However, the Imperial army sent reinforcements down the railway from Peking in early November. They had forced the republicans out of Hankow and were now fighting hard in Hanyang, the area across the river next to Wuchang where they stood. Kayano Chochi reported ‘Bushidō-like spirit’ among the young Chinese revolutionaries. ‘One soldier with two bullet wounds told me: See how a Hunan soldier is not afraid to die, just like a Japanese one,’ Kayano said.
Disarmed of his weapon, Charles joined a medical team bringing Chinese wounded and dead out of Hanyang. Among the republicans were about 140 Japanese, and they suffered casualties too. They came under distant rifle fire and occasional bursts of artillery. Boats bringing medicine chests from the foreign concession also came under fire. Once or twice bullets whizzed close by Charles, and one or two hit the thick planks of the sampan he travelled in.
It was a tense three weeks. A rush of idlers followed an execution squad hurrying an accused spy off to be beheaded. Charles didn’t follow. In the hotel crowded with Japanese volunteers, one young recruit accidentally discharged his rifle into the ceiling. He was savagely beaten by a drill sergeant.
Charles met up with Kiyofuji, one of the ronin from Tokyo who worked with both Miyazaki and the Black Dragon Society. He told Charles he was being funded by the Gaimusho. Major Kayano, who was later among the four or five Japanese killed in the fighting, told Charles he had been selected and sent by an officer running the intelligence section of the Japanese general staff, Major-General Utsunomiya Taro, whose thinking was that the revolution would result in China splitting into northern and southern entities, enabling Japan to dominate the north.
Yuan Shikai’s forces pressed them hard for most of November and cleared the revolutionaries out of Hanyang, with thousands killed and wounded. Then Yuan recalled his general, and the advance halted. It seemed he wanted to keep the revolutionary threat in being to preserve his new power in Peking. But most of the southern provinces had declared for the republic, so complete victory in the central city would only have been the start of his military challenge. By then too, Huang and others in Wuchang were openly talking about offering the presidency of the republic to Yuan in return for forcing the abdication of the Manchus.
Huang and most of the Japanese volunteers joined an evacuation by river steamer to join an attack on Nanking, another Imperial city, which was completed successfully on 2 December. Representatives of all the anti-Manchu provinces then gathered in Wuchang and truce talks began with Yuan’s emissaries.
The Japanese contingent pulled back to Shanghai where they were joined by several senior figures working to rebuild Japan’s badly frayed image with the revolutionaries. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, the Wuchang Uprising had taken everyone completely by surprise. Newspapers had been slow to report its significance. Indeed, at the time Japan was hosting the Chinese Imperial reformers at Hakone resorts. The initial reaction of the foreign minister, Okuma, and the other leaders had been to canvass Britain and other powers about joint action to suppress the revolt. The Europeans and Americans were quick to point out that the Manchu dynasty was probably beyond saving, and that they would not be financing Peking.
Inukai, the revolutionary benefactor, turned up in mid-December and went up to Nanking to confer with Huang and Sun Yat-sen, who’d finally come back to China from one of his foreign tours. Intervention by Uchida Ryohei had got the Mitsui branches in Hong Kong and Shanghai to make loans to Sun to keep the republican forces going. Toyama Mitsuru, the patriarch of the Dark Ocean Society, fountainhead of the Black Dragon Society and other nationalist shishi and soshin groups, arrived a week later and frightened the swarm of Japanese war profiteers flocking to Shanghai into less blatant behaviour. He followed Inukai up to Nanking, with Kayano and the newly arrived Miyazaki in tow.
The objective of the Japanese ultra-nationalists was to try to disrupt the accommodation between Yuan and the republicans, thereby blocking the possibility of a unified China under Yuan Shikai, a powerful figure with a record from his Korea days of opposing Japanese interests. Charles was told by his colleagues to move out of their Japanese inn and take a room at the Astor Hotel, on the edge of the British concession. Dressed as a European, he could circulate with the foreigners and pick up information about the policies of the Western powers.
