"No. I suggested that he should. He replied that he put no reliance on the opinions of missionaries. They were all narrow-minded fanatics, who couldn't take a broad, large-minded view of the situation."
"So he missed the one man who knows more of the probabilities of this war than all the rest of us taken together?"
"Yes, he missed him entirely. Said that he didn't care to meet him."
"That is it exactly. It is just such self-conceited experts, who know all about China when they have been ashore at half a dozen seaports during the hours of call of a passenger liner and who refuse to learn from those who do know, who have given our Western nations such an exaggerated idea of their own superiority and of China's inferiority."
"Then you think that the Chinese have been underestimated as soldiers," said Mr. MacAllister.
"I certainly do. For one thing, I have never seen nor heard of among any other people anything like the ability of the Chinese to bear pain. I was compelled to perform without anæsthetics operations so painful that most Europeans or Americans would rather have died than have endured them. Yet the Chinese bore them with little more than an occasional groan or a suppressed 'ai-yah.'"
"Why, then, is it that they have made such a poor showing when opposed to European troops? I have always been informed that it was the lack of physical courage."
"It is not because of the lack of courage. It is the lack of training and the lack of leadership. Going into battle vain, self-confident, and contemptuous towards the foreigners, they have suddenly found themselves exposed by incompetent commanders, mowed down by the foreign weapons, disconcerted by well-ordered movements of trained men, and helpless to meet foreign strategy. The inevitable panic followed, and they ran."
"But we have been told again and again by the experts that it is impossible to drill the Chinese; that they will never be anything else than a mob."
"Then I wish those experts could have seen Sergeant Gorman and his ambulance corps. He was given some of the toughest material in Liu Ming-chuan's army. In a month's time they moved like clock-work. As the American general they have over there said, I'd just like to see Gorman 'lickin' a regiment into fightin' shape.' General Gordon proved what could be done with a Chinese army during the Tai-ping rebellion. If China only had a few native General Gordons, the world would soon receive notice that China was to be left alone."