Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/92

the latter's troops had with little difficulty stormed the first-class fortresses of Talien, Port Arthur, and Wei-hai-wei, their attacks had been delivered from the rear, where facilities for resistance had not been largely provided, and consequently no certain inference could be drawn as to what might happen at places like Taku, Tientsin, and Peking, where the defenders would not be exposed to similarly irregular enterprises. Yet when the test of actual practice came to be applied, when Chili itself became the battle-field in 1900, the Chinese did not make a much better showing than they had done five years previously in Manchuria and Shantung. The same campaign fought at a somewhat earlier date might have been judged more leniently. But after the war in South Africa had demonstrated the enormous potentialities of the defence and the fatal futility of direct attacks upon strong fortresses held by troops using modern weapons of precision, the puny efforts of the Chinese to defend Taku, Tientsin, and Peking against the assaults of forces not better equipped than themselves and less numerous, constituted a fiasco as flagrant as the collapse of 1894-1895. After these two wars people set themselves to inquire seriously whether the Chinese were radically incapable of fighting or whether their capacity had been paralysed by some special and remediable causes. Many theories were advanced and many explanations offered, some suggesting the former conclusion, some the latter. It is