
Among those marching in the American contingent was Smedley Butler, the teenage marine captain, who had gotten up off his sickbed and limped along despite a leg wound, sickness from polluted water, and a toothache. Others had less fortitude. One soldier, the war correspondent Henry Savage Landor reported, “who had become a raving lunatic, with his tongue parched and frightfully distorted features, was making gestures to his companions to shoot him, because he could bear the pain no longer.” The country across which the troops marched was littered with dead people and dead animals. “These remain unburied,” observed Colonel A. S. Daggett, “and were food for dogs and hogs and crows and buzzards.”
The advance of the allied column was actually making life rougher for the Legation Quarter, since it was pushing more Chinese troops back into Peking. The Chinese mounted some of the most severe attacks of the entire siege in early August. On the night of August 13, for the first time they even situated a rapid-fire Krupp field gun on the Imperial Wall, where it could fire down into the legations. The gun did more damage in 10 minutes than all the old Chinese smoothbores had done in the past month. Luckily for the legations, counterfire from the American Colt machine gun and the Austrian Maxim gun killed the Chinese gun crew and silenced the Krupp cannon. But what if the Chinese brought up more Krupp artillery? The Westerners feared that the Chinese were making one last push to wipe them out before the relief force arrived.
On August 13, the allied force bivouacked all day at Tungchow, a town only 14 miles from Peking. Here the generals decided upon a plan of action to take the capital, with each of the armies assigned its own objectives. The attack was supposed to start on August 15, but the Russians jumped the gun. On the night of August 13, they sent a patrol in strength toward Peking. Finding the way clear and wanting to get a jump on the other contingents, the Russians attacked at once. This advance had more than a little in common with the Russian race to Berlin in 1945 or to Pristina airport in Kosovo in 1999, both instances of the Russians seeking to beat their ostensible allies to a joint objective. But in 1900 they did not get far. In the confusion of the night, the Russians attacked the Tung Pien gate, which had been assigned to the Americans. After blowing the outer gate with artillery, the Russian troops were pinned down by murderous fire in the courtyard, unable to advance any farther. As soon as the other allied forces realized the Russians were gone from camp, they hurriedly packed up and set out on a mad dash for the glory of being first to reach the legations.
The Americans reached Peking on the morning of August 14, a clear, cloudless day. Unable to advance through the Tung Pien gate with the Russians blocking the way, the U.S. units simply slid south. Here they confronted a section of the Tartar Wall 30 feet high—and no gate in sight. They had no scaling ladders, either, so Colonel Daggett of the 14th Infantry asked for a volunteer to climb the wall. Corporal Calvin P. Titus stepped forward. “I’ll try, sir.” He was the bugler of Company E, a tall, scrawny kid, just 20 years old. All eyes were on him as he slowly slithered up the wall, finding footholds in the eroded stone. As he prepared to go over the top, Daggett wrote, “All below is breathless silence. The strain is intense. Will that embrasure blaze with fire as he attempts to enter it? Or will the butts of rifles crush his skull?” Luckily for Titus, the Chinese were so disorganized that they had no defenders on this section of the wall. He climbed up and shouted down, “The coast is clear. Come on up.”
After a few men had reached the top, they were finally discovered by the city’s defenders, who opened fire. But by then it was too late. There were too many Americans on the wall to throw back. At 11:03 A.M., Old Glory was planted atop the wall. “As that flag was unfurled and stood out against the August sky, there went up to heaven a shout of triumph the Spartans might have envied,” Daggett wrote. For his exploit, Corporal Titus won a Medal of Honor and an appointment to West Point; he retired decades later as a lieutenant colonel.
It did not take long for the Americans to reach the Tung Pien gate, relieve the Russians, and rout the defenders. The Americans then fought their way through the city streets, with the route being cleared by the horse-drawn artillery of Reilly’s Battery. During the attack, Marine Lieutenant Smedley Butler was shot in the chest, but the bullet struck a large brass button and merely knocked him unconscious. He rejoined his unit, coughing up blood. At 4 P.M., the Americans finally reached the legations.
Too late!
No, the legations had not fallen to the Chinese. Almost as galling to American honor, they had fallen to the British.
The American and Japanese attacks on the Tartar City had drawn off most of the defenders, allowing the British to waltz in almost uncontested. They found a water gate leading into the Legation Quarter and at 2:45 P.M. on August 14, 1900, Sikh soldiers wearing khaki uniforms and red turbans crawled through the mud and muck of the sewer to end the siege of Peking. There was quite a contrast between rescuers and rescued. The relief column had been on the march for a week; the men were tired, sweaty, and dirty. Henry Savage Landor noted that some of the nonfighting men in the legations, on the other hand, “wore starched shirts, with extra high glazed collars, fancy flannel suits, and vari-coloured ties. We dirty creatures thought these particular fellows silly and objectionable; they put on such patronising airs that it made one almost feel sorry we had relieved them.”