Then Kayano came and told them the Chinese revolutionaries wanted Charles to carry out an assassination mission against Yuan Shikai himself. He would be supplied with a bomb and sent via Tianjin, the British port near Peking where he would be less likely to attract suspicion. The Japanese comrade who had taken his money in Dairen came by later and suggested he quietly disappear, as he would never get past the political police. A few days later Charles was told a Chinese student had been selected for the mission; a bomb was thrown at Yuan in Tianjin, missing him but causing casualties among his guards and bystanders. Charles wondered if it were not the Japanese themselves who instigated this attempt.
The effort was fruitless. In January the two Chinese sides reached agreement, and Sun Yat-sen resigned as provisional president of the republic. Yuan Shikai persuaded the empress Dowager to abdicate on behalf of the infant emperor, Pu Yi, and he was installed as president in March 1912.
Charles was asked by Kayano to move into the Hotel des Colonies in the French settlement, with the aim of meeting and cultivating a prince of the deposed Korean monarchy, who was known to have been close to Yuan Shikai. Presumably this was another way of getting close to the Chinese general. The prince occupied three rooms in the hotel, with another for his Japanese mistress. Kayano was meanwhile approaching the prince through the intermediation of a collector of curios. This attempt fizzled when the Chinese revolutionaries got wind of Kayano’s plan.
The friction between the Japanese nationalists, out to capitalise on Chinese turmoil, and the idealists around Miyazaki became overt. At one dinner the ronin roughly handled the Japanese general Shiba Gorō, a hero of the Boxer Rebellion, when he expressed support for the Chinese conservatives.
Charles stayed on, drilling with the Japanese company of the international settlement’s volunteer force, and trying to help the republicans get machine guns and other modern arms through the various embargoes. But he gradually started to realise that there was now little more he could contribute to the revolution and that financial support from Japanese sources would soon dry up. He began looking for work.
Charles soon suffered two more disappointments. Making inquiries around the foreign quarters, he learnt that the local branch of Bavier & Co. had shut down four years earlier after a business crisis in which his father’s brother, Ernest de Bavier, had shot himself. Then at one of the Japanese hotels he came face to face with Kiku, the photographer’s wife, for whom he had been holding himself ‘pure’ for six years. He persuaded her to talk to him alone. It became clear she barely remembered him. ‘Please let me go, I have a baby now,’ she said eventually. Charles picked up a Russian prostitute that night, and went on a month-long binge of drinking and whoring.
Towards the middle of the year, Charles read an article in the North China Daily News about the formation of a new army in Australia and the recruitment of suitable candidates for the officer training corps. He felt the tug of destiny, and shipped back to Yokohama on the Hakuei Maru, a little NYK steamer.
Back on Japanese soil, Charles went up to Tokyo. Thousands of people were bowed on the Nijubashi bridge into the Imperial palace, praying for the flickering life of the Meiji emperor. When the sombre announcement of his death came, at the end of July 1912, it felt to everyone the end of an era that had transformed Japan. Preparations got underway for the massive funeral to be held six weeks later that would be attended by royalty and statesmen from around the world, and marked by the ritual harakiri afterwards of General Nogi, the victor of Port Arthur, and his wife.
Charles didn’t wait. Within two weeks he had collected his few possessions and books, said his farewells, and boarded the s
teamship Kumano Maru for the South Seas.
Chapter 8
ADVANCE AND RETREAT
Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.
— On War by Carl von Clausewitz
Australia and Gallipoli 1912–16
The ship took its time leaving Japan, calling at Kobe, Shimonoseki and Nagasaki before heading to Hong Kong, then turning decisively southwards. It called at Manila and Zamboanga, dropping off traders and agents of commerce, before plunging deeper into the great archipelago of the East Indies. The steamer throbbed its way past islands with the sun glistening on the tops of their palm trees, the occasional canoe and rickety Buginese sailing ship, and many smoking volcanoes. The ship was the only modern thing in this simple world.
