Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 304 - The Boxer Rebellion Part 4: The Rembrandt of Violence

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

Part 4/5 A Wild Smedley Butler Appears! support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Alliance Led by Dunkies podcast, but I guess you probably already knew that. What if there was a war raging for a million years, but it was kept a secret? It's a question that Sarkis never considered. He was born as an upper middle class man living in Prime City during the so-called millennia of peace. As far as he knew, or as far as anybody knew, humanity has no army, no weapons, and no wars. The people of Earth had been expanding into the stars as long as anyone remembered, free

of conflict, while the Techno-King and his royal cabal enriched themselves in the backs of their labor. It was as it always had been. Then Sarkeys died. Unbeknownst to him, an app he used every single day of his life hijacks his consciousness and uploads it into a synthetic engine of war known as a Sleeve. Along with countless others, he's been conscripted into the Undying Legion, charged with fighting a secret, unending war in the name of humanity.

Their minds stolen, uploaded into war machines. They fight a secret war to preserve humanity. My new book, The Invisible War, is now available wherever it is that you consume books. If you have Kindle Unlimited, you can get it for free with your subscription that you already have, or order a paperback from whatever local bookstore you use. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at www.patreon.com slash lines led by donkeys. Just $5 per month gets you every regular episode early, access to our community discord, a

digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, as well as its audiobook read by me and over five years of bonus content. By supporting the show, you support us and allow us to keep our show as it has always been ad free. Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoy the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I am Joe and with me, four parts deep into the Boxer Rebellion is Tom. Yeah, I'm a little bit hungover. I'm about to pop a Robert Zimbabwe.

You know, here we go. Is that the slang for a Zin now? Is it like I do a fat lip of Robert Mugabe? Yeah, you know, pop a Zimbabwe, you know, we're creating new terms, you know, the tobacco industry once again has gotten a choke hold on everyone. Because like in Europe, funny enough, shout out to Hannibal, one of the listeners and Ahmad in the Discord, he brought actual Swedish snooze to the live show. And one of the conditions of Sweden joining the EU was

that they couldn't ban snus. Were they trying to ban it? It was already banned so like loose leaf tobacco snus has been banned in the EU for like a long time. It's so popular in Sweden that like one of the conditions of Sweden agreeing to join the EU was that they couldn't ban snus in Sweden. I figured that there was some ABBA based arms race, but it turns out it's just loose sleeve tobacco that you put in your mouth. Yeah. So like, um, but like zins and stuff don't actually have any tobacco in it.

It's like synthetic nicotine. So you know, Ah, that sounds like it's a guaranteed to make me vomit just like chewing tobacco was the first time I Yeah, I am animal will get a kick when he's listens this I tried one of those Swedish snoozes and Immediately felt like I was about to fall over because there's so much nicotine in them. Those Nordics are built different Yeah, yeah but I was telling you the other day that I have a bit of a Controversial gym opinion for you and I feel like this is gonna be another hack squat hack squat situation. It's squatting related

Okay, so we've entered the Lions gym corner. Okay, I have no strong opinions to piss you off with today So I guess it's your turn that piss you off with today. So I guess it's your turn. Front squats are far superior to barbell back squats. I actually have to agree with you. See, because I was like, I deadlift quite a lot and I was doing like barbell squats because I controversy, I do my deadlifts on my back day rather than leg day. People might be more pissed off about that than the front squats. rather than leg day. Um, people might be more pissed off about that than the front squads. We're talking about gym programming ideas. So somewhat that's one of the few things

along with like political theory, you're guaranteed to infuriate at least one person in every group. Well, um, I was starting to get like a kind of weird squeezing pressure in my back when I was doing like barbell back squat. So I was like, okay, I'm going to go in and like spend an entire session trying to dial in like a good front squat and do them and have been doing them for the past couple of weeks. Way better. And if the front squat for people that hate themselves is the Zurcher squat, which is the true king of the squat pyramid. No, you need to do the, um, it's the the the bazooka deadlift where you put like the bar

in between your legs and you have to lean over, pick it and like put it up on your shoulder. I have seen that and that looks just it's a recipe to destroy your ligaments, which is also what you call the zerkers or zurcher squat, which I will be doing today because I have a personal vendetta against the connective tissue in my body. Yeah, you're you're you are outbore with yourself. Yeah, the few the few bits of connective tissue that's holding the line is going to learn their mistake today.

There's literally zero collagen in between any of your joints. That is not even a joke. Joe sounds like an old door hinge when he walks. Anybody who sat near me as I had to get up out of a seat that I've been sitting in for too long can attest to the groaning noise that I make. Like, yeah, I remember when I was in the Hague and we were in the pub and you got up after maybe two beers and sitting there for like 45 minutes and the sound you made, you're like,

surprisingly most of those injuries from podcasting. Don't ask how. What if the, um, the military industrial complex is just in league with chiropractors and you know, kinesiology, like the army fully exists just to keep them in business. Well, I mean like the army's ideas of medicine are kind of close to a chiropractors in that they're not based in reality. Like the army is like, Oh, we see that you're sick or you know, you have an injury. Have you considered drinking water and taking Motrin and meanwhile like chiropractors like your flesh is haunted let me twist your

fucking neck and cure cancer yeah like chiropractors are really operating on you know medieval plague doctor science then you know get some unguance out you're you're too uh phlegmatic i mean the guy who who founded uh chiropractic is like this psycho who said that he was visited by ghosts or something to teach him how to do it. You didn't know this? No. Yeah, his name was something Palmer. I can't remember his first name, but yeah, it was effectively like bone-based spiritualism.

