The first order transmitted by Prince Kung to the new Inspector-General—or the I.G., as he was always familiarly called—was that he should live at Shanghai. This gave him the opportunity of meeting and working with the famous "Chinese Gordon," to whom the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion was so largely due. For the history of that rebellion—how one soldier of fortune after the other attempted to suppress it; how the picturesque American Burgevine, on changing masters and seeking to better his fortune with the rebels, was succeeded by the prosaic failure Holland; how at last, on General Staveley's recommendation, Charles Gordon was lent with several other young officers to the Imperialist cause—the reader must go (and will thank me for sending him) to some of the many historians who have immortalized the struggle.
Nothing remains to be told about that terrible war—except the part that Robert Hart accidentally played in it.
His first meeting with Gordon was planned for October 1863, when Major-General Brown, commanding the troops at Hongkong, came up to Shanghai for the express purpose of seeing the brilliant young commander of what was already known as "The Ever-Victorious Army." Gordon sent the Firefly to take the General and the Inspector-General up the Soochow Creek to Quinsan, where he then was, and on a certain Sunday morning they intended to have started. Fortunately, as it afterwards turned out, Fate interfered at this point.
The English mail arrived suddenly on Saturday night with important despatches; the General sent his A.D.C. to say that he could not possibly leave until they were answered; and so, reluctantly, the visit was postponed—as the two men thought, for a few days, but in reality for much longer. Next morning the A.D.C. hurried round again almost before Hart was out of bed, and this time with the most sensational news—the Firefly had been boarded as she lay at her moorings by foreign friends of the rebels, carried up stream, and burnt. Both her European engineers had mysteriously disappeared.
The whole affair, of course, was a plot as deep laid as diabolical, hatched by the rebels for the purpose of getting rid of General Brown, who they feared was about to reinforce Gordon. But for the timely arrival of those pressing despatches it would have succeeded, and he and the I.G. would have been trapped and quietly murdered.
Not till the spring of 1864 did the delayed meeting finally take place. There had been a serious difference of opinion between Gordon and Li Hung Chang—a difference which arose over the taking of Soochow. When the city, thanks to Gordon's co-operation, was captured, certain of the Taiping princes agreed to surrender. General Ching went to interview them outside one of the city gates, taking Gordon with him. His idea was that if the great General Gordon showed the rebels that he had actually been concerned in the successful operations against them, they would be the more likely to consider further resistance hopeless. Gordon, on the other hand, thought his presence would be taken by them to mean surety for their safety. It was not an unnatural misunderstanding, seeing that Gordon spoke no Chinese, that neither the rebels nor General Ching understood English, and that there was no interpreter present.
In the end the rebellious princes surrendered, not from any feeling that Gordon's presence would ensure the sparing of their lives, but because they believed—just as General Ching shrewdly guessed they would—that his presence in Soochow made it useless to continue the struggle. Had they only been wise enough to retire gracefully from the field, all would have been well. But they swaggered into Li's presence. "They appeared"—so an eyewitness described the scene—"rather like leaders in a position to dictate terms than men sharing in an act of clemency." They even had the audacity to suggest that Li should pay their soldiers—their soldiers, who had fought him, mind you—and divide the city of Soochow by a great wall, leaving half of it in rebel hands.
Naturally he refused to do either of these things; how could he possibly agree to such quixotic demands? But through his refusal, he found himself face to face with the problem of what to do with the surrendered Wangs. He might keep them prisoners—that would be difficult; or he might summarily behead them—and that would be easy. The latter action must certainly be open to the ugly suspicion of treachery, but he had as his excuse that the city was under martial law, and that prompt and vigorous measures might be the means of saving more bloodshed in the end. Accordingly he ordered the immediate execution of the surrendered chiefs.
When Gordon heard of it he was as angry as only a passionate nature such as his could be. The idea that his unspoken word of honour to helpless prisoners had been broken for him made him mad with fury. Out into the city he went, revolver in hand, to look for Li, and to avenge what he called the "murder." His sense of his own guilt was certainly morbid; morbid too was his treatment of the head of the Na Wang, which he found exposed in an iron lantern on one of the city gates. He brought it home, kept it for days beside him, even laying it on his bed, and kneeling and asking forgiveness beside it. The Na Wang's son he adopted into his bodyguard. No father could have treated his own child more tenderly. I believe not once but a dozen times in an afternoon he would turn to the boy and ask wistfully, "Who are you?" receiving the same soft answer, "I am your son," each time with the same pleasure.
Almost immediately after the decapitation of the Wangs, Gordon, still fuming with rage, suddenly determined to break off all relations with Li, to retire to Quinsan, and to take his "Ever-Victorious Army" with him. Though his friends, singly and in company, did their best to dissuade him from this rash course, and pointed out the consequences, he would not listen, and he went.