The Land of the Boxers; or, China under the Allies

by Gordon Casserly

For some distance alongside the railway runs a canal, which is largely used by the Chinese for transporting grain and merchandise. As our train rattled along, we passed numbers of long, shallow boats, fashioned like dug‐outs and loaded down until the gunwale was scarcely a few inches from the water. The half‐naked boatmen toiling at their oars paused to gaze with envy at the swift‐speeding iron horse, which covered the weary miles with such apparent ease.

The crops here were even more luxuriant than on the way to Pekin. Fields of ripe grain stretched away on either side of the line, interspersed with groves of trees or dotted with villages surrounded by high walls, significant of the continual insecurity of life and property in this debatable land. Here and there were deserted mud forts.

The journey from Tientsin to Shanhaikwan occupied about twelve hours. About midway the train stopped for a short time at Tongshan, a town important for the coal mines near, which are worked under the direction of Europeans. From the windows of our carriage we could see the tall buildings and the machinery at the mouths of the pits, which gave quite an English character to the landscape. For the convenience of travellers, the British officers quartered in the place had established a refreshment room in some Chinese buildings near the station, and lent some Indian servants to it. As our train was due to wait some little time, we all descended in search of lunch, and were provided here with quite a good meal at a very reasonable rate. Our German fellow‐passengers, ignorant of Hindustani, found some difficulty in expressing their wants to the Indian waiters, whose knowledge of English was very limited. We came to the rescue and interpreted, and gained the gratitude of hungry men.

As we journeyed on to Shanhaikwan the country began to lose its flat appearance. Low, tree‐clad eminences broke the level monotony of the landscape; and the train passed close to a line of rugged hills. In their recesses bands of brigands were reported to be lurking, so we had the pleasant excitement of speculating on the chances of the train being held up by some of these gentry. But without mishap we reached our destination about half‐past six o’clock in the evening.

The railway station of Shanhaikwan was large and well built, with roomy offices and a long platform. There were, besides, engine sheds, machinery shops, yards, and houses for the European employees, all of which had been seized by the Russians. We were met on our arrival by some officers of the Gurkha Regiment in garrison, to whom we had written from Tientsin to ask if they could find quarters for us. But as they were exceedingly short of accommodation for themselves, being crowded together in wretched Chinese hovels, they received us with expressions of regret that they were unable to find room for all our party. The two junior ones must seek shelter for themselves. I, unfortunately, was one. There was no hotel or inn of any sort. My companion in distress, luckily for himself, had a friend in a squadron of the 3rd Bombay Cavalry, quartered in one of the forts, and set off to request his hospitality. So our party separated; and I was left stranded on the platform with no prospect of a bed, and, worse still, not the faintest idea as to where to get a meal. On appealing to a British railway employee, I found that there were two military officers in charge of the station—one English, the other Russian; for the portion of the line held by the latter nationality began, as I have said, at Shanhaikwan. Both had quarters in the station, but both, unfortunately, had gone out to dinner; and there was no likelihood of their return before midnight. Taking pity on my distress, this employee promised to send me down a Chinese cane bed from his house, and then went off, leaving me to brood over the hopelessness of my situation. I sat down on a bench and cursed the name of Shanhaikwan. The lunch at Tongshan seemed by now a very far‐off memory; and I endeavoured to allay the pangs of hunger with a cigar. As I meditated on the inefficacy of tobacco as a substitute for food, I saw the door of a room marked “Telegraph Office” open and a smart bombardier of the Royal Marine Artillery emerge. On seeing me he saluted, and, snatching at every straw, I called him over and asked him if he knew of any place where I could get anything to eat. He told me of the existence of a low café, patronised by the Continental soldiers of the garrison, where I might possibly obtain some sort of a meal. I jumped eagerly at the chance; and, calling one of the Chinese railway porters to guide us, he offered to show me the way. Quitting the station, we entered a small town of squalid native houses and proceeded through narrow and unsavoury lanes until we reached a low doorway in a high wall. Passing through, I found myself in a small courtyard. On the muddy ground were placed a number of rickety tables and rough benches. Here sat, with various liquors before them, groups of Cossacks and German soldiers, who stared with surprise at the unusual sight of a British officer in such a den. At the far end of the court was a tumbledown Chinese house, on the verandah of which sat the proprietor and his wife, evidently Italian or Austrian. The lady, a buxom person of ample proportions, was attired in a very magnificent, but decidedly décolleté evening dress. Her wrists were adorned with massive bracelets, her fingers covered with rings. Altogether she looked a very haughty and superb beauty and more fitted to adorn a café in the Champs Elysées than a rough drinking‐booth in the heart of China. Her husband came forward to meet me; and on my stating my wants in imploring tones, he seemed at first in doubt as to whether he could supply them. My heart sank. He turned to consult the lady. To my intense astonishment this magnificent personage sprang up at once, called to a Chinese servant to bring her a chicken, and then, pinning up the skirt of her rich dress, plunged into a kitchen which opened off the verandah, and then and there, with her own fair hands, spatch‐cocked the fowl, and served me with a welcome and appetising meal.