What the fuck? It's absolutely bad shit, man. I'm surprised you don't know. It was effectively like bone-based spiritualism. What the fuck? Yeah, it's absolutely bad shit, man. I'm surprised you know. I mean, I guess I know that because chiropractors of anywhere in the world are deeply entrenched in American medical culture, if you wanna call it that, even though, again, it's not medicine.

And now it seems like they mostly exist on the internet to make YouTube videos where they're twisting like Instagram models bodies in horrific directions because that's like the least awful thing and Instagram models had to do for money. Yeah, like no, the thing that like I hate chiropractors chiropractors it is on site in general you are fucking more people up. But it's when I see them doing it to like dogs and stuff, I'm like, these people should be in prison. Oh God, yeah.

There's a guy on YouTube that does horse chiropractic. It's the greatest shit on earth. Okay, I have to say this last bit and I have to move on. But the funniest part of this wasn't even about the chiropractor himself, it was the YouTube commenter. Like this even about the chiropractor himself. It was the YouTube commenter. This guy was doing chiropractic, which was him tying a towel around somebody's neck and just looking like a Mortal Kombat finishing maneuver.

And the whole time he's breathing very heavily. And one of the commenters is like, you know, what's with like your breathing exercise and the chiropractor explains like, oh, it's to keep like the bad energy away and whatever. And like the next commenter is like, lol, okay, Goku. Oh God, like, yeah. But Tom, we are now four weeks deep into the Boxer Rebellion, and when we left you last time, we were at the gates of the city of Tietzen and the Eight Nation Alliance had an ad hoc army arrayed against tens of thousands of Imperial Chinese troops backed by thousands more of the God-possessed bullet-immune, period-blood-allergic Boxers, in case anybody forgot about the period bloodbit from a couple weeks ago.

Once again this just sounds like a Dragon Ball Z plotline. Next they're gonna start popping Senzu beans. I mean, to be fair, the only thing we're missing is that sick guitar riff as one of the boxers attempts to summon energy to fire an energy beam at like, I don't know, like an Austrian conscript only to get his skull canoed by a fucking bolt action rifle. Now, the Allies knew they would have to assault the heavily defended, well-fortified city in order to secure their survival line to the sea

and hope to eventually use it to base the relief efforts towards the international legations in Peking. If they failed, their main and only real force outside of Peking would be crushed and open a path for their defeat, or more than likely, rather than their defeat, a vast expansion of the war that would swallow China as a whole, as well as all these allied nations who aren't going to take that kind of shit sitting down. Though that isn't to say everything was all great on either side of this weird war of really fucked up alliances.

The Imperial government may have seen the Boxers as, remember, a free army, they don't have to pay for them, a means to an end, but their soldiers and officers absolutely did not trust them. Remember, in the very beginning of the series, they were just as likely to kill an Imperial soldier as a European or a Japanese one if they violated their mystical rules or simply didn't prosecute the war as they saw fit. And as for an overall goal of the war, the Imperial government had a lot of them that nobody could really agree on, And because they were just as busy politically maneuvering on one another, because remember

Empress Dowager is trying to sit someone on the throne, her opponents are trying to sit someone else on the throne, and they didn't really plan any of this very well, in essence they wanted to make sure the allies couldn't storm Peking and embarrass them again. If it happened now, while the Empress was barely clinging to power and fighting off efforts to replace her, there were fears that the dynasty and the country itself, the Empire, would collapse entirely. They wanted to pen the Allies in at Tiet-Tsin, win a convincing victory, and hope that would be enough to convince them to leave China alone. That maybe could have worked, because the allied side was not actually allied.

They didn't have the same goals. They were largely geopolitical enemies through and through. For starters, the allies still had no overall commander. All of this had been going on without any kind of supreme commander in charge of this eight nation alliance. Many of the officers just couldn't speak to one another, owing to the fact there were, you know, several different languages being spoken.

Only a few of the Europeans spoke one another's language, but nobody spoke Japanese or Russian outside of their own groups, for example. Like it was up to the Japanese or Russians to speak something else. Ding ding ding ding ding, mark that on your bingo card! I will say they found the most inventive way around this. Okay. Not saying it worked, but it was an idea. They drafted in the world's weirdest combination, weeb.

Kind of? The collection of commanders did find a way mostly to communicate as they had one language in common French. Okay. I'm going to take a swing in that like loads of the officers were like educated in French or something. It was kind of the military language of the day. And if you learned another language outside of your own in Europe, it was probably French. The Russian's military officer, Kast, was almost always learning French still at that time. Because if anybody remembers, during the Napoleonic Wars, the operative language of the Russian military was just French The Germans frequently spoke French the Americans were the only people who did not

So they would have to go through a translator but Nobody was really fluent and they all spoke with different accents this led the scenes of officers all struggling to speak the same foreign language None of whom was their own, other than of course, the Frenchman president, who also noted that many of these officers spoke the language so badly, he couldn't understand them half of the time. There's just some Russian dude who is accidentally speaking perfect Quebecois French.

I do, I shouldn't have spent all my university credit learning, I don't know, Dagestani shit, I can't talk to anybody. Just a dude with the world's worst bowl cut speaking perfect French? As for the no commander thing, it's pretty easy to explain. Nobody trusted anybody. Remember, we're only a few years away from the Russo-Japanese war, and the two countries have been fucking with each other for years at this point as the Japanese expanded their

power through Asia and the Pacific. Furthermore Russia and the Brits hated one another due to the years long rivalry in the great game of Africa and Central Asia. It wasn't too long ago that the French were literally fighting everyone and the Germans were still pretty new as a nation and remember the Franco-Prussian war was not that long ago And the Germans had pissed off pretty much every country on their way to becoming the German Empire And everybody hated the Americans are being new there. They weren't the part of the old guy like Empire Club They're the startup

Assholes on the block nobody liked them. Yeah, they were were the canadies of the geopolitical scene, they were new money. Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Despite their bullshit rivalries, they did know that someone would have to take command, but everybody also knew the person they picked wouldn't be in command. Rather, it would be seen as the country that person represented would be in command. And it would still have to be agreed on by mostly everybody, or it wouldn't work. So immediately they dismissed their two worst options, the Austrians and the Italians. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha movement plans, how we're going to, you know, try and defend against the boxers. And these guys just keep talking about skiing.

