Chapter 189: Fire and Water

Seen from above, Xinhui, besieged for months, looked lifeless. For lack of firewood, the Taiping Army had torn down more than half the houses in the city for fuel, so that only a few blocks in the west and south still kept their buildings intact.

Everywhere else was nothing but broken walls and rubble, and hoping to find a patch of green shade among those ruins was pure folly.

Besides the firewood shortage, the city also faced a water crisis. At the start of the siege, both the Taiping Army and the townspeople had drawn their drinking water from several large wells inside the city.

At first these deep wells were enough to supply the nearly ten thousand people within the walls, but from the sixth month on, the water in three of the wells near the city wall could no longer be drunk.

The first to discover that the well water was undrinkable was Li Fuguo, a probationary centurion of the Guard Battalion.

He had been about to draw a bucket of well water to rinse off, but when the bucket came up he found that the once-clear water had turned black and gave off a foul, nauseating stench.

Word that the well water was undrinkable naturally alarmed Zhou Shixiang and Song Xianggong. Both men at once suspected that Qing spies had slipped into the city and poisoned the wells. In such sweltering heat, losing water would be even deadlier than losing food.

Zhou Shixiang personally led men to inspect the three wells to find the cause, but after peering around the well mouths for a long while he still could not tell what was wrong.

A squad of Guard Battalion soldiers spent the better part of a day bailing the wells dry, yet found nothing unusual at the bottom.

No cause for the spoiled water could be found, and after the wells were emptied, the water that seeped back in was still foul. This made Zhou Shixiang frantic with worry.

There were only seven usable wells in the whole city. Counting the surviving people of Xinhui, nearly ten thousand souls now lived inside the walls, and the amount of water they needed each day was staggering.

These seven wells could barely meet each person's minimum daily water requirement; truly not a single drop could be wasted.

To keep the camp folk and the people of Xinhui from falling out over water, Song Xianggong had specially asked Zhou Shixiang for orders and set aside four wells for the old, weak, women, and children of the rear camp and for the townspeople.

Of the three wells now spoiled, two belonged to the rear camp. Even before, the supply had been barely enough to scrape by; now, with two wells lost at once, the daily drinking water for the camp folk and townspeople was cut in half.

How were they supposed to live? The Taiping Army was little better off: three wells had become two, so how were the soldiers to survive?

"Investigate! Investigate for me, and get to the bottom of it!"

Unable to find the cause, Zhou Shixiang blamed the spoiled water on someone poisoning it. But after the centurions of every camp, under orders, questioned the soldiers who had stood watch the previous night one by one, they all reported that their men were blameless.

Jiang He and Ge Zheng even offered their own heads as surety that their subordinates were not at fault.

If no one had poisoned it, how had good well water turned into poison?

Just as Zhou Shixiang and his officers were racking their brains without result, an old man of the rear camp who in his youth had made a living digging wells heard of the matter and asked Song Xianggong for orders.

He looked the three wells over one by one, then had someone help him up onto the city wall. After walking a full circuit of the wall, he explained to Zhou Shixiang why the well water had spoiled.

These three wells all had one thing in common: they were all very close to the city wall, the nearest less than three zhang from the wall's foot, and they were all newly dug wells, sunk for convenience when the Qing army rebuilt Xinhui.

After the wall was finished, the three wells had not been filled in but had continued to supply drinking water to the Qing garrison, besides serving the need for firefighting. (Note: one zhang is three meters three.)

What direct connection was there between a well's being near the wall and its water going bad?

Zhou Shixiang still did not grasp what the old man was getting at. Only when the old man pointed out the burial ground outside the wall did he suddenly understand. So this was the root of it!

After Shang Kexi had personally directed the Qing assault and it had failed, more than three thousand Qing corpses had been left beneath the walls. After the battle, Zhou Shixiang had ordered arrows shot toward the Qing lines, telling them to come take away their dead.

But whether the Qing never received the message or deliberately refused to collect the bodies, a whole day passed and the Qing made no move to gather their dead.

It was the height of summer, and corpses could not be left lying! In that single day the stench of rot could already be smelled below the walls, green-headed flies swarmed in black clouds, and on many of the gashed and torn bodies maggots could be seen writhing.

There was no help for it. Since the Qing would not collect their dead, Zhou Shixiang could only order the Taiping Army to bury them.

If the bodies were left another day or two, the Qing would not need to attack; the Taiping Army and the old, weak, women, and children in the city would all die of plague. The year before, Li Dingguo's great army had been forced to lift its siege and withdraw.

On the one hand, it was because Manchu and Han Eight Banners reinforcements had arrived from Beijing; on the other, it was because plague had broken out in his army, and he could no longer remain before Xinhui.

That was a warning from the past. Li Dingguo at least had tens of thousands of men in hand; even if plague struck his army, it could not shake his foundations.

But the Taiping Army had only this little bit of capital. If plague broke out in the city, the banner they had just raised would fall of its own weight.

And so the Taiping Army and some of the able-bodied men roped down from the wall to bury the Qing dead. When the Qing saw the Taiping Army descend, they seemed to know what they were about and did not seize the chance to attack, but merely watched them bury the corpses.

