Miscellaneous China, the Boxers, and the Siege of the Legations
The post at Peking did fall vacant. Poole accepted it on 22 August 1899 and, three months later, departed Charing Cross, arriving at the British Legation (’An impressive place’) inside the Manchu City of Peking on 30 December 1899. The Legations of eleven nations had been grouped together in a district about 2km long and 1km deep, situated to the south of the Imperial City and to the east of what is today Tiananmen Square, in the shadow of the massive Tartar Wall which had been built to separate the part of the city inhabited by privileged Manchss from that inhabited by ordinary Chinese. The Legation compounds were not fortified or professionally guarded, and the district contained, in addition to the legation compounds, hotels, banks, post and customs offices as well as private dwellings. Poole was warmly welcomed by the British Minister to the Qing Court, Sir Claude Macdonald and his wife Ethel, Lady Macdonald, ‘who is kindness itself’. This welcome was the start of a firm, enduring friendship and close understanding with each of the MacDonalds. Sir Claude was universally respected by the bickering, bitchy diplomats of the various nations, but was greatly stressed by the unpredictable attitudes of the Chinese Mandarins and top officials and frequently laid low by a heart condition which Poole discreetly and successfully treated, although it killed Sir Claude 15 years later. The following day, as Poole settled in, he was handed a telegram: ‘Poole British Legation Peking. Following from Mr Chamberlain: Queen Pleased appoint you Companion Michael George Services West Africa.’ prompting him to write that night: ‘Ain’t it good biz at 32!’
On 3 February 1900 he recorded: ‘An English missionary has been murdered in Shantung by the Boxers. 29 wounds on body.’ Two weeks later, wearing the gown, hood and mortar-board of an MB, Poole entered the Imperial City to attend a rare Audience in the Zhongnanhai with the Qing Emperor. ‘He is 30 but looked 15-18… Someone said he saw the Empress Dowager peeping from behind a screen.’ Poole made a sketch of the Emperor in his Journal.
Wordsworth Poole’s younger brother Francis, a Captain in the East Yorkshire Regiment, was sent by the War Office to Peking to learn Chinese and Wordsworth eagerly anticipated his arrival on 20 May. The two Poole brothers could hardly have chosen a more pivotal time to be in Peking and would both play significant roles in what was to come. With the anti-foreign, anti-Christian, ‘Boxer’ movement steadily gaining momentum and approaching the capital, by late May a sudden sense of unease had gripped the International Legations in Peking. News of massacres of missionaries and their converts in the nearby provinces and cities combined with never-ending equivocation by the Chinese government as to its commitment to ensure the safety of defenceless foreigners (neither the Legations nor the missionary stations had any fortifications, defences or armed guards). By 28 May some missionaries began to seek refuge inside the Legations, stones were thrown at foreigners, the train service became unreliable, wild rumours abounded and Sir Claude’s male staffers conducted ‘vigilante’ patrols of the Legations district at night, while hostile Chinese troops appeared at the entrances to the Legations and in the surrounding areas.
The Ministers of the Legations began an almost constant series of meetings and requested their governments to send up armed guards from the various foreign fleets stationed along the coast. The first contingents arrived from Tientsin on 31 May. Dr Poole noted: ‘French, American, Russian, Japanese, Italian, British. Ours were Marines, the others Bluejackets, in all about 300, of which 75 were ours… U.S. [Marines] a serviceable looking lot… An odd sight. Foreign soldiers marching through the old Peking walls, streets thronged with Chinese mob.’ Almost all their firepower came from magazine rifles rather than crew-served weapons, and their ammunition supplies were limited. The British Marines bought no doctors or medical equipment with them, just a Sick Berth Attendant with a first aid haversack, despite the likelihood that the Marines would have to fight. Dr Poole commented: ‘Very bad medical management. There is a good deal of sickness amongst them.’
