Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/192

170 Tsêng urged that since he was still in mourning it was scarcely suitable for him to accept such distinction, that whatever he had done was simply his bounden duty under the grave circumstances, and that any good results achieved were due solely to the merits of T'a Chi-pu, Lo Tse-nan, Yang Tsai-fu, and others. He would be glad if the emperor did not press the promotion on him. The emperor's reply to this memorial said that there was no higher form of filial piety than to come to the rescue of the imperilled country, a deed that must satisfy his departed mother's spirit. For his own part he appreciated Tsêng's great merit and no one in the land was ignorant of it.

The initial stages of the enterprise were now past. The experiment was a decided success, and the whole force now set off along the Great River to Hupeh, where the Wuhan cities were in hostile hands. Though comparatively few in numbers, the men who followed Tsêng were well drilled and well officered. Rebuffs, delays, and dark years still lay ahead, but it was only in the multiplication of this new type of soldiers and marines that hope of ultimate victory could be placed. At that moment great armies under veteran t'ituhs and imperial commissioners camped like locusts at Nanking, Yangchow, and Chinkiang. Sometimes they captured small detachments of rebels who freely came and went, but they never faced large armies, or, if they did, it was almost inevitably to be defeated. A sufficient force of these new Hunan armies could have prevented the spread of the rebellion from Kwangsi, or quickly have put it down at Nanking. Now, however, the rebels were intrenched in the three strongholds and their hordes of followers were carrying on guerrilla warfare, going from district to district, capturing towns and abandoning them after they were looted.