I am coming across a stumbling-block in my attempt to map populations on the way. The Chinese do not know how many families there are in their villages, nor does any Chinaman wish to know. When I ask, I receive the reply, ‘a few hundreds’, or even ‘not a few’. But a fixed and definite number? No.
November 22. I spent the morning at my third local garrison. A motto inscribed over the gate, translated as ‘A multitude of stars, a small cloud’. My interpreter said it meant just as a small cloud can cover many stars, a small body of resolute men can defeat a large army. Certainly not the eighty men of this garrison, I reflected. The fort had been sited in exactly the wrong position. The field of fire was poor. Ditto the arrangements for storage of ammunition, water and supplies. The parapets were not bullet-proofed. There was little head-cover. Even where it was provided it was conspicuous. There was no provision for extinguishing fires. The walls were loopholed but lacked dummy loopholes to draw away enemy fire. Overhead cover (to keep out splinters of shells) consisted of earth hardly 3 inches thick, rather than 9 to 12 inches.
The general bannerman is from the peasantry and hence as superstitious as all of the class. Many of them hold the belief that by carrying rolled-up pieces of papers with certain magical inscriptions into battle they will be protected by spirits from harm, and their eyes, finger-tips or nostrils will emit lethal lights, and by magic block the foreigners’ gun-barrels.
Marginal note: some weeks after I recorded this, Yuán confronted the bannermen’s belief in magic powers by assembling a corps of his provincial garrison and ordering a firing squad to shoot at them. The protective ‘lethal light’ meant to emanate from the corps’ nostrils and finger-tips failed to make its presence known to the firing squad. A number of the bannermen fell dead. The survivors, including the wounded, were sent to all the outlying garrisons to tell the grim tale.
November 24. The weather is cold. At the higher altitude oxygen levels are commensurately low. I have taken to wearing an extra thick coat and several layers of clothing, gloves, hat, long underwear and water resistant boots with good traction.
The predominant affliction among the bannermen is sore feet, the subject of much banter but in battle fatal to the infantry. At each garrison I instruct the men to bathe their feet in water coloured a bright pink with Condy’s crystals and give them a promise to ask the High Command to issue stout roomy boots and woollen foot cloths or stockings for marching in the snow. My words caused barely-suppressed laughter. Evidently the soldiers think the boots and foot cloths would be yet another source of income for their officers well before they got pulled on the ordinary soldiers’ feet.
Towards Tibet the garrisons are manned by some 70 despondent Muhamadan soldiers seeing out their lives in desolate isolation. There is a total lack of technological preparedness. The forts are made of mud, dilapidated, protected only by a few old cast-iron guns which would look more in place in the Tower of London museum. The men spend their time in pastry cooking, bird-raising and cricket fighting and tending their diminutive plots of cabbages, turnips, onions and tobacco.
As to building a strong fighting force, a New Army, China’s need is most certainly desperate. Learning is esteemed. Soldiering is despised. The line between mercenary and parasitic soldier and out-and-out bandit is hard to draw. The lack of surgeons remains critical. There are not more than three competent field-surgeons in the entire Chinese Army. The lack of understanding of triage is evident everywhere. The remedies prescribed for common illnesses such as scurvy, malaria, and smallpox are more likely to kill than cure. I shall suggest a home and hospital for aged and unwell soldiers like the Hôpital des Invalides in Paris which can also house a medical training school.
December 1. We have spent several days bivouacking with no sign of our own species other than stone fireplaces in old encampments. When the nomads strike camp to get to lower levels for the winter months or to move their grazing-ground, the fireplace is left behind, ready for when they return the next season.
China’s mountain ranges and most of the roads are impassable due to lack of upkeep. The spread of modern wireless telegraph communication between garrisons is essential. It can take two weeks to get a message from one command post to another using messengers on foot or carrier pigeons. Even Yuán Shì-kai’s yamen in Tientsin is not yet connected by telegraph and telephone with the Imperial palaces and the various barracks.
Our caravan has been following a stream full of great boulders. I am paying an extortionate 5d a mile for each of the mules or riding horses (and sometimes yaks) under the command of their own muleteers, plus two taels of silver per mule or horse for their fodder consisting mostly of beans. One of the ponies has gone lame.
Today I captured a scene with the Aeroscope whilst crossing an unbridged river about 200 feet wide, muddy, with a strong current. The ferry consisted of a half-dozen coracles made from interwoven bamboo and waterproofed with resin and coconut oil, and paddled by one or two men. The animals swam. After each journey the boats had to be pulled a half-mile upstream, to float back to the other side.
December 3. Wonderful to hear the King’s English spoken again (albeit with a Scottish accent). We are camped near a pair of medical missionaries, recent arrivals in a strange land. They are full of Christianity and antiseptics. Mrs. Macpherson from Inverness is like one of Rossetti’s pale and emaciated beauties. The couple are only just beginning to realize they have arrived in a land of demons, goblins, evil spirits of rivers and mountains, apparitions, magic, ghosts and mysterious occurrences. One of their boys is a Tibetan educated at Rugby School. His belief in Drought ghosts, the returning spirits of men who were consumed by carnal lust in life, and in death create hot, dry winds, is undiminished.
With a regal disdain for Feng-shui, the Macphersons have plumped for a site to build a church and establish an orphanage and do their Deity’s work, with plenty of the Creator’s finest waterfowl nearby - wild duck, partridges and pheasants. The orphanage lies empty. Being certain that our missionaries gouge out eyes and grind up human bones for medicine, ditto human hearts, the Chinese are not going to be tricked into placing children in the missionaries’ care. Witnesses abound who swear they’ve come across Christian cemeteries full of newly-buried bodies lacking eyes and hearts.
In reality many children are blind or deformed long before their impoverished rural parents offer them to the Catholics and Protestants to save the entire family from starving. If it’s sheer quantity of souls they want, the missionaries would reap a far larger harvest if they took their tracts to the kitchens of Paris, or London’s Chinese laundries. However, appeals ‘for our missionaries converting the heathen Chinese’ seemed to be a wonderful fundraiser back home. The Chinese in China will do more to heathenise the English than the English to Christianise them, despite - or because of - all our missions.
China may not be in need of our Bible but is in urgent need of our science. If the Macphersons insist on remaining in China they can do more good through medicine. The filaria worm is hard at work where-ever I go. As many as a third of the soldiery have large scrotal tumours. Not much is known about the life-cycle of the worm which causes these. I suspect there is an intermediate host, the mosquito perhaps.
A Japanese has billeted himself on the missionaries for the night. He confided he is engaged in an exhaustive topographical survey of the Celestial Chinese Empire. There is, he said (slightly in his cups), an interesting rumour doing the rounds that General Yuán has received permission to establish three new divisions. There will soon be a shortage of ponies because the New Army is purchasing 6,000 of the beasts and offering £3 per mount.