Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

by Robert K. Massie

  The Boxers objected to both the physical and spiritual pollution of the Celestial Kingdom. Foreign railroads stretched across the land, dispossessing peasants and violating sacred burial grounds. Trains carrying passengers and freight threw thousands of boatmen and carters out of work. Telegraph lines strung along the railways sang in the wind, affronting the spirits of the air. Worse still were the Christian missionaries with their fervent hymn-singing, their obsession with conversion, and their ridicule of traditional Chinese beliefs. And worse even than the foreign barbarians were the Chinese Christians, who had betrayed their countrymen by accepting these beliefs.

  The immediate cause of the Boxer Rebellion was Germany's seizure of Kiaochow Bay and the city of Tsingtao in Shantung Province on the Yellow Sea. The Kaiser, itching to acquire a naval station and trading port on the China coast, had used the pretext of the murder of the two German missionaries in 1897 to wrench a ninety-nine-year lease on these territories. With Prussian thoroughness, German administrators began to transform the province into an island of Germany-in-Asia. Tsingtao became a city of German architecture, with clean, orderly streets and a German brewery which produced the best beer in Asia. Signs in German directed the peasants (most of whom could not even read Chinese) to obey German laws and regulations. The peasants of Shantung, among the most hardy and spirited in China, resisted these efficient foreigners almost at once. German punitive expeditions marching out to destroy villages maddened increasing numbers of peasants. Before the end of 1898, the first Boxers appeared. Their initial victims were native Christians. Then, on December 31, 1899, an English missionary in Shantung, the Reverend S. M. Brooks, was murdered. His assailants were captured and decapitated, but the central government carefully refused to suppress or even condemn the Boxer organizations.

  The central government in China in 1900 was, essentially, a tiny, ruthless, ambitious woman, the Dowager Empress Tz'u-hsi. From within the walls of the Forbidden City, served and protected by dozens of eunuchs, she ruled the Manchu Empire. Born in 1836, the daughter of an officer in the Household Guards, Tz'u-hsi blossomed into adolescent beauty and was accepted as a Third Grade Concubine in the harem of the Emperor Hsien-feng. She became his favorite and bore him a son, who on the death of the Emperor succeeded his father. Tz'u-hsi, Regent at twenty-six, moved pitilessly against her opponents. One, a powerful court official named Su Shun, soon became the subject of an Imperial decree: "As to Su Shun, he fully deserves the punishment of dismemberment and the slicing process. But we cannot make up our mind to impose this extreme penalty and therefore, in our clemency, we sentence him to immediate decapitation." When her son was old enough to govern, Tz'u-hsi thrust him into debauchery, cutting short his life. He was succeeded by another young man, Tz'u-hsi's nephew, for whom she also served as Regent. In 1898, not long after he came of age, the Dowager Empress overthrew this young Emperor with a coup d'etat. He became a virtual prisoner while she resumed the task of ruling. In 1900, Tz'u-hsi was sixty-four, although sharp-eyed Western women who caught sight of her on ceremonial occasions said that she looked twenty years younger. Her voice was low and velvety and said to be filled with sexual insinuation.

  Tz'u-hsi did not like what foreigners had done to China. Throughout the four decades of her rule, she had seen them steal ports from" her empire, force unequal treaties upon her, dominate trade, and humiliate the Dragon Throne. The Regular Chinese Army seemed impotent to prevent these outrages. Now she observed the Boxers displaying all the courage and fervor which her own soldiers so embarrassingly lacked. Possibly, the Boxers, with their claim to 8 million "spirit soldiers," might actually defeat Western armies and navies. Carried away by this hope, the Dowager Empress first ordered her Imperial troops not to suppress the Boxer uprising in the provinces. Later, when the Boxers swept into Peking, Tz'u-hsi decided to ride the whirlwind and ordered her troops to join them. She wanted all foreigners and all Christian Chinese annihilated. At the height of the siege of the Legations, she said of the surrounded foreigners, "The foreigners are like fish in a stewpan."

  The center of foreign influence in the Manchu Empire was the Legation Quarter in Peking. Near the heart of the great city with its endless grid of streets, tiny, gray, one-story houses, shops, and open-air markets, the Quarter occupied an enclave about three quarters of a mile square. Inside this small, unfortified zone lived the diplomatic: representatives of nine European countries, the United States, and Japan. There were internal divisions-the British and Japanese distrusted the Russians, who seemed ready to annex all North China; no one much liked the Americans and their noisy preaching that they had no interest in acquiring Chinese territory-but to the Manchu Court, the foreigners presented a unified body. Collective documents addressed to the Chinese government were signed, simply, ' Le Corps Diplomatique."

