Imperial soldiers were too scattered and too feeble to strike a blow. Timid magistrates and prefects fled from their posts; brave ones died on the walls, tragic but fruitless sacrifices.
The Taiping cause had deteriorated, their armies no longer fighting with the same fervor as that first one from Kwangsi, while the religious illusions of their chiefs became constantly more erratic, their pretensions to divinity more insistent. Yet the opportunity for plunder and adventure continued to make a strong appeal to the classes whence the robber bands came, and their predatory companies, great and small, with yellow-robed or red-robed leaders, went almost unchecked to and fro, like a fire that burns over dry prairies. Tsêng's band of thirteen thousand, which in 1850 or 1851 might have put down the movement with ease, could only point the way now.
Final arrangements having been made, it sailed down the river to deliver Wuchang from the enemy. This city had fallen to the Eastern king in June, 1854, while Tsêng was repairing the damage caused by his earlier defeats. To prevent this catastrophe the central government had sent Tsêng many frantic dispatches while Hupeh was in danger the previous winter and spring, and one of the bitter thoughts during those humiliating days in Changsha had been that his failure had brought about the loss of the capital of Hupeh, for this was a strategic point on a strategic line. The thousand miles of the Yangtse River from the point where it breaks through the gorges above Ichang to the bar at Woosung drains a vast and fertile region, the heart of China. Of this important waterway the most strategic portion is that which stretches from Yochow to Hukow at the mouth of the Poyang Lake, a distance of about three hundred miles. Yochow controls the outlet of the Tungting Lake, into which flow the
