BLOOD WILL TELL.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 209, 3 September 1900, Page 8

BLOOD WILL TELL.

A. J. DAWSON'S YARN

ABOUT A

RENEGADE BBITISHER.

(From Our Special correspondent.)

LONDON, July 23

In the Daily Express for Wednesday Mr A. J. Dawson, who has written several Australian novels of passing accuracy on China and Chinese, came out with a short colonial yarn apropos of current questions. He says:

When I first met him in Hongkong, the Honourable Oeil Haugh had done this thing. He had lost caste; he had thrown it away; he was, not to put too fine a point upon it, a scallywag. And that, of course, makes his case perfectly clear to you. The Honourable Cecil was not noticeably honourable when I first met him; and he was not at all sober. He asked me for a drink, and led me into a fifth-rate sailors' drinking den to obtain it.

By reason of a prejudice I have against very bad liquor, he made me very uncomfortable there. But it was not for nothing-. I learned a good deal about beyond-the-pale folk from the Honourable Cecil.

It seems he had been a probationer missionary in Tientsin. There he had sickened of the. whole business; and, so he said .grown to loathe European influence iv China, lock, stock ana barrel.

Then he had loafed in England for a year, while his people made futile endeavours to buy him into the army. They failed completely, but the Honourable Cecil picked up a deal of military lore -while loafing*.

Then a foolish aunt gave the young man a thousand pounds, and, full of his new-born hatred of Western civilisation, and vague admiration of all things primitive, he drifted through the East, spending. He was drifting, and not, too wholesomely, when I first met him. He will never drift any more. A CHINESE SECRET SOCIETY. In a town called Chang-kiu, which Is in the north of Shan-tung, the Honourable Cecil, some time before his thousand was finished, was warmly itaken up by n community of young Chinamen, who considered that they had a mission, and whose particular secret sOciety was an off-shoot of the Celestial Order of Radiant Faith and Ancestral Dignity. The young men of Chang-kiu were .he extremists of the Order. The Order has for its object the maintenance, at all costs, of Chinese tradition.

The Purely Radiant, as the Changkin members unassumingly called themselves, were a sight to behold upon parade, after the Honourable Cecil had been for five months their drill instructor. There was no betterdrilled troop in China. And you are to bear in mind that ■theirs was no child's play. They represented the wealth of Chang-kiu: they rode their own horses; they had magazine rifles, each man, a small arsenal of their own, and two quickfiring machine field guns. Then of a sudden came the terrible signal from the Taku forts. The Ancient Order of Radiant Faith, etc.. became affiliated with that of the Boxers,'as we call them. Rumours of bloodshed between Peking and the Pecbili Gulf filled the veins of Shantune men like wine. The Honourable: Cecil was called upon to lead the Purely Radiant across .the Pechili border. ~. They placed extraordinary faith In the apostate foreign devil. Ito. had always, before and after his loss of caste, possessed what is called an aristocratic bearing. That pleased and soothed the young bloods of Changkiu. The day of the ultimate test had arrived, they told him. When its sun set China was to be China still, and for ever, or the West was to rule it by machinery. Haugh required no urging. He" had slipped his caste very completely. KILLING W TOUNDED PRISONERS. Beside the great lake of Pan-ting the Honourable Cecil's, troop had _ n fiery skirmish with a body of Russian soldiery; did great execution, and retired in good order, without loss. Three wounded Russian prisoners were killed at leisure and in a very horrible manner by members of the Purely Radiant. By an oversight the Honourable Cecil was allowed to witness the tail-end of this episode. And ■that, from the point of view of the Purely Radiant, was a grave technical error. The forward mai'ch was resumed, however, after Haugh had delivered himself of some plain words. On the banks of the Hun-ho it was that the Purely Radiant, strongly reinforced now by members of the merely Radiant Order and Boxers, had its first stand-up engagement with the .foreign devil. They attacked the column, then in full retreat upon Tientsin, and under the command of a British naval officer of high rank. Up to a certain point the engagement was not merely a fierce one. It was a fight in which the European column seemed brought to the red edge of absolute annihilation. To begin with, the white men had been surprised, jaded and Weary after a long, unsuccessful expedition. They were hampered by want of local knowledge, and by their burden of* sick and wounded. But here was the lamentable feature of their handicap. The Chinese guns outclassed those of the white men, and, at the outset at all events, were better handled. THE BRAVE BRITISHERS. What the Radiant ones could not outclass was the indomitable bra-very of this sadly decimated little British column. An Oriental, a fatalist, has always a certain eager recklessness in fighting that is closely a_tfn to valour. With the Britisher, on the other hand, neither religion nor philosophy provide any spur. His bravery is a thing undiluted. Consequently, when you spice it with rage, throw in a dash of fear of torture, and back the whole with that kind of desperate exhilaration which comes to true men when they face great odds, then your Britisher with his bayonet is a terrible person to face. But the party of whites that rushed two of the Radiants' guns on this occasion could not possibly have found victory by the aid of even their desperate bravery. The odds were eight to one —a well served, fresh eight to an exhausted, badly served one. Yet the rush saved the column. The two guns iv question were being personally manipulated by the Honourable Cecil Haugh, and supei-bl3 r,well he did it. So far he had no time to consider who the men were against whom he was directing so withering a fire. Then came the gallant rush of bluejackets— a dauntless handful that stopped up the Radiant's bullets as a sponge sops water. Renegade Cecil saw their blue-lined,

smoke-grimed faces, clean-shaven, set and grim. His eyes told the frozen heart of him just what that uniform meant. In the lurid background, somewhere, flapped a Union Jack. To Cecil Haugh the world stood still for ten seconds, while all mankind cried shame u.pon his fallen estate, and the bed-rock badness of it bit right into his soul. END OF SCALLYWAG. Then he fell upon bis guns like a man possessed. The Britishers no longer advanced through a zone of fire. Unfortunately, however, discipline prevented their advancing at all. A belated order to retire reached them. It was an order and they retired, though the way before them was clear now.

The sudden, flying rout of the Chinese was something the white men could not understand at first. It was made clear to them later when those at the base of the command grasped the changed nature of the situation, and word reached the bluejackets to advance again upon the two guns.

They advanced at the double, far behind a flying legion of Chinese, and seized the guns without a shot being fired. Tied to the yet smoking mouth of one of the guns they found a badly mutilated white man.

The Purely Radiant, owing' to other more urgent demands upon their time, had been unable to finish the work thus begun. The Honourable Cecil was* not blown to pieces by one of the quick-firers he had served. He had merely been '-.sliced'" almost to death and left bound to the gun.

But this gun and its fellow were found to be pointed in the direction of the disappearing Purely Radiant, and not towards the British.

To an analyst of character the mental struggle, the revulsion o_ feeling. the violent upheaval, which mii.t have rent Cecil -laugh's mind, what- time he had swept those guns round upon their owners —this would have provided a study of absorbing interest.

The words he murmured at the moment of his death in the arms of a bluejacket were: "So blood must be thicker than— civilisation."

No 'one understood, but he was given honourable burial. And there he lies—at his best.