That this placid sea was to become the theatre of the greatest clash of naval and air power in history, and of a desperate struggle of persuasion in which Charles would be personally involved, was not something that entered his imagination. He spent his days on board reading books on war strategy, engaging in kendo with some of the crew, and leaning over the rail to watch the changing blues and greens of the sea and land. Husbanding his savings, he mostly kept to himself, to avoid spending it on drinks and snacks in the passengers’ saloon.
As the ship rounded the western end of New Guinea and entered a shallow sea it made frequent changes of course. A Dutch gunboat passed, and the passengers saw great native sailing canoes with crablike sails of woven palm fronds above their double hulls, naked black men waving from the platform between the hulls.
The Kumano Maru put in at Thursday Island, the outpost between this primitive world and Australia, watched by an idle crowd of dark-skinned people in tattered shirts and bright dresses. Surly white men in sweaty uniforms came on board, and disappeared into the purser’s cabin. A desk was set up for them next to the head of the gangway, where they studied and stamped the papers of a group of pearl-divers, short and stocky men from Kyushu, who were about to disembark. Boxes came up in nets from the forward hold and were swung onto the quay.
The remaining passengers had a walk around the township and got back on board before dinner. The ship sailed on the high tide during the night. In the morning they headed due south. The ship called at Townsville and Brisbane, both still tropical, then the sea became darker and the air cooler. A pilot launch pulled alongside off Sydney and the ship turned towards the high sandstone cliffs of the coastline. A gap appeared, and once through it the ship swung left into the channel. It was a grand sight, fine houses with red-tiled roofs and headlands covered with eucalyptus trees, shrilling with cicadas. The new cruisers and destroyers of the Australian fleet lay at anchor. Tugboats, ferries and work boats criss-crossed the waterways. The Japanese ship moved cautiously up harbour, leaving the rumbling, smoky city of sandstone offices to its left, and nosed into a wharf, where stevedores put gangplanks across at deck level into the customs shed.
More unsmiling officials sat at desks, ticking off names from the passenger list. When Charles’ turn came, an official looked keenly at his face and glanced down at his name. ‘Bavier, eh,’ he said. ‘That’s French isn’t it?’ Charles nodded.
‘No need for a dictation test,’ the official decided, making a note on his list. The few remaining Japanese passengers, a wool buyer from Kanematsu and his family, were being shepherded through with a local colleague waving their certificates of exemption from the test in front of a stern-faced customs man.
Charles’ studious reserve had commended him to a returning traveller among the passengers. This brought an introduction to a Mr Hay, who offered Charles lodging at his home in Ryde while he got his bearings, in return for work about the place. It was pleasant enough at Glen Ayr, as the Hay house was called, and his command of English steadily improved, but in a district of orchards and small farms it was a long way from the city and in no way connected with his ambitions of a military career. After two months, he said his thanks and took the train to Melbourne, then the temporary Australian capital and hosting most of the federal departments including Defence.
At the suggestion of his hosts in Sydney, Charles went from the rail terminus at Spencer Street to the Metropolitan Mission in Bourke Street, a porter shouldering the heaviest bag containing his books. It was still early morning, and the sounds of groans and coughing came from the dormitories in the building. An elderly attendant asked him to wait in the lobby, where Charles sat and read old copies of The Age and The Argus. After an hour, a man of middle age in clerical dress appeared and introduced himself as William Pointer, the superintendent. He studied the letter of recommendation from Mr Hay, and blew out his breath.
‘Well, young man,’ he said, ‘I see you have come to turn yourself into a Briton, and join the profession of arms.’ Charles smiled. ‘Here you will not see the best side of this country,’ Pointer went on. ‘We are a refuge for the homeless, the unemployed, the destitute. Some of our charges have striven and failed in the endeavour of life. Some have not striven: even now in this desperate state they will spend their last pennies on drink.’
He stopped and looked at Charles intently. ‘Hay says you are a steady young fellow. I can give you a berth here, and some work as a steward. One pound a week and your board – that’s all! It will not be pleasant work all the time. You’ll have to round them up, clean them up, and get some square meals down them.’