  In the spring of 1900, the Diplomatic Corps received only bad news. Nature was stimulating anarchy in North China. Two harvests had failed and famine was widespread. That spring, the Yellow River flooded; then, when the waters receded, no rain fell. Hungry and desperate, the peasants listened to the Boxers. Reports coming into Peking from the countryside told of burning villages, massacred Chinese Christians, assassinated foreign missionaries. In May, frightened missionaries, engineers, and workers employed in mining concessions and railway projects began flocking into Peking and Tientsin from outlying stations.

  On May 24, sixty guests were invited to dine at the British Legation in honor of Queen Victoria's eighty-first birthday. They sipped champagne and waltzed on the Legation tennis court by the light of paper lanterns hanging from branches. It was a last evening of frivolity. Four days later, the host, Sir Claude MacDonald, the British Minister, decided that the Legations were in danger. He asked that an Allied fleet of seventeen warships anchored at the mouth of the Peiho River, 110 miles away, provide security. On May 11, 337 foreign sailors and marines came ashore, boarded a train and, at eight that night, arrived in Peking. A few days later, they were joined by an additional eighty-nine German and Austrian marines.

  The arrival of the foreign troops did not dispel the sense of imminent peril. On June 9, the grandstand of the Peking Race Course, a symbol of European exclusivism, was set on fire and burned to the ground, with a Chinese Christian roasted in the embers. Two days later, Chancellor Sugiyama of the Japanese Legation was returning from the railroad station in his tailcoat and bowler hat when his small carriage was stopped by a group of Boxers. Before the eyes of an appreciative crowd, he was dragged into the street and decapitated. The Boxers cut out his heart. Attacks on native Christians became more widespread. The Times' correspondent reported that he had seen "awful sights: women and children hacked to pieces, men trussed like fowls, with noses and ears cut off and eyes gouged out." On June 20, Baron Klemens von Ketteler, the German Minister to China, set out alone in a sedan chair to visit the Chinese Foreign Office. Along the way, a government soldier-not a Boxer-stepped from the sidewalk, aimed his rifle at the Baron's head, and fired, killing him instantly. That afternoon the fifty-five-day siege of the Legations began.

  Some three thousand people were inside the foreign compound. Over two thousand were Chinese Catholics and Methodists who had been given sanctuary. There were four hundred foreign male civilians, 147 foreign women, and seventy-six foreign children. They were defended by 409 foreign soldiers, sailors, and marines who, among them, had three machine guns and four small cannon. There was plenty of water, five sweet-water wells within the British Legation grounds alone. Supplies of wheat, rice, and other staples were adequate, and 150 ponies, brought into the stables for Race Week, were available to provide meat. Sir Claude MacDonald assumed overall command of both the military garrison and the civilian population and each minister at least nominally commanded the troops of his own nationality. Messages between separate national compounds and barricades continued to be couched in diplomatic language: "Veuillez agreer, M. le Ministre, l'assurance de ma tres haute consideration."

  The Chinese assault cons
isted of continual, ill-coordinated attacks on the walls and barricades which constituted the perimeter of the Legation defense, and constant bombardment by two modern Krupp cannon, sold to the Chinese by the German manufacturer. (After the siege, relieving troops discovered dozens of additional Krupp cannon in Chinese warehouses, still in their packing cases. Had they been used, the bombardment would have quickly demolished the Legation defenses.) As the siege continued, the red-sashed Boxers were replaced by regular Chinese troops. In the compound, ammunition dwindled, living conditions worsened, and the heat rose to no degrees. The stench of dead men and animals was thick and rich. A European professor, a man who knew and loved the Chinese, had crossed the lines in the first days of the siege. After being tortured, he was decapitated and his head mounted on a stick to give the Europeans on their barricades an excellent view. "The face," noted a witness, "has a most horrible expression."

  They were cut off from the world. On June 10, after the murder of Chancellor Sugiyama, Vice Admiral Sir Edward Hobart Seymour, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Fleet at Taku, had marched from Tientsin with a relief force of British naval infantry and other foreign troops.* Seymour's expedition of two thousand men. distributed in five trains, covered about half of the ninety miles between Tientsin and Peking before attacks on the trains and dam-age to the tracks forced him to halt. Waves of Boxers, disdaining death, hurled themselves against the rifles, machine guns, and field artillery of Seymour's troops. It became clear to Seymour that relief of the Legations was impossible; only with luck would he be able to save his own force. He began a fighting retreat to Tientsin, which by now was besieged by twenty thousand Chinese.

