The Devil Soldier: The Story of Frederick Townsend Ward (Hardcover)

However, roughly around the same time that America's North & South were slowly edging towards that great tragedy over the issue of slavery, a different civil war was gripping another of the Earth's great nations half a world away in a struggle that would claim millions(!) of more lives than even that more famous (to the American mind) struggle. The Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864), initiated by Hung Hsiu Chuan, a man who had failed in China's examinations to become a civil-servant, was a war over religious beliefs, ideology, & class-struggle. Hung, in a "vision" had believed himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ(!) His Taipings, made up of neo-Christian Chinese converts, frustrated & angered over the corruption & poverty imposed upon them by their inept Manchu rulers, captured several Chinese cities, established their base in Nanking, & nearly succeeded in toppling the Chinese (Manchu) empire. Hung's Christian learnings came from an American, Issachar Roberts. One of his oppoenents, an important adversary, a soldier for hire who had worked in Mexico, California, & Texas as a professional mercenary, who came to China & trained Chinese soldiers in the most up to date weaponry & tactics (as well as absorbing much of China's military culture), was an American also: Fredrick Townsend Ward.

Ward was a loner, a man who worked for prestige rather than money, a man who was stern yet fair to his band of mercenaries, & a man free of racial prejudices. He was the classic warrior, a character you would expect to find in westerns & adventure movies. However, he was real! He fought against both the Taiping Rebels, who he respected in battle & who respected him, as well as the corruption of his Manchu employers & the British military, who saw Ward's actions as a threat to the West's (Europe & the U.S.A.'s) strict policy of neutrality. In the end, he died in battle, but he won what he prized above anything else, recognition for his outstanding achievements in this most deadly of occupations. For a brief moment in history, thanks to Ward, East met West in a joint-collaboration to form a team of fighting men the likes of which the world had never seen. (Imagine the sight. American & European mercenaries armed not only with rifles & cannon, but also being acquainted with Chinese martial-arts weapons, including swords, spears, & bamboo-clay "bombs", filled with gun-powder, natural poisons, & (yuck!) human feces. Fighing alongside with them are Ward's Chinese troops, wearing the traditional Manchu queue (pigtail) & also armed with traditional martial-arts weapons, but also instructed (by Ward) in the use of Sharp's rifles, Colt revolvers, & modern cannon & mortars! Again, this isn't a comic-book fantasy or a Jackie Chan movie, this was real life!)

Caleb Carr does a meticulous, yet gripping, & in fact, fast-paced narrative on Ward's life. This book, along with Evan Connell's "Son of The Morning Star" & Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" should be a classic in historical reading. It gives a good portrait of the times, the nations, & the individual characters of this truly international struggle. (It wasn't just Chinese & Manchus. The British, The Americans, The French, The Russians, & even Filipino mercenaries all played a part in this epic true-life story.) It's tragic, compelling, uplifting at times, & depressing at others. However, one thing is certain. It educates & entertains without compromising on either count!

Hollywood (& Hong-Kong) film-makers take notice! This book is the stuff of great action-films, with heroes (& villains) that you would find in the greatest Westerns, the romance of high-adventure, & (given the culture & the methods of the major antagonists) all the flash of a martial-arts movie classic! ("Crouching Tiger" eat your heart out!)

Buy this book if you can. You won't be dissappointed.

In attempting to get the who, what, where, when, and why about people and places, he clouds these issues with such overwhelming "context", that it becomes difficult to read at times to see the forest because of the trees. Quite often his sentences are just too long, many running 200 words or more, with the result that the reader has to go back and re-read them again. It's easy to get lost because of his verbosity in spite of the fact that he uses simple words.

The author makes excessive use of parentheses to slide extra context into his sentences; where in itself this isn't bad, but when his writing contains sub-context within sub-context of a context in one single sentence, before he tells us of an event happening, his writing is difficult to read (like this sentence).

Moreover, what is surprising is that the author, Caleb Carr, is not guilty of any of these stylistic errors in anything else of his that I have read. He has always gripped my attention.

But my criticisms aside, the author goes out of his way to be an independent observer and commentator about the events concerning Ward's battles, based on a plethora of well documented research and opinion. He is very careful to imply just this, as opposed to fact, as a responsible historian should. In so doing, he does a very credible job in showing Frederick Townsend Ward to be an honourable, honest, responsible, and loyal warrior of the Manchu imperialists who were just not at all deserving of the services of\a man of such integrity.

Also because of the author's research into the cultural attitudes of the Chinese, it becomes easier to understand how China's people fell into another form of personal domination, by the same calibre of government it has today.