The situation steadily deteriorated. Dr Poole maintained his sense of humour, but the missionaries were a sore trial and the mental health of many of the foreigners showed signs of strain: ‘even Lady MacDonald depressed and wanted a phial of poison to do for herself…’ A Japanese diplomat was beheaded by Chinese soldiers, most communications with the outside world were cut - ‘Can [only] wire via Russia’ - and the local Chinese staff began to disappear. Fortunately, Poole’s servants stuck by him for a while, because on 12 -13 May he was hit by one of his periodic bouts of fever. ‘Supplies are getting short and everyone is getting wearied. In all quarters of the city there are large fires. The mission compounds are being burned…This evening about 8 as I lay sick the alarm was sounded and everyone rushed to their posts…’Events took another turn for the worse when Chinese Imperial Troops also began to open fire on the Legations’ defensive pickets. When an ultimatum was issued by the Chinese Government, ordering that all the foreign diplomats in Peking would have to leave for Tientsin within 24 hours, under escort, it was treated with scepticism. Francis Poole mused on an earlier instance of treachery perpetrated at Cawnpore ‘I also suspect that were we to leave here, we would fall into a Chinese trap, and history would repeat itself with a repetition of Nana Sahib’s massacre. So its war with China.’
On 20 June, the murder by the Chinese of the German Minister, Baron von Ketteler, prompted a decision that all foreign women and children and Chinese Christian converts be brought into shelter in either the Legation Quarter or the great Catholic cathedrals of Peking. Legation walls were loopholed, barricades erected and splinter-proof shelters constructed. With Sir Claude MacDonald, the British Minister, in de facto command of the defence, the historic 55-day Siege of Legations officially began. Dr Poole readied his improvised hospital inside the British Legation: ‘The international hospital was housed in the chancery of the British Legation. Through it in the course of the Siege passed 125 severely wounded men (of whom seventeen died), one severely wounded woman and forty cases of sickness - mostly enteric and dysentery - of whom two died. It was a grim place. Fortunately Dr Velde, a German surgeon and Dr Poole, the British Legation’s resident physician, were skilful as well as devoted. They were ably seconded by a sick-bay attendant from H.M.S. Orlando and an amateur nursing staff, to which the handsome Madame de Giers [wife of the Russian Minister] was an unexpectedly valuable recruit; Madame Pichon, on the other hand, Dr Poole found “a great nuisance.” Their resources were pitifully inadequate. The hospital had only four small iron bedsteads and seven camp-beds; most of the patients, whose numbers after the first two or three weeks never fell below sixty, lay on the floor, on mattresses stuffed with the straw in which wine-bottles had been packed. Antiseptics were scarce, there were hardly any anaesthetics and no X-ray apparatus. In the end, only one thermometer (it belonged to the widowed Baroness von Ketteler) was left unbroken. Bags of sawdust and powdered peat were used as dressings. The windows were sandbagged, and as the sun beat down on the low, overcrowded building the wounded suffered severely from the heat. There were no proper mosquito nets and the flies were a torment. They were bolder and more ubiquitous (it struck one patient) than the flies round a sweetmeat stall in an Indian bazaar, and every time a heavy gun was fired at night they rose from their roosting-places with so deafening a buzz that it woke the patients. The diet of pony-meat, varied with scraggy mutton until the sheep ran out, was monotonous and unsuitable for sick men; but the Chinese cooks showed as much versatility as their materials allowed, and “game”, which consisted of magpies and sparrows, was esteemed a special delicacy.’ (The Siege at Peking by Peter Fleming refers).
Another account by an American missionary-nurse who was eyewitness to events recalled her endless days and nights in the hospital, which another besieged person, Bertram Lenox Simpson, termed the ‘chamber of horrors’: ‘The supply of everything was short... The patients were all wounded men, the supply of absorbent dressings was very small, of rubber protectives there were almost none. When the mattresses and pillows were blood-soaked, there was nothing to do but wash them off as well as possible and use them again. The supply of proper sheets and pillowcases being inadequate, they were made up hastily out of any material that could be spared from the sandbags. Coarse, thin Chinese cotton covered one patient while his neighbour looked down on an expanse of slippery shining damask. As one patient remarked, “in this hospital it is every man for his own tablecloth.” Two napkins made a cover for a feather pillow. A beautiful embroidered linen pillowcase did duty on a pillow made of the straw bottle covers (the straw came from champagne bottles which, ironically, were in better supply than medicines)... At first the most approved surgical dressings were to be had, then bags of peat and finally, bags of sawdust served as dressings. At first bandages were used with a lavish hand, but before the close of the siege they had to be washed and do duty more than once. The small supply of the drugs most useful became pitifully small. The last bottle of chloroform was opened. No one can be impressed with the perishable nature of the hypodermic needle until he is obliged to use it many times every day with the knowledge that the last needle that can be procured from anywhere is in his hand.’
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