Like Austria was immediately dismissed because they didn't have that many soldiers. The Italians didn't have that much, that many soldiers there either, but also nobody respected them. So like our soldiers won't listen to you. Yeah. The Italians are, the Italians are like two weeks away from from siding with the boxers. I have an idea. My my grandkids are going to love this. Hey, they both love noodles.

Yeah, it's that the great noodle upon noodle alliance. Do you also have an embarrassing military history? Would you like to be friends? Giuseppe spaghetti strikes again. Do you also have an embarrassing military history? Would you like to be friends? Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe? Giuseppe Spaghetti Strikes again America was next to the chopping block because nobody respected them as an imperial power. Russia or Japan made the most sense because they had the most soldiers and were a local power, meaning they could more easily support the overall mission, but neither of them would agree to let the other be in command. So they were both out. France was next because everybody said, fuck them.

And then the Brits fell last because despite being the most powerful nation on earth still at this time, Seymour's mission, remember, had just been a spectacular failure and they took something of a prestige blow for losing the first Boer war. So everyone's like, nah, not you guys either. Yeah, and then as a consequence, there's just a weird German guy in South Africa saying, Das Lecker all the time. Speaking of the Germans. Ah, for fuck's sake.

That left only Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm asked his cousin, the Tsar Nicholas, for his support and he got it. Japan didn't have any major complaints against Germany yet, and only the Brits were really annoyed but relented when they saw everyone else agreeing that the Germans could take over. The French were the only power with a real complaint because remember they just got their shit kicked in by them. But everybody was like, nah, fuck you guys, this is the closest we can get. But everybody's like, nah, fuck you guys. This is the closest we can get. And everybody's like, okay, fine. Yeah, two guys who are not long for being empowered. Yeah. So the Kaiser handpicked Baron Alfred von Valdersie, his close friend and former chief of staff to take command.

However, none of this actually mattered. Valdersie was not in China, he was still in Germany, and it would take him months in order to get there, so him being in command was kind of immaterial. Meanwhile, the battle around the city of Tietzin continued. The Chinese forces constantly sniped at the Allies and launched night raids. Oftentimes groups of boxers managed to sneak in into the European settlement, set shit on fire or ambush people at point blank range. This racism and the knowledge of what would almost certainly happen to them if they fell into the hands of the Imperial army or boxers, led to an unofficial policy of no quarter being given to any boxer or Imperial soldier that fell

into their captivity. This was across the allied national lines and even Chinese civilians within the settlement. Everybody agreed that they should die. Oftentimes, POWs were thrown into the middle of the settlement and soldiers and civilians alike descended upon them and beat them to death on the spot. It's like throwing a chicken leg between dogs. No word on the cannibalism, but we can dream. There was so much constant shelling and sniping that virtually any moving thing within the settlement would be targeted, so people just stayed locked down, either in fighting positions

or cellars. By the first week of July, the people within the settlement were losing their shit from constant stress of shelling mixed with sleep deprivation. And this is actually part of the Chinese plan to break the defenders and weaken them before launching another attack on the settlement's railway station. Remember the same one that was defended by Russian just standing in the open last episode? We do not need cover. Cover is for European pussies. We do not need cover. Cover is for European pussies. Cover is gay? You're accusing Russian soldiers of being gay? We will not hide from bullets. We are better than boxers. We are also impervious to bullets.

We impervious to bullets because we do not care how many conscripts die standing in the open. You are wearing ceramic armor plates. I am wearing armor made out of blin. When they finally launched their attack, it was the middle of a blinding downpour. It was immediately complete and utter confused chaos because nobody could see one another through the rainstorm. Point blank fighting erupted as defenders and attackers just kind of got lost and bumped into one another. Just the Benny Hill music is playing in the background.

All the lines broke down and of course the way the boxers fight is they're not going to fight in a line anyway. And so there's just people just spinning around and randomly firing out anything they saw. This continued virtually nonstop until the Allies slapped together a raiding force with the goal of striking out where the Chinese were basing their attacks from in a nearby village. The overall effort was under the command of the Japanese, but the Russians refused to fall under their command, so the Russians then decided to fall under the Brit, who is like a British officer who told the Japanese, I'll listen to you, but they won't listen to you. So I'll pass orders to the Russians. I speak the fourth best French. That game of telephone will have, I suspect, very dire consequences.

It's telephone and dire consequences the rest of this episode. This raiding force stormed the nearby village and Smedley Butler reappeared to stab several boxers to death in hand-to-hand combat with a knife while trapped alone in a house because the man is the Rembrandt of violence. Once again, Smedley Butler American Crept It. The mission succeeded and the attacks on the railway station stopped, at least for a few days. The next time Japanese scouts saw boxers gathering for an attack, they didn't bother to warn anyone or tell anyone it was coming, they simply charged at them with bayonets and swords. Now this attack was easy to spot because the boxers were still doing their boxer shit,

like ceremonial dance and martial arts expositions before doing battle, meaning the Japanese could see them dancing and singing all while wearing a big dragon mask and playing trumpets. They weren't exactly gonna sneak up on anybody. They're like, bro, we're in the middle of a war. Why are they doing Shen Yun stuff? The Japanese soldier's like, I think they're attacking. Why? I could hear ska music.

