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Updated: June 18, 2025
Several days were passed in preliminary observations and skirmishing. On the one side, the whole of the Tartar cavalry was removed to the southern bank; on the other, a bridge of boats was thrown across the Peiho, and the approach to the northern fort carefully examined up to 600 yards from the wall. At this point the views of the allied generals again clashed.
Thaine hardly had time to think it as the armies came into their places. It was the third day after the regiment had reached Tien-Tsin. Along the Peiho river lay a sandy plain with scant tillage and great stretches of barren lands. Here and there were squalid villages with now and then a few more pretentious structures with adobe brick walls and tiled roofs.
A report was long current in Peking that foreigners have no joints in their knees; hence their reluctance to kneel. Thus vanished for Mr. Ward the alluring prospect of winning for himself and his country the beatitude of the peacemaker. The summer of 1860 saw the Peiho forts taken, and an allied force of thirty thousand men advancing on Peking.
All these men came down with dry canteens to the Peiho by Yang-Tsun. The river was choked with dead Chinamen and dead dogs and horses. They must push aside the bodies to find room to dip in their canteens. "You have one more lesson. You must learn to be a Christian." Somehow the words seemed to ring round and round just out of Thaine's mental sight. "Vasser!
Harris had brought to this conference exceptional diplomatic skill and winning tact, but it cannot be denied that he derived assistance from contemporaneous events in China, where the Peiho forts had just been captured and the Chinese forced to sign a treaty.
"On the 28th of April 1862 Captain Gordon left the Peiho and arrived at Shanghai on 3rd of May, and at once dropped into the command of a district with the charge of the engineer part of an expedition about to start, with the intention of driving the rebels out of a circuit of thirty miles from Shanghai."
Before the fleet left the Peiho workmen were already engaged repairing and re-arming the Taku forts, and the morrow of Lord Elgin's departure from Hongkong witnessed the revival of disturbances round Canton, where the new imperial commissioner Hwang, instead of seeking to restore harmony, had devoted himself to inciting the population to patriotic deeds in emulation of Commissioner Yeh.
He slept on his arms the heavy sleep of utter weariness, which Little Kemper's bugle call broke at three o'clock the next morning. Before the August sun had crawled over the eastern horizon the armies were swinging up the Peiho river toward Peking.
The American troops were leading the column now, as Thaine Aydelot had wished they might, and in all that followed after the day at Peit-Tsang the Stars and Stripes, brave token of a brave people, floated above the front lines of soldiery, even to the end of the struggle. It was high noon above the Orient, where the Peiho flows beside the populous town of Yang-Tsun.
Of course the Tartars will consider this a victory, and will he elated by it; but perhaps this is a good thing, as it may induce them to face us on the open. The ground on which they were found is firm and fit for cavalry, and is about four miles from the Peiho Forts. This is a very nasty place.
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