As it was the rebels had lost, the Imperialists had won: but as one went around the countryside and talked with the country people, peaceable souls who had only their small cabbage-patch to bring forth their wherewithal to live, the tales of savagery and cruelty and devilish treatment which the Imperialists said they found it necessary to bring into their "military measures" did not make one wonder that, although compelled at the point of the bayonet to submit, the whole of the rural population swore vengeance upon the army that had worked havoc among them. Such behaviour as the Imperial soldiers, in their devilry, persisted in was worse even than one would expect from the worst of Chinese. We all know that the Chinese are cruel, that they have no sympathies in the usual Western sense; we know that they delight in the torture of all things that have life. But such grossly inhuman conduct as was countenanced by the Imperial military authorities in this centre almost compelled one to exclaim that to the depths of Chinese barbarity one cannot probe. What one saw made one instinctively draw back, yet one did not see a tithe of what there was.
Of the searching for the dead I shall have but little to say. There were few dead to be found. We buried 207. As soon as the military stationed in command of the captured hill heard that the Red Cross Society was sending parties to search for the dead and to bury the corpses, they set about with their own burial parties to remove those who had been shot in that dreadful battle. The villages that had been razed to the ground, and incidentally rid of all the menfolk with a rifle shot or a few bayonet thrusts, had been made to bury their own dead; most of it was done by the girls before they were taken off to be made worse than slaves to the fiendish men who took them. But the tale had better be told in sequence.
If one is able to keep his mind free from the gruesome and the cruel, the fiendish tricks practised everywhere along the Han by the Imperial soldiers, he cannot but admire the smartness of the military training and the extremely creditable manner in which this Imperial Army had been handled. When it is remembered that from the four high hills overlooking the Han River the Revolutionists were able continuously to blow to smithereens anything that was attempted in the way of bridge-building, the making of the bridge by which the main body of the enemy passed over the river is little short of a marvel. At this point the Han, with no inconsiderable current, is no less than three hundred and fifty yards wide. The bridge by which the Imperialists crossed was composed of some one hundred and fifty boats of all sorts and sizes, each in its turn tied to an extremely stout hawser; over this the whole of the attacking force with their complete equipment was brought. Then from this point to another point some twenty li away, at the base of the hills, villages were indiscriminately scattered, some with twenty families, some with half a dozen. All had suffered the same fate and were now but places of ashes.
To the left was found a Revolutionary soldier, dead, half-eaten, dressed still in his black uniform. About the body, which was huddled in a decomposing heap on the ground, were noticed several bayonet wounds; it had been brought from a bed, upon which the wounded man had probably been done to death. Under the bed was found a lamp, on and around the bed were found huge chunks of charcoal and charred firewood; nothing else in the room was burned. Is it possible to think that those devils of men, first getting their prey like the beasts they are, then maiming him, then putting him on a bed, then getting the fire by which they intended burning him to death, had fired the lot and literally roasted their victim alive, and sat down to watch the last agonies? Such was my theory, and the circumstantial evidence, with the guarded explanation of the temple caretaker—who was spared because he could wait upon these vicious greycoats—made for none other. And there the body lay; dogs had come in and eaten off a leg, a part of the neck, a part of the body; the main bone of the leg had been wrenched off, and a dog near by still growled with another for possession. Soon the burial was made, the wistful onlookers, lucky that they had escaped, remarking blandly that we were performing hao si. Further gruesome details of a most gruesome duty it were reasonable not to expect given; sufficient has been written to show where the great battle took place and what its effects had been. Over the hills one came across one, two, a dozen peaked caps, a dozen uniforms. Near by were nightsoil pits and ponds of stagnant water; into these the unlucky victims had been thrown. Pools of blood there were everywhere, cartridge-cases and cartridges there were by the thousand, seven big guns with the breach-blocks gone, boxes of unopened field-gun cases, piles of 2¼ gun shells alongside the heavy pieces, pieces of bone, bloody bandages, and much else all too eloquent of the carnage and the battle. One man volunteered to show us where the corpse of a villager lay; he said the body had been hit fair by a big shell and now there was little left to show for what had been a soldier doing his duty for a cause of reform; when we came to the place a pool of blood and a few bones were all that the canine scavengers had left.
THE HANDY MAN ASHORE.
Residents in the British Concession owe much
to the bluejackets. They are seen here carting
bricks in rickshaws, with which to build barricades.
Farther on an old woman sat upon a heap of rubbish, which had been her home for forty years. She was ill-clad, cold, had had no food for four days, and thought that she, too, would die. Her husband, poor old man, had been killed by stray shots before the Imperialists made their rush; her sons, four of them—peaceable men, she said, who offered no resistance—were killed cruelly at sight; their wives had been carried off. "But I am not alone," she added; "others in the village suffered the same fate. Our young boys had their queues taken off to make them into rebels so that the soldiers would have an excuse to shoot them. And our 'little babies'"—the poor old lady was now wiping her eye—"our girls of fourteen and fifteen were carried off across the river. I wonder whether I shall see them again." I wondered, too, as I watched the old woman weeping. And the farther I went the more was I impressed with the cruelty of this war towards the civilian rather than to the military part of the community. The devastation was terrific.
Have you ever noticed how soon a Chinese can spoil or totally destroy things in general? Whether it be the mechanic in the factory, the cook in the kitchen, the boy about the house, the gardener, the boatman, the tinker, tailor, or sailor, it is undeniable that the Chinese is a pastmaster in the art of spoiling and damaging and putting things destructively to their wrong uses. One sees it, not in one district and among one class of the Chinese; it is universal in the country and the people. To go through China one is struck more than anything else by the manner in which everything is brought to a general condition of decay and uselessness. And so in war the Chinese have been showing us how destructive is their nature, how vile they are in pillaging and looting and destroying. For miles around the city of Hankow long stretches of burned and pillaged districts stand as painfullest evidences of the ravages of this horrible civil war. These northern victors could not have behaved worse had they specifically endeavoured, and this is much to say. All the cruelties, all the infamy in its several forms, all the wanton destruction, the stealing, the ravishing of pure women, the killing of little children, the kidnapping of young girls, the gross oppression practised by them all will go down to history as the conduct unworthy of any civilised nation. I am aware that in writing this I may call down considerable criticism, but I fail to see why such things should be kept back from public knowledge. China is making claims, as she long has been, that she is coming line to line with the civilisation of the West. She has claimed that she has got out of the rut of the past, and that now the world may confidently look for that which in history has made the nations of the world great—liberty, justice, and other so far unknown virtues in her present military campaign against those who truly, so far as we can tell, are urging for real reform.