Ah! What are they saying? Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. Why? I could hear ska music. AAAAAAAAHAHAHA! What are they saying? Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up. You just hear the mighty mighty boss tones blaring as you just see men flying through the air. All of them wearing the oversized mighty buddy boss tones suit and ties. Their uniform is all checkerboard. And then they're immediately smacked down by Japanese machine guns. Which is exactly what should happen to the Mighty Buddy Boss Stones. Hey, I listen up until a couple of years ago, I would defend the Mighty

Mighty Boss Stones, but the lead singer is now like very weird and very anti COVID. So see, I didn't even know that I was just displaying my general hatred for ska music. No, ska is good. Ska is good. It's good. Fun music, like all of the waves. Like some of it better than others, but I will not, I will not stand for disparaging ska on the music is just depressed music, but now you have a horn yeah it's like what if white people got rhythm I can't stand this you're fired next you can't fire me

I quit you're being locked in the eternal prison which is just a trumpet being played by someone in like Orange County California now this attack obviously was broken because they took their time to do sick dance moves and and ska based Kung Fu and has sent them running back into the city and other places boxers were doing the same thing and allied defenders would just tear them apart with machine guns and artillery. Yeah, you're just reading the machine guns and you just see people, you know, skanking very menacingly towards you.

A skanking skirmish line if everyone's wearing a dragon helmet like, get the machine, go ahead and get the Maxim ready. I mean, were army, you know, the the trumpeteers and drummers at the front of armies, were they the first ska band? Hmm. They were the right age because most of them were like teenagers starting their first band. But instead of having like a shitty high school based battle of the bands to tell them like, Hey Steve, maybe you should stick to like having a job. Uh, they just get blasted

by cannon fire. Yeah. You just hear like a military tattoo being played on a drum, you know, a marching drum and like trumpets and all you hear, and they are picking it up. Like. It's true. It's true. We discovered the first ska band was the first military trumpeter.

Yep. Yep. Like we are discovering forbidden knowledge right now. I feel like there's going to be someone coming through the ceiling and getting whisked away to a black site because. Smedley Butler's going to appear behind the curtain and getting whisked away to a black side because I- Smedley Butler's gonna appear behind the curtain and just stab you to death while screaming. Face covered in blood.

Smedley Butler was in the specials. Either that or he got exposed, like Smedley Butler didn't die and got exposed to radiation and instead just became the Mothman at Point Pleasant. Kaiju Smedley Butler emerging from the sea to do violence in the American Pacific Empire. You just see Godzilla going through a city and out of the sea you just see a giant Smedley Butler emerge. That is the most terrifying thing any Latin American country has ever seen. By the middle of July, things had remained pretty much unchanged with the army and the

boxers trying to assault the settlement but failing, and the allies continued to dig in and fight them off. However, the allies had finally gotten enough men into the settlement to believe they could actually attack the city of Tietzin itself. And since Valderci was still not there, command fell to British General Arthur Doward because he was the one guy everybody mostly agreed to listen to. Doward came up with a plan that was simultaneously agreeable to everyone while also splitting his forces up into nations that he knew would actually work together.

And remember, all this is happening in French. Bad French. Like, I imagine some of the level French there is like that person you know who went to Paris once and just insists on pronouncing wine and cheese names correctly, and you wouldn't understand because you've never experienced the culture. That kind of guy. So the Russians and the Germans had worked together to attack the city from the east while everyone else would attack from the south. And the attack would begin on July 13th, just as the sun was coming up. And then everything went badly.

The city had high defensible walls, but there was also like they were ringed by a much smaller, simpler mud wall that surrounded the city's effectively what you consider suburbs. And they would have to advance through that in order to attack the main wall and actual city. And rather than climbing the mud wall at various points, which would have been very easy, they decided that they would need to attack the walls main gate and capture them to allow their forces to enter the suburb area. I guess all of the commanders at once

learned very rapidly what happens when you funnel all of your men through a small central point while overlooked by fortified defensive positions. Now in the army- It's like when Mr. Burns in The Simpsons went and was like, why is he still alive? Because all the diseases can't get through the door at the same time. It's like that, but if the doctor starts shooting them with a Maxim machine gun. Now, in the army we call this the fatal funnel. Because defenders have to just pour fire into one specific area of so many men,

piled into it, all trying to squeeze through at once. You wouldn't have to aim or hit anything. One bullet could hit two people. The number one rule of the Fatal Funnels, get the fuck out of it as fast as possible or you die. And there's a dude firing the Maxim machine gun and you just hear the halo like, double kill, triple kill, killing spree. But it's all in like, Mandarin.

I don't know what he would unlock. I assume a boxer somewhere down the way unlocked martyrdom as a possible skill set. That did not happen. The allies were churned into a multinational pace while trying to force their way through the gates by torrents of incoming fire. But they did continue to advance through it and found the area on the other side to be open, swampy ground with no cover whatsoever leading towards the suburbs where every single house had been turned into a fighting position.

Yeah, once again, they're getting hit with a shwang-sha! Worse still, their advance would be funneled directly down the streets of the suburbs, where they're not only being shot at from the overlooking walls of the city of Tiet-Sin, but the defenders within the houses as well. And if they stormed the houses, they would be met by boxers with swords, which it turns out is pretty good for close quarters urban combat when not everybody had a bayonet Yeah, I mean like a bayonet. It's it's pretty directional You have to like run and stab someone wears a sword

You know if you're within a meter of someone a sword is more effective Yeah, and it doesn't you know and all this is made worse by the fact that remember the the boxers red lantern women's division Can apparently fly overhead There you go. They invented the first Air Force. Yeah, they're doing wire fighting from window to window Doing John Wick shit Then came more problems other than you know orders to attack yet sin Throw yourself at that wall. There were no other orders in place.

