Winning the Wilderness Part 57

Because my price was paid me ten times over by my Maker.

But you wouldn't understand it. You go up and occupy.

--The Explorer.

The victory at Yang-Tsun had come with a tremendous loss of life. To go on now promised the cutting to pieces of the entire army. To stay here and await reinforcements would mean the slaughter of all the foreigners in Peking. In a council of war the next day English and Indian, Russian, German, j.a.panese, Italian, and French, general after general declared for the wisdom of waiting at Yang-Tsun for reinforcements.

Up spoke then General Chaffee of the American command:

"I will not wait while the Boxers ma.s.sacre the helpless Christians. Stay here or go back to your own countries, as you please. My army will go on to Peking, if it must go alone."

And his will prevailed.

Followed then a memorable march, with the Stars and Stripes ever leading the line. The strength of the force was thirteen thousand now and one thousand of these fell by the way before the end of the journey.

After Yang-Tsun, for the only time in this ten days' campaign, the soldiers undressed and bathed themselves like Christians in the unchristian Peiho, and on the next day, which was the Sabbath, they listened to the military chapel service. Six days they forged onward with the same cruel heat, and scalding air, and alkali dust, and poison water, over dreary plains, through deserted villages, twenty, twenty-five, and even thirty miles a day, they pushed on toward the Chinese capital.

And ever before them the Boxers slowly receded, stinging grievously as they moved. Sure were they that at last only dire calamity could await that slender column moving across the plains, led under a flag of red, white, and blue, with bands ever playing _The Star-Spangled Banner_, while from line on line rolled out that weird battle cry of "Rock Chalk! Jay Hawk! K U!" Sure were they that this stubborn little bands of soldiers foolishly following the receding Boxer must at last crush itself like dead-ripe fruit against the ancient and invincible walls of Peking.

On the evening of the sixth day from Yang-Tsun the twelve thousand men of the Allied Armies, flower of the world's soldiery, stumbled into camp with their outposts in sight of the great walls of the City of Peking. This had been the longest and hottest of all the days, with the weariest length of march. A great storm cloud was rising in the west and the air hung hot and still before it.

Thaine Aydelot and his comrades threw themselves down, too exhausted to care for what might happen next.

"This is the hottest day I ever knew," declared McLearn wearily, as he lay p.r.o.ne on the ground looking up at the hot sky with unblinking eyes.

"I reckon you never hit the National pike on an August day, out between Green Castle and Terre Haute down in Indianny," Binford suggested.

"Nor St. Marys-by-the-Kaw," Boehringer, a Kansas man, added. "There's where you get real summery weather."

"Oh, kill him, Aydelot, he's worse than a Boxer. Don't you know I'm from Boston originally, which is only a State of Mind?" Goodrich urged.

"No matter what state you are from originally, you are in China now, which is in a state of insurrection that we must get ready for a state of resurrection tomorrow. What are you thinking about, T. Aydelot? You look like Moses and the prophets." McLearn half turned over with the question.

Thaine, who was lying on his side, supporting his head on his hand, quoted softly:

"'Oh, the prairies' air so quiet, an' there's allers lots of room In the golden fields of Kansas, when the Sun Flowers Bloom.'"

A low boom of thunder rolled across the western sky; a twilight darkness fell on the earth, and a long night of storm and stress began for the army of deliverance encamped before Peking.

Outside the city the Boxers ma.s.sed in numbers. Inside more than a hundred thousand waited the coming of hardly more than one-tenth of their number.

No wonder they felt secure behind their centuries-old walls.

Thaine Aydelot was accustomed to sleeping tentless on the ground and to being beaten by rains. He was a sound sleeper and he was very weary. But tonight he could not sleep. The morrow would see world movements that should change all future history; in which movements he was a tiny unit, as every furrow that his father, Asher Aydelot, had run across the face of the prairie had by so much won it from wilderness to fruitfulness.

All night long the rain poured in torrents upon the camp. A terrific cannonade of thunder shook the earth. The lightning tore through the clouds in jagged tongues of flame. Where Thaine lay he could see with every flash the great frowning black walls of Peking looming up only a few miles away. In the lull of the thunder a more dreadful cannonading could be heard, hour after hour. Thaine knew that inside the walls the Boxers were besieging the Compound. And inside that Compound, if he were yet alive, was his old teacher, Pryor Gaines. He wondered if the G.o.d of Battles that had led the armies all this long hard way would fail them now when one more blow might bring deliverance to His children. He remembered again the blessing with which his father had sent him forth:

"As thy day so shall thy strength be. The Eternal G.o.d is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms."

The memory brought peace, and at length, wrapped round in the blessing of an absolute trust, he fell asleep.

Inside of the City of Peking on that dreadful night the madness of the Boxer forces was comparable to nothing human. Nor jungle beasts starving for food and drink, frenzied with the smell of blood and the sight of water, could have raged in more maniac fury than the fury possessing the demon minds of these fanatics in their supreme struggle to flood the streets of Peking with rivers of Christian blood. For such as these the Christ died on the Cross of Calvary. For such as these the missionary is offered up. A human jungle, untamed and waiting, to whose wilderness the soldier became a light-bearer, albeit he brought the gospel of gunpowder to aid him.

The great walls about Peking enclose an area some fourteen miles in length and twelve miles in width. Within these walls lie several cities, separated from each other by walls of lesser strength, intended, with one exception, in the opening of the twentieth century, not so much for defense as for boundary lines.