  For almost eight weeks, the outside world remained ignorant of what was happening in Peking. All telegraph lines were destroyed. By the end of June, Seymour's column had battled its way back into Tientsin and other Allied troops had stormed the Taku forts and lifted the siege of that city. But nothing had been heard from the Legations since June 13. On June 29, a messenger got through with grim: news: "Situation desperate. Make haste." In England, concern about China had pushed the Boer War out of the headlines, though there was little news to report. Rumors abounded. On July 16, under the headline "the peking massacre," the Shanghai correspondent; of the Daily Mail reported the death of all foreigners in Peking. On the night of the sixth, the writer declared, a mass assault had overwhelmed the defenders, who had run out of ammunition. All survivors were "put to the sword in the most atrocious manner" except in cases where men had been able to shoot their own wives and children before the Chinese burst in. For two weeks, the story remained undisputed; Lord Salisbury wrote the Queen that it was "impossible to exaggerate the horror of the news from Peking." Then, suspicion set in and a mass service of mourning at St. Paul's was canceled until verification could be obtained.

  In Peking, the defenders, alive but desperate, ate rice and pony meat The Italian cannon had only fourteen shells. The Chinese had brought ten artillery pieces into action. From around the world, troopships were converging on the Yellow Sea. By the end of July, 25,000 foreign troops from eight nations were gathered at Tientsin and a Russian Commander-in-Chief, General Linevitch, had been appointed. On August 5, a new relief expedition started for Peking. It took nine days, but on the fourteenth, British and Japanese troops entered the city, reached the compound, and raised the siege. Sixty-

  * Captain John Jellicoe and Commander David Beatty, later successive Commanders-in-Chief of the British Grand Fleet in the First World War, accompanied Seymour's expedition. 80th were wounded, Jellicoe so severely that it was thought his wound was mortal.

  six foreigners had been killed and 150 wounded. The Dowager Empress and her court fled to western China, the Boxers and Imperial Army melted away, and three fourths of the city's population vanished into the countryside. Within the empty city, looting became the principal activity of the remaining population, the relieving troops, and even the once-besieged civilians. "Lady MacDonald [wife of the British Minister] was out in Peking and devoted herself most earnestly to looting," a British officer in the relief force reported in a letter.

  Kaiser William II burned with righteous indignation. "Peking must be stormed and leveled to the ground," he told Bülow. William basked in his new role as the avenging angel, the pillar of Christendom against the Yellow Peril. "Now it is a pleasure to be alive," he declared to Bülow, who later wrote, "I never saw him so excited as during the first phase of the Chinese affair." In a speech on July 2 at Wilhelmshaven, the Kaiser described the Boxer rising as "unprecedented in its impudence… [and] horrifying in its brutality" and demanded "exemplary punishment and vengeance." Without consulting the Chancellor or the Wilhelmstrasse, William ordered an expeditionary force of thirty thousand soldiers and marines to prepare to sail. From the beginning, he made clear that this military operation fell under his imperial prerogative. The China expedition would be "no business of the Foreign Office," but would be directed "from the saddle, as it were."

  On July 27, he appeared at Bremerhaven to inspect the first contingent of German marines ready to leave for China. Standing before them, he gave what Bülow described as "the worst speech of this period and perhaps the most harmful that William II ever made." "You must know, my men, that you are about to meet a crafty, well-armed, cruel foe!" shouted the Kaiser. "Meet him and beat him! Give him no quarter! Take no prisoners! Kill him when he falls into your hands! Even as, a thousand years ago, the Huns under their King Attila made such a name for themselves as still resounds in legend and fable, so may the name of Germans resound through Chinese history a thousand years from now…" Hohenlohe and Bülow were present at Bremerhaven and, as the Chancellor listened, his old face grew sad. He turned to Bülow and said, "I cannot possibly answer for this in the Reichstag. You must try to do something." Although Bülow did his best to suppress the speech, handing an expurgated copy to the press, one reporter obtained the real text and soon the Kaiser's words were circulating around the globe.

  When he learned what Bülow had tried to do, William complained, "You struck out the best parts." Bülow pleaded with the Emperor to try to control himself. Speeches such as this, he explained, would be used by Germany's enemies to demonstrate that Germany was a land of barbarians. William accepted the criticism and reached for Bülow's hands. "I know you are concerned only for my best interest,":he said, "but after all, I am just as I am and cannot change myself."