Even if they actually had been, what kind of detail could truly be communicated through all this? It would probably be lost in your middle school French lesson. For example, the commander of the American infantry hadn't even been invited to the mission briefing and had to piece together what he thought he was supposed to do from other officers after the fact. He was so unsure of what the plan was, he just didn't tell his subordinate officers anything because he was afraid that it would be wrong.

He just told them to advance that way and try to stick with everybody else Nobody had done any scouting and the maps that they had available were mostly a hand drawn and therefore terrible Drawn in crayon. Well, I mean there were American Marines there someone like has to draw something that they would understand The American Marines are just like shoving crayons up their nose Smedly butlers carving a knife in his own's carving a map in his own leg with a knife. He's carving a knife with a knife. Like he's just sharpening two knives ready to stab people. So every single unit involved became lost and unsure of where to go and what to do next. That meant from the second the Allies stepped off, every single officer from every single

nation on the ground was just kind of winging it all while under heavy fire. Most of the southern route got bogged down, unable to move and unable to communicate with other soldiers around them, and no overall plan to advance. The Japanese got to the main gate through sheer force of will and uncaring for their own lives, but they couldn't breach it. The Brits got pinned down all on their own unable to do anything, while the Russians were so completely bombed by Chinese artillery that people remembered that the screaming of dying Cossack horses could be heard from miles away.

Oh Jesus, that's a really grim thought. It's fine, just put some horn music behind it. You have ska. Everyone was stuck, getting slaughtered by Chinese gunfire for hours. Only when the sun began to go down did the Japanese finally begin to inch forward, once again setting up a large bomb against the main gate and blowing it apart. From there, they charged into the city and began to capture pieces of the main wall, opening the way for the rest of the Allies to run in after them. Now remember, none of this was planned. The Japanese mission

during this attack was like, you're going to get to the main gate and you're going to blow it. Everybody is just fucking going out of pocket. Once the Japanese blew up the wall, nobody was sure what was happening. They go rushing in pretty much on their own for an hour before people are like, oh no, that was a bomb on our side, this is a good thing. And they go charging in afterwards. Yeah. Caught in the middle of all of this was thousands of Chinese civilians

who lived in the city turned combat zone. The allies did not bother to try to tell the difference between them, the boxers or the army. They dumped fire into them all the same. Machine guns and cannons were set upon civilians, just as much as they were set on soldiers. Buildings were set on fire and soldiers from across the alliance began a spree of murder and looting as they went. By the time the smoke cleared, the city was all but gone. Eyewitnesses said it had been reduced to a

wasteland. I feel like this is where the turn is about to happen, where this starts to be, Tom doesn't make any jokes for the next 20 minutes. If it makes you feel any better, while I'm describing human horrors beyond all comprehension, if you just put the dulcet tones of skull horns behind me, it cheers you up. Countless dead bodies of soldiers, civilians, men, women and children lay all over. Soldiers stalked through the fetid rotting corpses, executing anyone who was still cleaning the life, while the Japanese took anyone they thought could be a boxer, meaning anyone who

was Chinese, out back behind the walls and cut their heads off with their swords. I don't think up-stroked guitars can fix this. Just need more trumpets bro. Save me mustard plug. James Rickleton, an American witness to the event, called it a quote Holocaust of human life. So many dead were left behind that allied authorities when finally stopping the killing but starting the occupation had no idea what to do with them all so they chucked them into a pile and set them on fire. When the black cloud of burning human flesh became too much to handle, they began to chuck

the rest of the bodies in the river. So many dead bodies had been thrown into the river that they created a corpse-like dam that had to be cleared by ships heading towards the city. A city of around one million people had been reduced to a ghost town, and the few Chinese who remained were desperate, starving and constantly under threat with summary execution should anybody accuse them of being a spy or a boxer. Victory! Woooooo! We did it! Here we go, it's all downhill from here.

I've become the downhill. Listen, it took three and a half episodes to get to this point. It was always coming. I think the anticipation of it has made it so much worse. Oh, just wait until they get to Peking. Oh, fuck. No, like this is really in the existence before the concept of war crimes, so, you know. Kind of, yeah.

There was like a concept of what peer nations would and wouldn't do to one another, like during a war in say, Europe. However, the racist undertones are so incredibly strong that any of that control is gone. They don't see Chinese people as humans. I mean, depending on what side of the alliance you're talking about, they don't even see one another as human, specifically like the Japanese and anybody or the Russians and the Japanese or Western Europeans and Russians or Western Europeans and Japanese. So, combined all of this intense, intense bloody racism and throw it in a war of colonialism and you get things like this. At the time, it was European powers wouldn't

do this to one another because they saw one another as, you know, brotherly nations of white people. Unfortunately, this is not the worst thing that will happen in the rest of the series. Now, just because the Allies won in Tietzen didn't really mean they had anything to be happy about. Mostly because it was getting increasingly clear to the militaries and the governments involved in this alliance that there was actually going to be a much longer campaign than any of them had originally thought. Because now they'd have to organize a full-on offensive to get to Peking and relieve the

legation. Which was going to be, to put it mildly, a bit of a bastard. Yeah, once again, bingo card, a military operation far outlasting its initial plans. Hello the birth of mission creep! This was made worse by the fact that nobody had any idea what was going on in Peking because remember they had lost contact with them quite some time ago. That didn't stop people from just making shit up in the meantime though. For example, good old classic, the Daily Mail ran a story that the legation had fallen and everybody inside had been slaughtered. Which is a big Daily Mail moment. Yeah, Daily Mail's like, you say a lot of things about the Daily Mail, but at least they're consistent.

