God's Chinese Son (49 page)
It is in early 1863 that Li Xiucheng attempts to launch a new campaign to the west, on the north bank of the Yangzi, in Anhui province, to distract Zeng Guofan and his brother from the Nanjing siege. Within a few weeks Li's troops, which have set out so boldly, are bogged down in mud and driving rain. The areas on the north bank of the Yangzi they campaign in have been fought over so often that no grain supplies are left, and the new crops have not yet had a chance to ripen. Many of Li's troops fall sick; some of them eat grass; others die of hunger. The Qing garrisons in Anhui, made canny by past experience, simply sit tight behind their defenses and refuse to be lured out in combat.
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Like Li's Shanghai ventures, the new campaign is a brave but costly failure, which deflects tens of thousands of Taiping troops and new recruits from either relieving the siege of Nanjing directly or strengthening the cities between Suzhou and Shanghai. These fall one by one to the inexorable and well-armed British and French military and naval forces stationed in Shanghai, working in conjunction with Qing troops and the Ever-Victorious Army, led first by Frederick Ward of Salem, Massachusetts, and then by Charles Gordon.
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' In May 1863 Li abandons the Western campaign as a failure, and hurries back down the north bank of the Yangzi River to Nanjing on the urgent orders of the Heavenly King. He is met, as he attempts to cross the river, by the Qing forces, now much strengthened and armed with Western implements of war. In Li Xiucheng's own words, "It was just at the time when the Yangzi was in spate; the roads had been destroyed by the floods, and there was no means of advancing. ... The army was in disorder. Combat officers and troops, and the horses, were first taken across the river in boats. The crossing was almost completed, but some old and very young, and horses which refused to embark, were left on the river bank. Jiufu zhou was flooded and the soldiers had nowhere to lodge. Even if they had rice, there was no fuel to cook with, and a great many died of hunger. Just at this time, Zeng Guoquan sent river troops to attack."
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The resulting battle, as described by a Western mercenary still loyal to the Taiping cause, is catastrophic:
Even when [the TaipingJ had arrived within sight of their capital, the sufferings of the unfortunate people were not completed until they had endured much more loss by the assaults of the enemy. Upon the arrival of the famished and emaciated troops at the brink of the river, they were saluted with one continuous cannonade from the gunboats that now found ample opportunities of slaughtering them as they crowded the bank for a distance of nearly two miles. With incredible fortitude they maintained their position, and did not flinch backward by the least perceptible movement; and, in the face of the terrible fire poured into their dense masses at point- blank range (mostly from
English
guns), proceeded to the work of embarkation as steadily as their weakened condition would permit.. . .
The fearful sights that met my gaze upon every part of the shore I shall never forget. Very many of the weakest men, totally unable to assist themselves further, were left to die within sight of the goal for which they had striven so hard and suffered so greatly, their number being so large that their comrades were not sufficient to help, or get them over the river in the presence of the enemy. The horrible "thud" of the cannon shot crashing continuously among the living skeletons, so densely packed at places that they were swept off by the river, into which they were forced by the pressure from behind; the perfect immobility with which they confronted the death hurled upon them from more than a thousand gunboats; and the slow effort the exhausted survivors made to extricate themselves from the mangled bodies of their stricken comrades, were scenes awful to contemplate. It was dreadful to watch day after day during the time occupied in getting the remnant of that once splendid army across the river, with but little means to succour them, the lanes cut through the helpless multitude on the beach by the merciless fire of the enemy; all so passively endured.