Still there was no mistaking the joy in the legations at finally being rescued. The siege had taken its toll. Sixty-six foreigners had been killed, most of them servicemen (including eight Americans); amazingly enough, only one European woman and six children died. Another 150 foreigners had been wounded. Many more Chinese Christians had perished. Outside Peking 240 missionaries were murdered in north China in 1900, many of them women and children. And some 30,000 Chinese converts died.
Inside Peking, the Legation Quarter had not been the worst hit. The Chinese attacks took an even more fearsome toll in the Peitang Cathedral. Thirty-four hundred Chinese Christians and 55 missionaries clustered inside, protected by just 43 Italian and French sailors commanded by French Sub-Lieutenant Paul Henry. There were more people besieged here than in the legations, and they had less food, faced more determined attacks, and took more casualties. More than 400 died in all, including 75 children, some from wounds, others from starvation and disease. It was truly a miracle that the rest survived. The Boxers rather imaginatively attributed their failure to a “ten thousand woman flag,” woven out of pubic hair, that the defenders supposedly draped on the cathedral, thus negating the Boxers’ magic.
Reilly’s Battery
Having conquered Peking, the allies were uncertain as to how to proceed. What were they to do with the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi? If they deposed her, who would rule China? To avoid this choice, the allies insisted on pretending that they had been fighting simply to suppress the Boxer “rebellion”; they refused to acknowledge the empress’s declaration of war. It was just as well from their perspective that just as the Allied Expeditionary Force was arriving she slipped out of Peking disguised as a peasant. She then went on a grand “tour of inspection” of the countryside, trying mightily to pretend that her capital was not occupied by smelly barbarians. That still left the question of how to handle the Imperial City and the Forbidden City. If the allies invaded the empress’s domain, they feared she would lose too much face with her subjects; but if they stayed out, they feared she would be able to tell her people that they had not really been defeated.
General Adna Chaffee, apparently on his own initiative, ordered U.S. troops to advance on the Forbidden City before dawn on August 15, the day after he had arrived in Peking. First they had to penetrate the adjoining Imperial City, which required passing through three heavy wooden gates, each one at least 8 inches thick and sealed with enormous padlocks. This was a job for Reilly’s Battery. A couple of horse-drawn guns were wheeled into position in front of the first gate to the Imperial City. A lieutenant coolly walked over and chalked an X in the middle, ignoring the bullets ricocheting around him. Then he strolled back and ordered his guns to fire at point-blank range. “The heavy studded ancient doorway creaked and quivered,” wrote Henry Savage Landor, “and splinters flew in every direction as each thorite shell hit the gate full.” Eventually the gate gave way, and a company of the 14th Infantry poured into the courtyard to clear out the Chinese defenders. This process was repeated with a second gate and a third—all under heavy Chinese fire.
The Americans lost a number of men in this operation, most notably Captain Henry J. Reilly. Born in Ireland, he had enlisted as a Union private in 1862 and won a battlefield commission for bravery. A slight man—he stood 5 foot 11 inches and weighed just 145 pounds—he had blue eyes hidden behind a pince-nez, a close trimmed beard, and a mustache streaked with gray. His 39 years of soldiering had elevated him no higher than captain but along the way his courteous, gentle demeanor had won the affection of his men. Many of them cried when they saw Reilly felled by a bullet to the head. But they kept firing. They were about to blast the final gate leading to the Forbidden City when a messenger arrived from Chaffee to announce: “The general directs that you suspend all further operations.”
According to Savage Landor, this order was greeted with a “melody of oaths as only American boys can devise.” And no wonder. They had seen their beloved Reilly and five others killed and 19 wounded—and for what? So that they could stop short of their goal? This galling decision had been forced on Chaffee by his fellow allied commanders. When they got wind that the Americans were on the verge of breaking into the Forbidden City, they convened a council of war and demanded that the advance stop at once. Their ostensible justification was that they did not want to insult the empress by entering her lair. But this was nonsense. In fact the allies staged a big ceremony of entering the Forbidden City three days later, with the Russians leading the way. It was not that they were opposed to entering the Forbidden City. They were opposed to the Americans entering first. So Reilly and the others had died in vain.
Reilly’s funeral was held on August 16. After the ceremony, the parsimonious U.S. Minister, Edwin Conger, tried to grab the flag from the casket, explaining, “There are so few American flags in Peking, this one can’t be spared.”
“Don’t touch that flag,” growled General Chaffee. “If it’s the last American flag in China it will be buried with Reilly.”