Charles gratefully accepted, and the Mission became his base. Chastened by his debauch in Shanghai, Charles was set on making himself officer material, to fulfil the destiny he felt was waiting. He defined as duty the routine of taking in the drunks and tramps dumped on the Mission’s doorstep by the police and city officials, of taking their reeking clothes down to the laundry, of cajoling them into the dining hall, of locking up at night.
For long stretches of the day he was free to explore this sprawling city and its fine buildings created from the wealth of the gold rushes and the wool booms of the previous century. With a straw boater, suit, round collar and tie, he left the backstreets and mingled with the clerks, accountants and managers thronging the daytime streets and crowding the trams. Attendance at church gained him the acquaintance of Delwyn Vaughan Rees, a teacher at the Albert Park state school, to whom he went for tuition in English.
Through reading the newspapers, Charles also became aware of the growing doubts and fears in Australia about the country of his upbringing. The British naval agreement with Japan and the recent Anglo–Japanese Exhibition in London fed into an alarmist view that Australia’s position as a white, British bastion was imperilled, and even seen as dispensable in London.
From reports in the press, he saw references to the Directorate of Military Intelligence and sent off a letter addressed to its chief at St Kilda Barracks, Colonel McCay, offering his services in translating Japanese. A few days later, a card came inviting Charles to call on Major Reynolds at the barracks the following day.
At the orderly room near the gate, they had his name. A soldier took him across the parade ground to the intelligence room. Reynolds, an older soldier with a heavy moustache, was sitting at a desk under a huge map of the Pacific festooned with small German, French, British and Japanese flags.
‘Ah, Bavier,’ he declared, sitting up and placing a large envelope to cover an open file in front of him. ‘A window into our little yellow friends and allies, we hope.’ Reynolds introduced him to others sitting at desks around the room, Mr Clerk and Mr Newman. The director, Colonel McCay, was absent from his adjacent office. He was a man with many irons in the fire, Charles later learnt, including simultaneous careers in politics, education and the law.
An enamel mug of milk tea was brought in, tannin-dark as floodwater, and Reynolds interrogated Charles about his background, sitting up especially when he talked about the Japanese home front during the Russian War and his experiences in China. Charles raised the question of entering the Australian army, mentioning th
e article that had drawn him to Australia.
‘We’re a very small force, just a few thousand of us, just the skeleton to flesh out with the militia if something blows up,’ Reynolds said. ‘But we’re working on it. The first class of officer-cadets at Duntroon are midway through. You work on your studies and get your naturalisation.’
After nearly an hour, Reynolds produced a stack of periodicals in Japanese that he said had been collected by a naval officer. ‘Meanwhile you can be most useful to us,’ Reynolds said. ‘People round here and the state capitals, like Mr Piesse, are getting most interested in Japan. Have a look through these will you? Pick out anything about the army or navy, or Japanese foreign policy, and write it out in English. Post it in, and I’ll call you. Earn you a few pounds.’
So began a relationship that went on for the next year and a half. It provided an ample stream of cash on top of the weekly pound from the Mission, enabling Charles to pay Rees for his tuition and to expand his library. The work with the men in the refuge gave him daily lessons in the Australian and British vernaculars, as the men came from all walks of life.
The translations and reading kept him busy in his spare moments at night. There were plenty of temptations, as the lower end of the city teemed with prostitutes, some of them pretty girls from the factories down near the port, but Charles was determined to keep himself pure and dedicated to his higher calling, as it then appeared.
In part, it was because he was intimidated by white women, too. Apart from the Russian prostitutes in Shanghai, Charles had only known Oriental women who were instilled with a duty of submission and deference to men. Australia was then one of the few countries where women had the right to vote. In Melbourne Charles sometimes stood and listened at public meetings addressed by the successors of the suffragettes, like Vida Goldstein and Adela Pankhurst, who were to come out against the war and enlistment almost as soon as it started. The women of this country, rich and poor, had a directness and hard practicality that hadn’t been apparent among the foreign ladies of Tokyo and Yokohama. On the rare occasions when women looked at him closely, Charles felt they could see right through to his Japanese inner self.
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