  The Kaiser had set his heart on a particular prize: he wished a German officer to command the international expeditionary force. By early August, there were thousands of Allied troops in China or on the way, and it was obvious that some kind of supreme commander was necessary to coordinate their activities. Without the Kaiser's knowledge, Vice Admiral Sir Edward Seymour had commanded the first effort to relieve Peking and had failed; without William's consent, General Linevitch had been chosen on the scene to command the force which would eventually lift the siege. Still, William demanded priority. As the German Minister in China was the senior diplomat assassinated, the Kaiser reasoned that German precedence in extracting vengeance was justified. Hatzfeldt sounded out Lord Salisbury, who told him that it was a British characteristic, however unreasonable, "not to endure the command of a foreigner." Under pressure from William, the Wilhelmstrasse instructed Eckardstein to make a second attempt. This time Salisbury agreed; Britain was still involved in the Boer War and did not want the pqst for a British officer; the prospect of a Russian generalissimo in China had no appeal. Salisbury declared himself perplexed as to why the German Emperor wanted the post, but, as he did, he would have British support. William next telegraphed the Tsar. "The strongest corps only really worth speaking of will be the Russian, German, and Japanese. Is it your special wish that a Russian should be Commander-in-Chief? Or would you eventually wish one of my generals? In the latter case, I place Field Marshal Count Waldersee at your disposal." Nicholas II could see the thrust of William's offer. "I fully agree to the nomination of Count Waldersee," he repli
ed. "I know him well; he is certainly one of your most able and experienced [generals and his name stands high in the Russian army. With full confidence, I place my troops… under his command." On August 7, the Kaiser telegraphed General Count Alfred von Waldersee that he had been appointed.

  Waldersee was a political general with a nose for power and a vehement American wife. Both Waldersees had attached themselves early to young Prince William. The Countess, outspokenly religious, preached vigorously against cigars, coarse language, and lascivious art. The Count, when he discovered that William's father, Crown Prince Frederick, was dying of cancer, remarked coldbloodedly, "How wonderfully everything is turning out. All of us are looking with high hopes to… [William]." Three months after William became Emperor, Waldersee was appointed Chief of the General Staff, replacing Helmuth von Moltke, the hero of Bismarck's three wars, who, at seventy-seven, could no longer sit on a horse. Using his new position to cement his standing with the new Kaiser, Waldersee asked William to accept the rank of Field Marshal in the army. William consented and happily carried his beautiful gold-inlaid Marshal's baton at military parades and reviews.

  Because William insisted on actual command of troops during army maneuvers, Waldersee got into trouble. The Kaiser, unlike his father, had no actual war experience. In maneuvers, he favored spectacular infantry attacks and mass cavalry charges, which in wartime would have been suicidal. "He is extraordinarily restless, rushes hither and thither, is much too far ahead of the fighting line, interferes in the leading of his generals, issues countless and often contradictory orders and pays little heed to his counselors," Waldersee noted of the thirty-one-year-old Emperor at the 1890 maneuvers in Silesia. "He is always determined to win and therefore takes in ill part any decisions given by the umpire against him." Caprivi, the former general just installed as Chancellor, remarked quietly that "the General Staff had offered many traps and the Kaiser had gaily fallen into every single one of them." Unfortunately for Waldersee, it was his duty as Chief of the General Staff to critique maneuvers, including the performance of his sovereign. Waldersee tried to be tactful, but he pointed out the Emperor's mistakes in front of a large audience. William looked astonished, then became grave. He "tried to make excuses and became very feeble in his explanations," Waldersee said. A few days later Waldersee was removed as Chief of the General Staff and sent to command the Northern District in Altona, near Hamburg. His successor was General Count Alfred von Schlieffen. For a while, Waldersee's banishment from Imperial favor was total; Bülow found the word "traitor" penned by William in a margin next to Waldersee's name. But by 1898, retired and living in Hanover, Waldersee had sufficiently regained the Kaiser's goodwill to be invited aboard the Hohenzollern for a summer cruise. And in 1900, needing a field marshal who could handle a role that was more diplomatic than military, William completely resurrected Waldersee. Once the Tsar and Lord Salisbury agreed to a German commander in Asia, the Kaiser appointed Waldersee without troubling to consult either Hohenlohe or Bülow. The German press gave Waldersee the title of "World Marshal." Beyond raising the siege of Peking, Waldersee was not sure what was expected of his mission. He tepoke to Holstein, who was unable to give help. "It became obvious to me," the World Marshal wrote, "that apart from punishing the Chinese, our policy had no definite aims. The Kaiser had merely some vague ideas about the partition of China. The great thing for him was the necessity of playing a role in world politics."