Rape and Pillage
As soon as the allies had secured Peking, the looting began. Everyone, military and civilian, missionary and diplomat, Asian and Westerner, joined in stealing everything of value they could get their hands on. Polly Condit Smith, the young American visitor who had been trapped in the Legation Quarter, found various admirers presenting tokens of their affection: a Russian officer tried to give her a sable coat, a Belgian offered a tortoiseshell bracelet set with pearls, a Sikh presented an expensive clock and two chickens. It was the chickens she valued most. But some of those present became rich from their loot. “It took stronger wills than we possessed not to be tempted by brocades and furs lying in the gutters,” Smedley Butler later confessed.
Count Alfred von Waldersee, a German field marshal who had arrived too late to take part in the actual campaign, became the new allied commander. He ensconced himself in one of the empress’s palaces with a Chinese concubine to warm his bed, and carried out Kaiser Wilhelm II’s orders to behave “just as the Huns a thousand years ago” did. The German troops were particularly enthusiastic in staging grisly reprisals against the Chinese. The countryside was stripped bare for miles around Peking, many temples and pagodas of great value being blown up and countless Chinese being beaten, raped, or murdered—sometimes all three. “It is safe to say,” said General Chaffee, “that where one real Boxer has been killed since the capture of Peking, fifty harmless coolies or laborers on farms . . . including not a few women and children, have been slain.” As with the looting of Tientsin, the rape of Peking was not a good advertisement for the benefits of Western civilization.
In fairness it should be noted that there was more to the allied occupation than plunder and pillage. The foreign armies split Peking into zones of occupation, as Berlin and Vienna would one day be split. While the Germans and Russians were interested primarily in preying on the natives, the Americans took their administrative duties in the western half of the Chinese City more seriously. American troops enforced sanitary regulations to stop epidemics, opened charities and hospitals, set up a court run by the Chinese, created schools, policed opium dens and gambling houses. The U.S. sector was so well run that people flocked there from other parts of the city.
The U.S. and other nations began pulling their troops out of Peking after September 7, 1901. On this date, the Chinese government signed a protocol containing a variety of punishments for its failure to suppress the Boxers, including a promise to pay the West an indemnity of $335 million over the next 39 years at 4 percent annual interest. (Ever since the Opium Wars, it had become standard practice for the West to make China pay the costs of defeating it.) The full amount would never be paid. Starting in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt turned over the U.S. share to pay for Chinese students to be educated in the U.S.
By May 1901 the only U.S. ground forces left in north China were five officers and 150 infantrymen guarding the Peking legation.
Rise and Fall
The faction at the imperial court that had wanted to save the legations hoped that doing so would be good for the Middle Kingdom and the Ching dynasty. It did not work out that way. The Boxer Protocol further impinged on Chinese sovereignty by giving foreign powers the right to deploy troops from Peking to the sea, and the vast indemnity weakened the state treasury. Russia used the Boxer uprising as an excuse to temporarily seize all of Manchuria in the summer of 1900. Ching prestige was shattered beyond repair. Tz’u-hsi, Old Buddha, died in 1908. Four years later the last emperor, Hsüan-t’ung (better known as P’u-i), would be overthrown and a republic declared.
Although it marked one of the death knells of the Manchus, the Boxer uprising represented a milestone in the rise of American and Japanese power. Both in the legations and in the relief expedition, the bravest, most disciplined soldiers were Japanese. And, oddly enough, they were also respectful of Chinese lives and property—restraint that would be spectacularly lacking during Japan’s invasion of the Middle Kingdom in the 1930s. Japan’s reputation would be further enhanced by its thrashing of Russia in 1905. The sun was clearly rising on the Japanese empire.
So, too, U.S. power was ascendant. Ever since the Civil War the U.S. had been an economic juggernaut. But it was a slow process to convert economic carbohydrates into military muscle. Most of the U.S. campaigns abroad in the nineteenth century had been small affairs. That had changed when the U.S. had grabbed the remains of the Spanish empire in 1898. Now something else had changed as well: America had abandoned its old unilateralism. Uncle Sam was now willing to take part in military coalitions with other Great Powers. In this respect the Boxer campaign presaged Washington’s entry into World War I in “association” with the Triple Entente.
The Boxer campaign presaged World War I in another respect as well: It showed the difficulties of fielding a multinational army. The bickering was almost nonstop, the coordination virtually nonexistent. A number of American lives were lost—in the badly planned attack on Tientsin, for instance—due to the lack of centralized planning.
Many of the American soldiers who served in the Boxer campaign would get to see plenty more action. Just as many of them had come from the Philippines, so many would return, to suppress a far more determined and better organized guerrilla uprising than the one they had faced in China.