Casca #18: The Cursed

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When a new British army lieutenant kills Casca's whore in a drunken fit, Casca takes revenge by executing the man and leaves him hanging from the army flagpole.  The next day the parade is suspended while the man is cut down and the unfortunate Sergeant Casca - who has taken another dead man's identity - is identified by accident by the dead woman's brother.  Under sentence of death he is saved by a British official, who wants him to spy on the Chinese, as there are fears of an uprising against the British presence there.  Casca finds trouble instead, running foul of local Chinese tax collectors and is captured after a small battle and is tortured by the local provincial noble into revealing his true identity, that of a former Roman legionary cursed to immortality.    Impressed by his story the noble allows Casca to live and take up a post as ruler of a nearby city.  He soon settles down into his duties but the men he has become allied to are part of the new 'boxer' movement who believe in modern ways, rejecting the old, and this includes revolutionary means to free their country.  The Boxer uprising is uncoordinated and catches all by surprise, but Casca manages to eliminate the British presence in his city, only for the British army and his former allies in the Boxer movement to turn against him.  In the short fight that follows Casca is wounded and is dragged off to safety by a member of the Brotherhood of the Lamb.

One of the more humorous stories in the series, the battle in the Chinese village against the tax-collecting warlord had me falling off my chair in places.  Sadler's portrayal of British army procedures is uncannily accurate and at the same times hilarious.  The description of the water torture is compelling and another indication of Sadler's penchant for writing about Far Eastern subjects.  It does seem however rather slanted against the British as China at that time was subject to other foreign powers, the French and Germans being the most notable, and the Boxer rebellion of 1900 was triggered off by the murder of a German diplomat.  Britain was not, as Sadler suggests in the book, about to annex China as another part of her Empire; the other powers just wouldn't allow her to even if Britain was in a position to do so.  The name 'Boxer' comes from a translation of the popular name for the anti-foreign movement - Righteous Harmonious Fists . The book finishes with Casca being in the care of Sister Martina of the Brotherhood (it would appear Sadler has a liking for tying the Brotherhood closely in with the Christian church). However, he would seem to quickly escape and become part of Chiang Kai-Shek's Chinese government before having to come to Britain in 1914 where we pick up the story in the next book.

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Click here to read about the Boxer Rebellion