Daily Mail is like you say a lot of things about the Daily Mail, but at least they're consistent You know people often confuse consistency with good you can also be consistently shit Yeah, look at any of Rupert Murdoch's, you know output since I don't know the 80s Or any since his birth, you know some I don't always say that someone being born was a mistake, but you know, sometimes there's exceptions. You know who would have really loved covering this war? Rupert Murdoch. God. And you could say slurs in the paper at that stage.

Oh, hold on to that thought. We're getting there. Oh, for f- I hate when this happens! Woooooo! It took days for anyone to figure out that that actually hadn't happened. And in reality things in the legation had kind of chilled out. Without speaking to one another the two sides of the conflict kind of had an informal ceasefire, like a live and let live situation. The boxers in the army stopped attacking them

and nobody's really sure why. And the Europeans inside the legation not really wanting to lick a gift horse in the mouth, like, you know, maybe we should stop shooting at them too. So they've just been kind of in a non firing siege. The only time that they did shoot was, because remember the legation is the embassies, the ministries of all these years.

So they'd have flags that were hoisted up over the buildings and every time they do that, the boxers and the Imperial Army would machine gun them. And then the legation employees would lower the shot up flags, repair them or put a new one up and fly it back up and for them just to get shot at again. You know, it's a great boon for the flag making industry. I'll say that.

Yeah, it's called disrupting the industry, shooting at all the flags. Yeah. War profiteering comes in all shapes and forms. Sometimes it's just your friendly neighborhood, like weird flag guy. To be fair, I think every war is a good boon for the flag industry. Like think about the invasion of Iraq. Great for flag makers. You know, you couldn't go anywhere after September 11th, 2001, the U.S. without seeing like an American flag that was the size of a car

flying from every structure. And you know, you'd say is like, you know, Americans really buckled down and started churning out American flags. None of them fucking things are made in America. It's even funnier like the Walmart patriotism to a T. Yeah. When, when someone eventually does nine 11 two, I will just raise to half mast my American flag with ice spice on it. And then your neighbor will machine gun it as his tradition.

Yeah. Like in like the area that I live in, in London is like, it's very, very diverse. And it's like a lot of mixes of cultures, a lot of Irish people, a lot of people, you know, from Lebanon, you know, a lot of people from North Africa, a lot of people from Eastern Europe and stuff. And it's very interesting when a geopolitical situation happens of what flags are raised and what are not. Yeah, yeah. I got to say, the area where I live, not a ton of flags. Makes me happy.

I mean, the Dutch are generally quite apolitical people unless they're, you know, hating migrants. Yeah, if they're either apolitical, they vote for fielders. No in between. Ha ha ha ha. Now, for the Allied forces to go from Tietzin to Peking, they would need a lot more soldiers and they were working on that. This is what led to the infamous July 27th, 1900 speech given by the German Kaiser to

his departing soldiers while they were still at Bremerhaven. We've talked about this before on the show, but it's pretty important to bring it up again. In part, the speech said, quote, if you come before the enemy, but it's pretty important to bring it up again. In part, the speech said, quote, If you come before the enemy, he will be defeated. No quarter will be given. Prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago, the Huns under King Etzel made the name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend.

So may the name of Germany be affirmed in you in such a way that China and no Chinese will ever dare look cross-eyed at a German. This was considered a bit too much for its era. This bloodthirsty speech became known as the Hun Speech. And it's the reason why, during World War I, the nickname for the Germans was Huns speech. And it's the reason why during World War I, the nickname for the Germans was Huns. Also, this wasn't just a speech for his soldiers. The Kaiser was, outside of Imperial Japan, the most racist allied leader towards the Chinese. He wanted Peking to be leveled to teach them a reason. He wanted every member of the city to be killed or enslaved, and frame it as a war defending civilization

against Chinese barbarism, and the Germans must kill as many of them as possible to save Europe from what he called the yellow peril at their gates. God, something that the Germans will never do again. What's the distance between Tietzen and Peking? If the railroad was functioning, not that far. Otherwise, it's a bit of a hike. What, we're talking like 10 days? Two weeks? I think they expected it to take a week. Yeah. So you have to not only get more soldiers, but they have to march for an entire fucking week. Yep.

Now this speech was so murderous it made everyone, again, outside of Japan, mind you, wince. And the rest of the German state knew that, because when they made official translations into other languages, they edited the Kaiser's speech to take out the most bloodthirsty lines, but soon enough the actual version got out. Though again on the ground in China, all this pomp and bullshit in Germany didn't change much. Valderci and his troops wouldn't be there until at least September. Every other nation in the alliance didn't want to wait that long, and like they had done in the lead up to the Battle of Tietzen, they began to plan their own shit. This led one British general, Arthur Gaseley. It might be Gaseley. I'm gonna, Arthur Gassley, to petition other allied officers for another

offensive towards Peking immediately. Fuck the Germans and their reinforcements. As they complained and bitched at one another, a messenger showed up at the gates of Tiet-Tsin. A Chinese teenager had been snuck out of Peking and sent there with a note from the British minister trapped in the legation. Things inside the legation were getting grim. They were holding their own, but casualties were mounting and they were running out of food.

They were keeping horses alive and butchering them slowly so they could eat them. And they had no means to store the flesh. If they killed them outright, they'd be, you know, I'm not the biggest fan of horses. I'll admit that. Eating the horse the slow way. Yeah. But why? You know, thank God we don't use horses in war anymore. I think the horses have suffered enough. Or have they not suffered enough? We knew what the horses did, what their original sin was.