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Once again, Hong Xiuquan has no specific words for General Li, neither of solace nor of encouragement. Nor has Hong himself received such words for some time now, not from his Heavenly Father, nor from his Elder Brother. And if his earthly wife, his mother, or his eldest son have told him of their dreams, Hong has not shared them with his Taiping faithful followers. In the last of the books that he has written, and published in Nanjing, Hong has passed in review all the visits down to earth that Jesus made, and all the messages he conveyed through Xiao Chaogui in the days at Thistle Mountain; he has lived again through the diatribes and promises of God the Father, relayed to Yang Xiuqing and his attendants in the early days in which the city of Nanjing became the Heavenly Capital. He has written out the somber words of Xiao Chaogui, after his wounding in Yongan, that the greater the suffering the more a man can grow, and transcribed with his blunt-nosed brush the final cry of Yang Xiuqing: "The city of your God is set aflame. There is no way to save it."
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How often the voices from Heaven spoke in those far-off days! Now Heaven has fallen silent
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During the same week of mid-June 1863 in which Li Xiu- cheng helplessly watches so many of his men slaughtered on the north bank of the Yangzi, a thousand miles away in the province of Sichuan, Shi Dakai—the Wing King—surrenders to the Qing. Since leaving Nanjing in 1857, Shi has conducted a ceaseless and exhausting campaign, across fifteen different provinces over a distance of more than six thousand miles, seeking first a permanent base, and then mere survival, while the number of his loyal troops slowly shrinks due to illness, death, or desertion. On June 13, cornered, helpless, and exhausted, Shi Dakai simply walks into the camp of the commanding Qing general and gives himself up, in the hopes that with his own life he can ransom the pardon of the two thousand veterans who have been with him all those years. He has prepared for this step by having his five wives commit suicide, and his infant children drowned, to save them from the inevitable shame and agony at the hands of the Qing troops. After six weeks of interrogation by the newly appointed governor-general, Luo Bingzhang—who so long before directed the defense of Changsha at which the West King lost his life—Shi is executed by slow dismemberment. His two thousand followers, who have been held under guard in a local temple complex, are massacred.'
News of Shi Dakai's surrender has not yet reached Nanjing by July 1863, when the Heavenly King orders Li Xiucheng into battle once again, this time to shore up the defenses of Suzhou. Li has had a month to size up the situation in the Heavenly Capital, and before he leaves he offers to Hong Xiuquan what seems to him now the only feasible plan: to stockpile all available grain in Nanjing, along with weapons, ammunition, and gunpowder, so that it remains the Heavenly Capital in word and deed, and becomes a truly impregnable fortress, impervious to siege. Such a base might wear down the morale of Zeng Guofan, who is proving invincible to the west, and of Zeng's rising protege Li Hongzhang, whose troops have been cooperating with the Westerners and performing ably in recapturing the area around Shanghai.
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But this plan, according to Li Xiucheng, is also ruined, this time by the greed of Hong Xiuquan's relatives, who forbid any residents of Nanjing to buy grain until they have first bought permits, or to use the permits until they have bought passports—the money for all of which paperwork goes into the pockets of Hong's staff—and even if people go through these procedures, and manage to find grain to buy, they are taxed according to its value when they return to Nanjing.
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The situation grows even graver in October 1863, when Qing troops, moving inexorably closer to the Heavenly Capital, seize hundreds of tons of stockpiled Taiping grain supplies, along with a thousand Taiping soldiers, their horses, and their mules.
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In November, the Qing commander orders a moat over ten miles in length dug around the southern perimeter of Nanjing, running from the Yangzi River past the city's southern wall and curving up toward the east. Suzhou falls to the Qing in early December, just after Li Xiucheng has left it to campaign nearby. The city's fall is marked by the Qing commander's treacherous murder of all the surrendering Taiping generals, to whom he had promised amnesty, and the massacre of the civilian population. In mid-December, by which time Li Xiucheng has returned to supervise the capital's defense, the Qing make their first assault on the walls of Nanjing, using deep tunnels filled with gunpowder that shatter a major section of the city walls, though Taiping troops are able to repel the Qing troops that try to force their way through the breach.'
By December 1863 Li Xiucheng, having surveyed all the options, can see no way of defending the city. Gathering his courage to address the ruler who still overawes him, Li reports, "The supply routes are cut and the gates blocked. In the capital the morale of the people is not steady.
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