It has been said that the clever interpreter, instead of translating all the viceroy's arguments and explaining his difficulties, summed the whole up to Captain Fournier in two words, "Avancez donc"—advice which would no doubt have been sufficient if only the French military commander, Colonel Dugenne, had marched with a reasonable force, or even if he had carried with him a competent interpreter, through whom he might have communicated with the Chinese commander. The latter officer, however, when called upon to evacuate the post, pleaded that he had received no instructions to that effect, and asked for time to communicate with Peking. The letter to the French commander containing these reasonable pleas for delay was either wrongly translated or left untranslated for months. In the meantime Colonel Dugenne advanced with a small party, and was forced to retreat with loss, for which he was not unjustly recalled by his own authorities; and thereupon ensued the Franco-Chinese war.
This was not, however, the only contretemps in connection with this lamentable outbreak. The Chinese commander had actually telegraphed to Li Hung-chang for instructions; but, still unwilling to face the responsibility, the latter left the reply to his council, among whom there happened to be for the moment his evil genius, Chang Pei-lun, a fire-eating member of the Tsungli-Yamên, who was on his way to take up the post of governor of Fukien province and Imperial Commissioner of the Foochow arsenal.
Laudable efforts were made to repair the mischief, and in the conferences which followed in Paris peace was more than once all but assured; but owing to a series of accidents and misunderstandings, in which the authorities at Peking, the French representative there, the French commanders on the Chinese coast, and the telegraph were all implicated, the die was cast in August 1884, and the war was continued till the following April.
For reasons of their own the French Government were averse to calling the hostilities "war," preferring reprisals and "intelligent destruction." By whatever name it may be called, the French did not distinguish themselves greatly in the conduct of the operations. Their only feat of arms was the destruction, at their anchorage in the river Min, of the Chinese ships belonging to the Foochow squadron, and of the arsenal, which, as Li Hung-chang bitterly reflected, had been erected by "French genius." Admiral Courbet found his destructive work easy, having entered the river and taken up a position in the rear of the batteries during time of peace. The subsequent operations in Formosa were without result; and the French Government refused permission to Admiral Courbet to attack Port Arthur, on the non-military ground of wishing to save the prestige of "notre ami Li Hung-chang." So far as the naval operations were concerned, even when most successful in intelligent destruction, they were quite ineffective towards ending the war until the method which has never failed to bring the Chinese Government to terms was resorted to—the stoppage of the grain-supply to the capital. This was accomplished by a patrol of the coast for the purpose of intercepting vessels carrying rice to Tientsin. The work performed during the winter and spring of 1885 by the French cruisers, in keeping the sea without any base and performing their patrol duties in all weathers, excited the admiration of seamen. It should be mentioned that they were precluded from acting offensively against the Yangtze by tacit understanding with Great Britain and other Powers.
If the breach of the peace between France and China was a historical curiosity, the eventual settlement of the dispute resembled a dramatic extravaganza. The final incident of the war in Tongking was the defeat of the French, followed by a panic, caused apparently by General Négrier being wounded. The force then made a disorderly retreat before imaginary pursuers. In the meantime the empress-dowager had given positive orders that peace should be made on any terms. Both parties had thus come round to the status quo ante bellum—that is to say, they were both equally urgent to obtain peace, as they had been in May 1884. The agent in bringing this about was Sir Robert Hart; and it was effected, as great things usually are, by the adroit use of very simple means. During the blockade of Formosa a small Chinese lighthouse tender was captured by the French admiral and detained. As she was essentially non-combatant, and was serving the interests of humanity in supplying the numerous lighthouses on the coast of China for the benefit of the commerce of all nations, Sir Robert Hart instructed his very capable London agent, Mr Duncan Campbell, to go to Paris and represent the case to the French Ministers, with a view to obtaining the release of so useful and harmless a vessel. In this manner the door was opened to the larger negotiation. Mr Campbell executed his delicate mission with so much tact, that in the amicable conversations which ensued between him and certain French officials the idea of putting an end to a war of which both parties were tired, and which, moreover, seemed objectless, was ventilated; and in a few days authority was telegraphed from Peking to Mr Campbell to sign a protocol.
This was done before the news of the French reverse at Langson reached Paris. After such a military success M. Jules Ferry could not imagine that the Chinese Government would adhere to the terms of the protocol, and therefore he kept the whole negotiation secret from the Chambers. In the meanwhile the mishap to the French troops, being greatly exaggerated, excited such intense feeling in France that M. Ferry, le Tonkinois, was obliged to resign, with the treaty which might have saved him in his pocket. As for the empress-dowager, she recked nothing of the success of her brave troops on the outskirts of the empire, but thought only of the enormous expense of the war, which had been unpleasantly brought home to her, and of matters affecting her own convenience. She therefore had no thought of going back on the treaty, but was even more urgent than before to have it promptly signed and ratified. The honours of the peace thus fell in a few days to M. Ferry's successor.
And what was the outcome of a year's fighting which cost China 100,000,000 taels and France some proportionate amount? A simple reaffirmation of the Li-Fournier convention of May 1884! The convention itself was short and simple—one clause only exciting much interest during the negotiations, and that provoked a hot discussion, not on the substance, but on the verbal form. It was a stipulation by which the two contracting parties consciously meant different things, and each fought hard for a phrase sufficiently subtle to allow each to interpret it in his own way when the time came for the fulfilment of the treaty provisions. The French were most desirous of binding the Chinese to employ French industries in all their new undertakings. China was equally resolute in avoiding any such obligation. In the end each was satisfied that he could read the treaty clause in his own favour. But the final victory in the struggle would go to the side that was most persistent in forcing its meaning into practice. The French Ministry had announced to the Chambers a great victory for French manufacturing industries, which were represented as having by it obtained a monopoly in China. The text of the treaty, even in the French version, did not, indeed, bear this out; but the French had the primâ facie argument on their side, that the introduction of a clause in a treaty referring to the Chinese patronage of French industries, however worded, must have meant something more than merely to register the common fact that China was at liberty to deal with whom she pleased. In the end a compromise was effected by China's giving to a French syndicate the contract for excavating the basin and dock at Port Arthur and certain orders for material, among which was a famous military balloon, wonderfully symbolic of the whole proceeding.