There were too many bodies. The best course was to bury them on the spot beneath the wall; otherwise, where would the manpower come from?

If the bodies had to be hauled far away one by one, not only would Zhou Shixiang be unwilling, the soldiers below would never agree. Besides, the Qing were watching hungrily from a distance, and Zhou Shixiang would never dare risk sending his men under the enemy's very nose.

It took more than ten long pits to bury all three thousand-odd corpses. Because of the heat, and because the Xiongwei and Hujie battalions doing the burying, along with the able-bodied men and captives, feared catching plague, the pits were not dug deep.

Still, the dead were at least put under the earth. Most of the pits were by the east wall, with three or four more by the south gate.

Not long after the bodies were buried, the Qing, under the command of Assistant Regional Commander Wang Guohui, launched another assault on the city, leaving several hundred more corpses behind before withdrawing in failure.

These Qing dead, too, were buried by the Taiping Army, cursing all the while.

At first the burial pits had no effect whatever on the city, and the plague Zhou Shixiang had feared did not come. But who could have guessed that after more than half a month, the rotting corpses in those pits would contaminate the wells near the wall?

According to the old man, when the corpses in the pits rotted, they gave off great quantities of poisonous corpse-fluid. Underground, this fluid gradually soaked through the soil.

If no rain fell, it was tolerable, but once it rained, the rainwater seeped into the pits and the corpse-fluid spread rapidly outward. And so these three wells, too close to the wall, were the first to be contaminated.

The process was invisible to the eye, and most people would never notice it; by the time trouble appeared, nothing could be done.

Hearing the old man's words, Song Xianggong had a sudden realization too. He remembered that in his youth, a neighbor at home had dug a well not far from the privy.

After a few years, the well water began to stink because of seepage from the cesspit. Now, thinking back, he truly regretted not having thought of this sooner, so that good wells had been ruined.

When Ge Zheng and the others heard the old man's explanation, they cursed the Qing devils as bastards. It seemed the Qing devils had most likely counted on polluting the city's wells, which was why they had not come to collect their dead.

Zhou Shixiang thought the same. Xinhui was only so large, and the Qing surely knew everything inside the city like the back of their hand. The first object of a siege, besides cutting the defenders' grain, was cutting off their water.

Though Xinhui lay on a riverside plain, in most parts of the city one could not sink a well with drinkable water; most wells yielded only brackish, alkaline water. Only these seven wells had water fit to drink.

In ordinary times, without a siege, the townspeople could go outside the walls to carry water, or there were men who delivered water by cart for a few coppers.

Now that the city was besieged, no outside water could get in, and these seven wells alone had to support nearly ten thousand people. It was truly a case of a clever wife hard put to cook without rice.

If the corpse-fluid contaminated a few more wells, the city would surely be thrown into chaos.

Without grain, one could still hold out a few days. Without water, in a deadly place like Guangdong, one could not last even a day.

Now that it had come to this, regret was useless; they could only think of remedies. Fortunately, the old man pointed out that the underground corpse-fluid spread slowly.

Unless several days of heavy rain raised the groundwater, the fluid would not reach the other wells for some time.

Nor was there any need to think of ways to block the underground seepage, because when the Qing Assistant Regional Commander Wang Guohui had directed the Qing troops to tunnel into the city, the Taiping Army had already dug isolation trenches inside the walls.

These deep trenches happened to block the spread of the corpse-fluid. Still, for safety's sake, the old man advised Zhou Shixiang to have the trenches dug deeper.

A little caution never hurt, since the whole city now had only these four wells left.

Zhou Shixiang at once followed the old man's advice. He ordered Jiang He to take men and deepen the trenches, and had the three spoiled wells sealed off completely.

Only after all this was done did he sit down with Song Xianggong to work out how to divide the four remaining wells. They talked it over and over but found no good solution.

There were only four wells; if the front camp took more, the rear camp would have nothing to drink. Many front-camp officers and soldiers had their families in the rear camp.

If their wives and children truly went without water, disaster would not be far off.

In the end, the two men split the four wells evenly: two for the front camp, two for the rear. The able-bodied men and captives conscripted by the county office would be supplied with water by the front camp, while the rear camp would supply the two thousand-odd people of Xinhui.

How the water was distributed was Song Xianggong's affair, and Zhou Shixiang would not interfere.

The wells were divided, but the amount of water was certainly far less than before, and quarrels over water were frequent. In the front camp, Zhou Shixiang handled matters; in the rear, Song Xianggong took full charge.

To save as much water as possible, the two men tried every means, and even attempted to sink new wells in the city, but all to no avail, and in the end the matter was dropped.

From then on, whenever it rained, great vats and small jars could be seen everywhere in the city, and everyone who could move went out to collect rainwater.

Not enough firewood? Tear down houses.

Not enough water? Make do.

These two things were indispensable, but as long as there was any at all, one could endure. Yet without salt to eat, a man had no strength, and without strength, to say nothing of defending the city, he could not even do his daily work.