Battle for Beijing, 1858–1860 by Harry Gelber

Author:Harry Gelber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

More immediately and urgently, there was a fundamental disagreement between the British and French commanders about how the entire campaign should be run. Montauban wanted the army to cross to the south bank of the Haihe River and attack the main forts on that southern bank. The allied gunboats beyond the mouth of the river would be able to give powerful artillery support to such a move, while the Chinese, once both sides of the river were in allied hands, would have no line of retreat towards Tianjin and so would face destruction or surrender. From the point of view of senior French officers, such a strategy dovetailed not only with their general thirst for military glory but with their strong view that the object of a campaign was to crush the enemy and celebrate as complete a victory as possible.

Some local factors pointed in the same direction. Command of the river would necessarily depend on being able to move between both of its banks. But the only floating bridge had been destroyed on the day of the fall of Tanggu. A number of barge-like boats were available, and work on a new bridge was begun. On the 18th Colonel Lévy of the French engineers took 300 men to the south bank to secure that end of the new bridge, but they found themselves in a fight with Tartars and had to send to Montauban for reinforcements before they could secure that southern bank position and get Jamin’s brigade to take proper command of both sides of the river. That bridge would probably have given the French first place in any full-scale allied attack on the south bank forts.

Hope Grant, on the other hand, saw that attacking the south bank forts would mean putting the Haihe River between the army and its supply base at Beitang, while the ‘mud flat’ defences of these very powerful forts would require a formal siege of many weeks, even months. Furthermore, he never lost sight of the fact that the basic objectives of the campaign were the ratification of the 1858 treaty and the installation of a British ambassador at Beijing. Those were not aims that could be usefully promoted by killing, or even capturing, lots of Chinese (who would, at any rate, then have to be fed). He was therefore much less interested in destroying the Chinese army than in capturing the forts as quickly as possible and with few losses. As Robert Swinhoe, the interpreter, fairly wrote, ‘Our object was not to subdue the country, but merely to open the way for negotiations with its Government, and at the less cost of life this was achieved the better for our country’.25 Furthermore, Hope Grant understood, as did Elgin and the Cabinet in London, that too dramatic a victory might not just crush the Chinese army but destabilise the Chinese state. Gros himself sent Montauban a letter pointing out that the allies did not want to overthrow the dynasty and did not even

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