The Sun.
London, England, 1859-09-15 00:00:00

little complimentary precursive force just mentione,
amounted to no more than 1,300 of both nations

and of all arms. Out of which the enormous
proportion of 478 men were cruelly put
hors de combat by a cannonade sud-
denly opened upon them from masked batteries
by 20,000 recreant Chinese. The aggregate of 478
including 14 French and 464 British ! It will
have been se-a from the accounts already published
in our columns giving the details of those disastrous
occurrences, that the ambassadors accredited by
France and England to the court of the celestial
ruler of these infernal barbarians arrived off the
Peiho on the 18th of June, ever memorable as the
Waterloo anniversary. Denied communication of

any kind with the principal authorities on shore
—refused a passage up the Peiho by some subor-
dinate mandarins, with whom had been opened an

equivocal sort of left-handed correspondence—
Mr. BRUCE placed the matter then (as was indeed
the only course left to his excellency in that em•
barrassing situation) entirely and implicitly in the

hands of Admiral HOPE. Apparently that gallant

tar felt perfectly well assured of a successful pas.
sage up the Peiho in spite of the booms and stakes
with which the navigation of the river entrance
was obstructed. If there were the assurances
thereupon given by the Admiral to the Ambas-
sador, there again certainly, as the old song says,
" HOPE told a flattering tale !" For hardly
had the little squadron, consisting of the Plover,
having the Admiral's flag, and followed by the
other gunboats, namely, the Lee, Janus, Nimrod,
Kestrel, Haughty, Starling, Opossum, Forester,
Banterer, and Cormorant—entered the river and
taken up their position off the Peiho forts ; hardly
had two of the iron stakes been drawn, hardly had
the first and second bo'om been passed by the Plover
and Opossum, when the signal for the preconcerted
crime was given ashore—a single gun was dis-
charged, and immediately " all the masks were
rolled up, and a tremendous fire was opened on
the squadron," the murderous onslaught thus be-
coming general. It was nothing less than an am-
buscade of 20,000 assassins lying in wait there to
destroy a handful of brave and confiding men, who
had come thither in accordance with arrangements
made in a solemn Treaty of Peace—had come
thither not as ertmies but as new-sworn friends—
come, so to speak, as the body-guard and attendants
of two eminent civilians, despatched (also accord-
ing to treaty) with assurances of amity from the
Courts of the Tuileries and St. James's to the Im-
perial Court at Pekin, in their high and sacred
character as Ambassadors ! Twenty thousand
Chinese assassins were there, in dastardly ambush,
to accord this welcome of death and torture from
their masked batteries—to 1,300 men in attendance
upon a couple of Ambassadors ! The brutality of
the same enemy upon the unmasking of those con-
cealed batteries we may find illustrated, painfully
enough, in the incidents befalling one individual,
the brave old Admiral himself, then in com-
mand of the all but doomed expedition. "At
an early period of the action," we learn, " the Ad-
miral had been wounded on board the Plover by a
splinter in the thigh, and that vessel was almost
entirely disabled. He shifted his flag to the
Opossum. When there, he took his station on the
caboose, and thence issued his orders [his thigh, re-
member, torn by a splinter !] until a round
shot cut the mainstay on which he was
leaning, and ' caused him to fall to the
deck, a height of some eight feet, breaking a
rib and severely shaking him. After a short time
he left the Opossum in the Du Chayla's gig [the
Frenchman's gig]—the alliance being happily as
complete and cordiale on the Peiho in 1859 as on
the Tchernaya in 1854], and proceeded to the
Cormorant, where he remained." So much for the
gallant tar in command. Now for the squadron—
manned by two hundred less than one-and-a-half
thousand—and murderously fired upon from sud-
denly unmasked batteries by twenty thousand
Chinese bombardiers ! Of the total of 1,300 men
of all arms—we have seen that 478 were either
killed or wounded. Of the ten gunboats—the Lee
and the Kestrel sunk "in testimony of the hard-
fought day "—the Haughty, just contriving to keep
afloat till morning, went down in her turn a little
E:fter daybreak—" the Cormorant, with the admiral
on board and full of wounded, was so fast aground
that it was considered necessary to leave her, as
she was right under the batteries "—the Plover and
the Starlinj, for similar reasons, were abandoned.
Eventually the Kestrel (sunk on the 25th) as
drifted out on the 26th and towed into shoal water
by the Janus, being thus unexpectedly recovered.
Eventually also the Plover was set on flames by
the Chinese, and the Cormorant sunk by a terrific
fire from the batteries. For this atrocious outrage
—there cannot be one instant's doubt of it—
England and France will forthwith wreak upon its
perpetrators a terrible, a signal, and a fitting retri-
bution. Whatever those wretched humbugs, the
drivellers about peace at any price, may say to the
contrary—this retribution is demanded at once im-
peratively, not alone by the dictates of national
honour, but by the sacred interests of civilisation.

We trust our naval and military authorities will
see that the opinion of the country has decided
against flogging as a punishment. We will not
recur to several special cases which have lately
occurred; there is something invidious in thus
seeming to fix blame upon individual officers, when
they are but acting in accordance with a settled
system. Not, let it be observed, that we justify
them for not being superior to routine ; we only
feel that, if the people of England do not amend
their military laws, they are heavily responsible,
as well as the administrators of such laws, for their
direct consequences. Martial law is, much more to
be sure than civil law, a law of the judge's discre-
tion: Still, the martial law of this country must
rest on Acts of Parliament, and, of course, could
inflict no penalty forbidden by an Act of Parlia-
ment ; the country and Parliament must, there-
fore, share the blame with the officers who flog ;
only share it, however ; since we must think that
wise, not to say humane, officers would have got
rid of the punishment long ago. They ought to
have been aware that public opinion was not mere
sentiment, but founded on reason.
Military men are ready enough to think and to
exclaim that civilians know nothing at all about it.
We do not know drill, and therefore it is absurdly
assumed we do not know human nature ! There is
nothing professional required to decide the question
how certain kinds of punishment must tell on a
human being, and with or without the leave of
some of our military and naval friends we must
think that we calm lookers-on, who see the work-
ing of the whole machine, of which they are but
parts, have some advantages for forming a judg-
ment which they have
not. Oh, some old routinist.
or some one who has just put on his " little brief
authority," will exclaim—,, Such incorrigible ras-
cals as get it, deserve it ; you can do nothing else
with them !" And they think that thus they have
settled the question. But the public does not think
so. Desertion, re-enlistment, getting bounties once
and again, are surely roguish tricks enough; still we
civilians have to submit to all kinds of roguery, and
we make shift, now-a-clays, to get on without the
cat-o'-ninetails, the whipping post, the cart tail, or