They know. They know that we know. This is why you gotta hold something like the Kentucky Derby to keep them all in line. So you are you saying is that Mr. Hans was like the Andreas badder of the horse world possibly the Vladimir Lenin The horse is much like the beavers they're reading Lenin you cannot do bestiality in the woods of Washington while wearing white gloves Yeah, there's there's two ends of the spectrum of horse Revolutionaries, there's mr. Hans and there's mr. Ed Who's this say that they weren't the same? Actually, no, Mr. Ed. I think we're having a fundamental mistake here. Mr. Hans was the guy,

not the horse. Oh, okay. The Mr. Hans horse then. Mr. Ed is Lennon. The Mr. Hans horse, Stalin. He did believe in some kinetic violence. Now, the situation in the legation was very bad. And the letter warned the allied military forces in Tietzen, like, we will be out of food and water at most in two weeks. And if the Chinese actually organize a full attack on the legation, not piece by piece, we will be wiped out. Though it's important to remember they're like, oh, well, how long did it take for you to get here? And the kid was like, two weeks.

The situation is dire. We'll be out of everything in two weeks. Two weeks later, the message shows up like, oh, I guess they're fucked. Yeah, it's also like, you know, you can't remove that fast because you're eating the horses as you're going along. No, the horse is just crawling around by its front legs with like three Germans gnawing on its ass. Yeah, like a very important part of, you know, movement logistics for troops are at this time horses. What are you doing eating the horses?

It's like, you know, eating a car or like, what if you started to try and take chunks out of a fucking Abrams? With a doubt, just begin eating your MRAP with a fork and knife. Snout to tail, but it's tires to armor. I mean, if anybody is depressed about the sight of of horses being slowly eaten by rich up-delegation quarter embassy workers. Again, just put it over the soundtrack of Scott and now it's fun. You got to pick up, pick it up, pick it up. That horse flesh, baby. Yeah.

Listen, this is not something out of the realm of possibility for people who currently work for think tanks. I can imagine them doing this. Now they just eat horses alive for fun. The screams fuel my Ivy League education. I graduated from Cornell and now I'm in France eating horses So what do you do for a living? Oh, I just inflict human misery also horses Now they knew that this kids voyage

Trek hike death March took two weeks to get there. And if they waited for the Germans to show up, it would be far too late to try to rescue the people within the legation. The legations would have easily starved to death by then. Maybe the Boxers and the Chinese army would have wiped them out. And then most importantly, winter would begin to creep into northern China making any campaign virtually impossible. There's also the tactical advantage if they acted now. The Chinese forces, boxer and army alike had been badly beaten at Tietzin and were now thought to be disorganized

as they retreated back towards Peking. If they act now, they'd preempt them fortifying anything. However, there was still imperial bullshit at play. Just because the Germans won the dick measuring contest to have the overall commander didn't mean anyone was exactly happy about it. Gasly and others, specifically the Japanese commander Yamaguchi Motomi, the highest ranking man on the ground in China, period, wanted to move quickly before the Germans could show up and steal their thunder. And just because it was going to take the Germans months to get there didn't mean

it was the same for others. Remember, other countries like the US, Russia, and Japan had nearby colonies, and it made reinforcing Tietzen very easy for them. On August 3rd, it was agreed that they would move out the next day towards Peking. And to be fair, that is about how much planning that they had done. We will leave tomorrow. That was it. No overarching plan is like we're going to walk that way. Plans are for losers.

Like, if you plan ahead, you are a loser. That's why meal prep is for losers. That's why, you know, calendars are for losers. If you want to be a true base, Chad, must, one, not read and two, not plan anything. And also, time is just a construct you don't need to listen to. Yep. Yep. Just becoming every worst stoner you've ever met in high school. Dude! Like, what did they do before clocks existed? Like like did time exist before clocks?

That person is probably like a lawyer somewhere in Washington DC Or Brussels is also an option for the ones that couldn't cut it However, they didn't actually come to an agreement on who would be in command. Ghastly insisted he should be the one in charge, while Motomi correctly pointed out, like, I outrank all of you. And not to mention that, he had significantly more experience, and there's more Japanese soldiers taking part in this operation than anyone else, so it should be me. This was not even considered for a second. The Europeans looked across the table and probably whispered a racial slur

To one another like fuck off Yeah, hearing the same racial slur in seven different line separate different accents of French Yeah, probably seven different slurs in French as well the Europeans of like we said, had their own shit between each other, but they all refused to fall into the command of a Japanese man based solely on racism and nothing else. They did not see the Japanese, no matter how strong as they were, to be their peers. And they believed that not only it would slight their honor as dickhead gentlemen or whatever, but it would also demotivate their

soldiers for having to listen to an Asian man, which I know that's not surprising to anybody listening, but it's still, you don't expect to see it so starkly, you know? So it was agreed that we wouldn't have a unified structure. We would have no unified commander. What became known as a ghastly expedition marched out without one, and they all simply agreed that each country had fallen to their own officers, and those officers would have to come together to discuss what to do should anything arise. A weird ad hoc government of officers.

And remember, if at any point, again, you're getting depressed, this is all being done in broken French. That lightens up the mood. I mean, not really. Lab stretch in here, man. The advance, in short, sucked ass. That's the historical term to use here.

Soldiers likened the weather to, quote, marching into a blast furnace. The drought had since lifted and crops were growing again. Now anybody who's ever stood in the middle of say a wheat field or a rice paddy or a field of corn in full crop, like full like you know as as tall as it gets, knows how fucking miserable that is. It traps the heat and the humidity inside making it significantly worse than if you were walking alongside it. And these troops marched right through the middle of these newly growing fields. The ground was muddy and then it began to rain.

