July 1959
I once had a governess who could remember picking wild roses in London’s Cromwell Road. She seemed to me incomparably old anyway, but this statement further removed her; she became from that moment an historical figure, and if I had a few dates to attach to her, she would have taken her place among the battles and kings on which I was brought up. But it seems to me that during the last twenty-five years a new kind of writing has evolved which will have interesting consequences, both upon what is generally called history, and upon the young host who are conscripted to learn it. There used to be nothing - or very little - between Great Aunt Ethyl’s Mother’s letters written home during the Indian Mutiny, and immense military and statistical accounts of what was going on - often bombastic always one-sided and usually dull, and neither of these categories by themselves gave one a very clear idea of the events which they described. The first was of course frankly subjective: one might glean fascinating information about how ladies with very long hair and very tight stays survived extreme heat, general discomfort and danger - one might even be told what Major so-and-so had said he thought was going to happen, but the view would still be alarmingly partial. The second while purporting to be detached, and admittedly taking a wider view of the situation, was still usually written from a rigid standpoint - such as being white, Christian and right - which would be bound to make certain inroads on the writer’s sense of proportion. Facts from the second category could easily be rendered down into what Mr. Fleming in the foreword to his book, reviewed below, so aptly describes as iron rations of knowledge until they became so meaninglessly dull that time converts them to mere landmarks of ignorance…
But there are now a growing number of first-rate books which take an historical situation and give one an account of it, taking into consideration all the principal factors; the times on either side of its life - i.e. immediate causes and consequences - the temperaments and personalities of the chief characters, and having regard for accuracy which enables their authors to admit ignorance whenever they discover a gap in their material which cannot honestly be filled in. The results are an account far more in proportion and on a much bigger scale, infinitely more interesting to read and far more memorable than the small subjective stabs or larger dishonest sweeps that were generally recognised as memoirs or history. Here is another such book - succinct and masterly, which apart from its qualities of gripping the reader from beginning to end, is really a contribution to contemporary literature.
Less than sixty years ago the diplomatic representatives of eleven countries, their wives and families, Legation guards consisting of twenty officers and three hundred and eighty-nine men and well over two thousand other persons including armed volunteers, missionaries, converts, servants and children, were besieged in Peking from the end of May until the middle of August. They had four pieces of light artillery, an adequate sweet water supply, about one hundred and fifty ponies and mules (for meat) two hundred tons of rice, etc. and large quantities of excellent champagne. The year was 1900: the heat was insufferable; by the end of a month of drought the problem of sewage disposal was insoluble. There was also the stench of putrefying corpses, the fact that nobody could bath and most people had no change of clothing. Some ladies took to “the constant smoking of cigarettes” as a relief, but they were also fortunately sustained by delusions of impending rescue. Outside these cramped quarters, was the great city enclosing them with forty-foot walls and labyrinths lanes and houses - excellent cover for the constantly attacking enemy - initially the fanatical Boxers, but eventually also the Imperial Chinese Army. In the Forbidden City the Empress Dowager was issuing Edicts that were to become less and less obliquely savage towards the besieged as the weeks wore on. Sixty miles away, a relief force led by Admiral Sir Edward Seymour foundered because the Boxers made mincemeat of his railway track. Throughout the world curiosity about the situation in China was so intense that the total absence of real news about it soon led to mis-information: the besieged were reported massacred. In England Lord Salisbury informed the Queen that ‘it was impossible to exaggerate the horror of the news from Peking’ and a Memorial Service in St. Paul’s Cathedral was arranged: in Germany, the Kaiser despatched retributionary forces with many a blood-thirsty injunction.
When towards the end of July, a telegram from the American Minister got through from Peking implying that the besieged were in desperate need of relief, but alive, the armed forces of eight countries amassed and eventually set forth - twenty-thousand strong - on August 4th to reach the British Legation ten days later….The end of this business while not so bloodthirsty as the Kaiser might have wished, was peaceably resolved; lives were saved, the Boxers quelled, international honour - like a range of mountains laced with false summits of competitive greed - was satisfied, and even the looting and bickering of the polyglot garrison came to an end ten days after the Peace Treaty was signed…and what connection, if any, did they have with the Manchu Court?
Mr. Fleming suggests in his foreword that most of us know very little about this mysterious and extraordinarily recent incident: he goes on to point out that the participants in it fall into three categories; the besieged, their assailants and the relief forces. “There was no wireless in 1900, and all the relevant telegraph lines were destroyed at an early stage. Each category was thus insulated from the other two and had only a vague - often erroneous - idea of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Each category left copious records. We are left with the numerous pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle which has never been put together.
Mr. Fleming manages to sift from the records the most probable explanations of the intriguing questions all of which can never be answered with absolute certainty. (The Boxers were a secret society made up of brigands devoted to the pillaging and annihilation of Christians. They were reputed to be invulnerable through magic powers, and it is thought that the Empress Dowager - a lady whose malign tendencies were on a truly operatic scale but who was subject in her declining years to severe bouts of superstition - believed in them, and therefore appeased, tacitly supported and finally openly endorsed their activities and this, very roughly and over simply speaking, brought about the extraordinary situation of the siege.)
I do not think it would be possible to put together the pieces of the jigsaw better than has been done in this wholly admirable book. Mr. Fleming’s writing has the brilliant intelligence of somebody who has really taken the trouble thoroughly to inform himself out of passionate interest in his subject matter: he combines that grasp of the whole which is vital for clarity, with invariably well chosen detail that brings his subject to life, and the result is that one is enthralled from beginning to end, in a way which I do not remember having enjoyed since Mrs. Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why.
It is in fact impossible for me to exaggerate the enormous pleasure that this account of the fifty-nine-years-old news of Peking has given me.