The exception is the Imperial City, inside whose sacred precincts it was firmly believed a foreigner might not set foot and not be stricken dead by the G.o.ds. This City within a city had defenses the allied armies were yet to come against. It lies on the north, inside the great wall. Just east of it, along the north wall, was the Foreign Legation, whose south and east bounds were lesser structures of brick and earth. Here all the foreigners and many native Christians had been shut in for six long weeks, with the infuriated Boxers hammering daily at their gates, mad for ma.s.sacre.

Here they had barricaded themselves with all the meager means available.

They had fortified every gate with whatever might stop a bullet or check a cannon ball. They filled up the broken places in the walls with piles of earth; they dug deep trenches inside these walls, and inside these trenches they had built up heaps of earthworks. Daily they strengthened the weaker places and watched and prayed. No word from the big world outside seemingly could come to them--a little handful of the Lord's children, forgotten of Him, and locked dungeon deep from human aid. They had sent out a cry for help and had sent up prayers for deliverance. How far that cry had gone they could not know. Frowning walls besieged by enemies lay all around them. They could only look up and lift up helpless hands in prayer to the hot, unpitying August skies above them. Sickness stalked in over the walls. Hunger tore its way through the gates. Death swooped down, and sorrow seeped up, and despair lay in wait. But hope, and trust, and faith, and love failed not.

They ate dogs and horses. They went half naked that they might make sand bags of their clothes for greater defense. They exhausted every means for protection and life, but they forgot not to pray.

On this August night, while unknown to the besieged the Allied Armies encamped only six miles away, the reign of terror reached its height for the little Christian stronghold.

The storm beat pitilessly on the starved and ragged captives. The rain softened the earthworks and the rivers of water in the trenches threatened to undermine the walls. Across these walls the incessant attack of cannon and roar of rifles was beyond anything the six weeks' siege had known, and only the power of Omnipotence could stay the b.l.o.o.d.y hands. So the long hours of the dreadful night dragged on.

At length came daydawn. The storm had rolled away. A lull in the besieging guns gave the Legation a little rest of mind. Hungry and helpless, it waited the pa.s.sing of another day. A silence seemed to fill the city and the wiser ones wondered anxiously what it might portend.

Suddenly, in the midst of it, a great gun boomed out to the northeast.

Another gun, and another. Then came a pause and the besieged listened eagerly, for their own walls felt no shock. Again came the bellow of cannon, nearer and heavier, repeated and repeated, and the roll of smoke and the rattling fusillade of bullet shots told that a battle was on.

Outside the gates! An army come against Peking! The Army of Deliverance!

They were here fighting for the Christians! Oh, the music of birds' song, of rippling waters, of gently pulsing zephyrs, the music of old cathedral chimes, of grandest orchestras--nothing of them all could sound so like to the music that the morning stars sang together as this deafening peal of cannon, this rippling rhythm of Krag rifles.

With bursting hearts they waited and watched the great wall to the north.

It is sixty feet high and fully as wide at its base, tapering to twenty-five feet across the top. Could the gates be stormed? Could this wall be shaken? From the highest points inside the Compound eager eyes scanned the northeast as the battle raged on with crash of sh.e.l.ls and whir of bullets. Then down to the waiting ones came a message that seemed to fly to every ear in the besieged city, making men and women drop to the ground in a very ecstasy of joy.

"They've run up the Stars and Stripes on the northeast wall!"

The sword of the Lord and of Gideon was come again to Peking, as it came once long ago to the Valley of Jezreel.

The Allied Armies broke camp early on the morning of August fourteen in the year of nineteen hundred. Six miles away stood the most impa.s.sable defense an army of the West might ever storm. Yet the twelve thousand men did not hesitate. With General Chaffee's troops in the front of the line they fought through fiercely skirmis.h.i.+ng forces up to the h.o.a.ry old city's gates, the Fourteenth United States Infantry leading the way. The American guns cleared the Chinese soldiery from the top of the walls, and the American cannon were in line ready to blow open the huge gates.

"I want to know what's on the other side before I open up the gates,"

General Chaffee declared.

So the command was given for a volunteer to scale the wall, to stand up a target for the Chinese rifles! To be blown to pieces by Chinese cannon!

Yet the armies must know what awaited them. There must be no debouching into a death-trap for a wholesale ma.s.sacre.

Thaine Aydelot had cherished one hope since the twilight hour on the battlefield at Yang-Tsun--that when this day should come the American might lead the way through the Peking gates and be first to enter the strange old city. Not merely because he was an American patriot, but because to him the American soldiers with all their sins and follies of youth and military life were yet world missionaries.

Thaine knew his comrades shared his hope, whether for the same high purpose he could not have asked. He had no longer dreams of military glory for himself. His joy was in achievement, no matter by whose hand.

"There's an order for somebody to go up on the wall."

The word was pa.s.sed along the line. Before it reached Thaine and his comrades a young soldier had leaped forward to obey the order.

"Glory be, America first!" Goodrich said fervently.

"And a Kansan. A Jayhawker!"

Thaine did not know who said it. He saw the soldier, young Calvin t.i.tus, a Kansas boy, leap after the j.a.panese coolies who ran forward toward the wall with the long bamboo scaling ladders. And for one instant's flash of time the old level prairies came sweeping into view, the winding line of Gra.s.s River with the sand dunes beyond; the wheat fields, the windbreaks, the sunflowers beside the trail, and far away the three headlands veiled in the golden haze of an August morning. A Kansas boy the hero of the day--first of all that army to stand on top of that h.o.a.ry old wall! The prairies had grown another name for the annals of history.