My hunger satisfied thus unexpectedly, I strolled back to the station in a contented frame of mind, indifferent to anything Fate had in store for me. Nothing could harm me; I had dined. I was quite ready to wrap myself in a blanket and sleep on a bench, or on the ground for that matter. But my star was in the ascendant. I found a comfortable camp‐bed of a Chinese pattern awaiting me, sent by the kind‐hearted employee. Placing it on the platform, I spread my bedding on it, undressed, and lay down to sleep.

But I had reckoned without the merry mosquito. I have met this little pest in many lands. I first made his acquaintance on the night of my arrival in India with a raw, unsalted regiment from home; when he could batten on seven hundred fresh, full‐blooded Britishers and feast to the full on their vital fluid unthinned by a tropical climate; when next morning the faces of all, officers and men alike, were swollen almost beyond recognition. I have remonstrated with him as to his claim to the possession of the interior of a mosquito net and failed to move him. I have scarcely doubted when a friend vowed that he had broken the back of a hairbrush over the head of one of the giant, striped species we knew as “Bombay tigers” or questioned the truth of the statement that a man had lain on his bed and watched two of them trying to pull open his curtains to get at him. I have cursed him in the jungle when sitting up in a machân over a “kill” waiting for a tiger. I have wrestled with him when out on column and bivouacked beside a South China river, where his home was; but never have I seen him in such wonderful vigour and maddening persistence as during that night on the station platform of Shanhaikwan. In vain I beat the air with frenzied hands; in vain I smoked. I tried to cover my head with a sheet; but the heat was too great, and I emerged panting to find him waiting for me. As Thomas Atkins says: “It h’isn’t the bite of the beggar I ’ates so much as ’is bloomin’ h’irritatin’ buzz”; and the air was filled with his song. It was a concert with refreshments. I was the refreshments. To make matters worse, I had the tantalising knowledge that I had mosquito curtains with me, which I had been unable to fix up as the bed was without poles.

At last, maddened by the persistent attacks of the irritating pests, I sat up and reviewed the situation until I hit upon a plan. I shoved the bed under the windows of a room which looked out on the platform and which happened to be the quarters of the British Railway Station Officer. The venetian shutters opened outward. About ten feet away was a telegraph‐pole; and a short distance from the foot of the bed stood a lamp‐post. Taking the cords of my Wolseley valise, the straps of my bedding and my luggage, and some string which I looted from one of the railway offices, I contrived to suspend my curtains from the shutters, the pole, and the lamp‐post. It was really an ingenious contrivance, and I lay down in triumph and security. The baffled mosquitoes uttered positive shrieks of rage.

Somewhere about midnight I was awakened by the sounds of revelry in a foreign tongue. Peering through the curtains, I saw by the dim light of the turned‐down station lamps two figures in uniform advancing along the platform. One was a very drunken but merry Russian officer, who was being carefully helped along by a sober and amused British subaltern. They suddenly caught sight of the white mass of my mosquito curtains, which swayed in ghostly folds in the wind and looked uncanny in the uncertain light.