Hope's failure at Taku met with less sympathy from the London correspondent of the New York Daily News, Karl Marx. Reporting the subsequent debate in Parliament, he wrote: "The whole debate in both Houses on the China war evaporated in grotesque compliments showered … on the head of Admiral Hope for having so gloriously buried the British forces in the mud." (See Edgar Holt, The Opium Wars in China, 1964). Marx was a trenchant commentator on Chinese affairs; he it was who likened the dissolution of the Manchu Empire to that of a mummy in a hermetically-sealed coffin brought into contact with the open air.
22.
Last night among his fellow roughs,
He jested, quaff'd and swore;
A drunken private of the Buffs,
Who never look'd before.
Today, beneath his foeman's frown,
He stands in Elgin's place,
Ambassador from Britain's crown
And type of all her race.
Flashman had witnessed one of the most dramatic moments of the China War, and its most famous heroism, when Moyes, "the drunken private of the Buffs", who had been captured along with an Irish sergeant of the 44th and some coolies (one version says Sikhs), flatly refused to kow-tow to his Chinese captors, and was cut down in cold blood. Yet but for Sir Francis Doyle's poem the incident might hardly have been heard of; today it is largely forgotten, and the facts behind it are difficult to trace. The story rests on the sergeant's authority, and there seems no reason to doubt him, or Flashman—or for that matter, Doyle's poem, which only errs (possibly deliberately) in presenting Moyes as a young Kentish country boy, when in fact he was a fairly disreputable Scot, old enough, it is said, to have been broken from the rank of colour sergeant for insubordination—which seems characteristic. Not much more is known of Moyes, whose presence in the Buffs (the East Kent Regiment) was presumably a matter of chance. A rumour that he died of drink in captivity seems to have no foundation; he was in the hands of the Chinese for barely one day, and the sergeant's account, which Doyle obviously accepted, is consistent with the experience of later prisoners.
It is just possible that Doyle, who was Matthew Arnold's successor as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, had the Moyes story from a most authoritative source—Lord Elgin himself. They had been contemporaries at Eton and Christ Church, where both took Firsts in Classics in 1832, belonged to the small circle of Gladstone's intimates (Doyle was his best man), and may have met again after Elgin's return to Britain in 1861.
23. The hoot of the tawny owl, the chat huant, was a recognition signal among the peasant guerrilla fighters of Britanny ("les Chouans") who remained loyal to the crown in the French Revolution. Probably only Flashman, hearing the words at such a critical moment, would have known (or bothered to note) that the speaker was presumably a Breton.
24. According to British Army custom, the most smartly turned out member of a guard was (and possibly still la) excused guard duty, and given the light task of orderly to the guard. This is known as "taking the stick", possibly because the orderly would carry a cane rather than a weapon. The practice of carrying the guard on to parade was still occasionally seen in India in the editor's time, forty years ago.
25. It is fairly rare for Flashman to show much regard for "politicals", but the three with whom he was to work on the Pekin expedition seem to have been exceptions. They were, in fact, an impressive trio. James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1811-63) was Britain's most accomplished foreign envoy in the middle years of the century, and served with distinction as governor of Jamaica, governor-general of both Canada and India, and on missions to China and Japan. His great diplomatic service was to prevent annexation of Canada to the U.S., and negotiate the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, which he was accused of floating through the American Senate on "oceans of champagne". Harry Parkes, former Canton commissioner and Elgin's interpreter, was to spend his life in the Orient, and make a name in both China and Japan; small, wiry, tenacious, and a glutton both for work and punishment, he had an adventurous career, distinguished by his ability to survive attempts on his life. He was the first foreigner ever received in private audience by the Mikado. Henry Loch (1827-1900), as Flashman indicates, already had a highly active service career behind him, belied by his gentle disposition and scholarly appearance; he was to write the standard work on the Pekin expedition, and was subsequently governor of the Cape, of Victoria, Australia, and of the Isle of Man, where he had the unusual distinction of having part of the sea-front named after him. (See James Bruce, Extracts from the Letters of James, Earl of Elgin … 1847-62 (1864); G. Wrong, The Earl of Elgin (1905); Theodore Waldron, editor, Letters and Journals of James, 8th Earl of Elgin (1872); Henry (Lord) Loch, Personal Narrative of … Lord Elgin's Second Embassy to China, 1860 (1869); S. Lane-Poole, Sir Harry Parkes in China, (1901); Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People, vol ii, 1972).
26. An opinion Elgin was to revise before the campaign was over. British opinion of the French was, as usual, highly critical, but on the march Elgin noted that the French soldiers were better improvisers than the British, and adapted well to the conditions. "Our soldiers do little for themselves, and their necessities are so great, that we move but slowly. The French work in all sorts of ways for the army. The contrast is, I must say, very striking." (Elgin, Letters and Journals.)
27. The fight between Tom Sayers, the Pimlico bricklayer, and John Camel Heenan, U.S.A., for the equivalent of the modern world heavy-weight title, had taken place at Farnborough in April and ended in a draw after 60 rounds, by which time neither man was fit to continue. The exchanges had been so brutal that there was an outcry, and the new Marquess of Queensberry rules were introduced a few years later. This was the last bare-knuckle prize fight in England.
28. Flashman is right in supposing that the regimental march of the Buffs is attributed to Handel, but almost certainly wrong in saying that it was played on the march to Pekin: the Buffs had been left behind to guard the Taku Forts, while the 60th were left at Sinho, and the 44th sent as reinforcements to Shanghai, thus reducing the army to a more manageable size. As to the Handel attribution, there is no conclusive proof that he wrote the march, although the Buffs' tradition is strong on the point; the suggestion is that the composer had an affection for the regiment, with its distinguished record of Continental service, and perhaps also because it had its origins in the old trained bands of London, his adopted home. (See Fortescue, vol. XIII; Walter Wood, The Romance of Regimental Marches.)
29. Flashman gives a condensed but accurate account of the march to Pekin, which finally took 44 days to complete. For fuller accounts see Loch; Wolseley; Grant and Knollys; Rev. R. J. L. McGhee, How We Got to Pekin (1862); R. Swinhoe (Hope Grant's interpreter), Narrative of the North China Campaign (1861); D. Bonner-Smith and E. W. R. Lumley (Navy Records Society), The Second China War, 1944; Robert Fortune, Yedo to Pekin (1863).
30. It is not often that the editor finds it necessary to supplement Flashman's narrative with any important matter, but the present glaring omission has to be filled. Having devoted almost half his narrative to his mission to Nanking, and his efforts to prevent the Taipings taking Shanghai, the author now blandly forgets all about the matter; of course, it is quite characteristic that he should no longer have cared whether Shanghai fell or not, since he was safely away from it, but one would have expected at least a line about the outcome, especially since Elgin had just drawn it to his attention. For the Manchu request for British help against the Taipings was prompted by the news from Shanghai, where Loyal Prince Lee's forces had been repulsed by British marines and Sikhs on August 18-21. It was not a major action, although the Taipings suffered some casualties; Lee's reaction appears to have been one of bewildered disappointment at being rejected by fellow-Christians. His failure seemed to do him no harm in the Taiping hierarchy.