Swamps and ponds formed, leading to a quote, explosion of flies and mosquitoes. Oh, everyone's got malaria. a, quote, explosion of flies and mosquitoes. Oh, everyone's getting malaria. I know, I was about to say, I know what you're thinking next. Disease, baby! Oh, God, planting tactical corn to prevent your enemies advancing? I mean, at this point, they were just happy

the drought was over, but like, I myself has had to patrol through a cornfield, it so I never imagined it would suck so bad like farmers are in there working all the time why would it be so bad and then you walk in and you're suddenly in a surprise sauna full of shit because the fertilizer yeah like you know this is a the American corn lobby really learned from this you know then they invented high fructose corn syrup. And now we just go to the fields and plow up lucky charms. Yep. Just cereals. It's a really hard time hacking on your hands and knees in the Froot Loops fields, picking a fully formed cup of pumpkin spice latte off of

a tree. Captain Crunch is up on a horse like an overseer whipping you. I feel like that would have to be his job because in like 50 years the man has not been promoted. You should be fucking it like it's like in Futurama it's called Admiral Crunch and Fry is like, wow, he finally got promoted. What did Captain Crunch do to prevent the promotion? He did. He's done things that we cannot talk about on air. Yeah. He's the evil Smedly Butler. He probably Captain Crunch would have a statue somewhere and a protest and form around it with like calling him an enslaver or something. And then if you open a book, it's like, Oh God, nobody ever talked about what he did during the American Philippines war. Well, I was about to say

Smedly Butler is his own evil Smedley Butler as well. Yeah, Smedley Butler is his own yin and yang, both of which trying to kill one another for very different reasons. Inside you there is two Smedley Butlers. Soldiers were quickly infected with anything and everything. There was no field sanitation whatsoever and nobody attempted to try any. The diarrhea flowed like a river, poisoning the rest of the soldiers around them. Soldiers got desperate as their thirst and hunger

outstripped their miniscule logistical capacity. They descended upon local villages and small groups or individually looking for food and water. In some places they found it, but it was never enough to go around because remember this place had just experienced a famine. So this would quickly devolve into international battles within these villages over like a single chicken. According to the book Warriors of the Rising Sun, a British soldier got into an argument with German soldiers over some rice that they had found and he shot four of them dead he was not good he was not in trouble at all and his commander was more mad that he didn't kill more Germans rather than he killed any at all more Germans kill more rice for us exactly everybody knows how much those Germans eat or something, I don't know. Those Germans love rice.

Sure, I don't know where to go for that. However, occasionally these fetch quests for food would turn bloody in another way. Chinese villagers rightfully were terrified of these foreign troops, and they ambushed them and like if one single or like maybe five soldiers showed up in a village, the village would just like, descend upon them with farm implements and kill them on the spot. The villagers like, rocking up to the soldiers like NPCs in Oblivion, they're walking are really weird.

It seems you have come to our village. Oy, adventurer! Let's start macheting off his arms and legs. The worst was saved for the Japanese, though, who would be torn apart. Their tongues and severed heads would be nailed to nearby trees as a warning to others. Smedley Butler wrote about how he came across several soldiers that had, in effect, been minced. Jesus. came across several soldiers had, in effect, been minced.

Jesus. The atrocities, however, and I need to stress this, and nobody's under any kind of mistaken ideas here, the atrocities were heavily weighted in one direction, and that was the fucking Allies. According to that same book, Warriors of the Rising Sun, Russian and Japanese soldiers acted in ways that can only be described as fitting in perfectly with their Rape of Nanking series. And that isn't to say nobody else did anything, murder and looting were commonplace amongst the Allies as was endemic sexual violence that I really don't feel like describing. Like people

violence that I really don't feel like describing. People described all of this and the murder, the sexual violence saluting as being conducted by soldiers who were almost bored while doing it. But specifically the Russians and the Japanese engaged in a level of violence that was shocking even to the other murderers and rapists. Jesus. The Americans, meanwhile, brought some of their own learned atrocities. You see, the US had just taken over the Philippines and were dealing with a bit of a, uh, insurrection, let's say.

They pointed out that, you know what works really well in the Philippines that we could do here? Scorched Earth tactics. Oh, my head has been in my hands for the past 15 seconds. Like I was, it's still bad, but it's not as bad as I was thinking it was going. Like it wasn't what my mind was going to. It was like, are they going to start scalping people? Joe, no, no. Hold on to that thought, Tom.

I hate being on this road. I'm laughing because I'm sad. Like, the amount of like, I will be going about my day after recording, and just a small detail will pop into my mind, and it will just be like, a fucking knife into the soul. Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up! Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do up. The impression I get. My mind is being cushioned by the thought of ska music in the moment and it's not helping. There's very few things that have been made better by white people. Ska is not one of them. China also not one of them. Ska China. What did white people ruin more? Like we've said before, the world has. What did white people ruin more late? Like we've said before, the world has never recovered from white people

discovering the concept of boats. Yep. Yeah. Or wind instruments, boats and horns. Worse through the simpatico and being awful. Yeah. Now, the Americans said, like, look, our soldiers need food. We need to take everything with us. And what we can't take, we burn it. And the rest of the European powers and the Japanese, of course, were like, sounds good. We do this all the time. I'm glad that you're on boat with the old kids club.

Our boy is finally becoming a man. And yeah, so they laid waste to an area that had only just barely begun to recover from a famine and a drought. This would kill 10 times more people than the Boxer Rebellion itself. The vast majority of the deaths from the Boxer Rebellion are from the famine that the Allies caused. It's unfair to say they caused it directly, but they expanded the famine and made it worse. As the expedition advanced, they continuously rounded detachments from both the army and the boxers, when they put up a hellish defense but only for a very, very short amount of

time before breaking contact the first possibility just to set up down the road a few miles and to do the whole thing again. Though they were always constantly moving, launching night raids and keeping the allies on their toes. And at one point they pulled the old classic dig out a dam and flood an area in front of the allies, which destroyed multiple villages and destroyed miles and miles of crops and land. But this did create a massive diseased filled swamp

the Allies would then have to march through for days. And this also funneled them in a very specific direction right into a fortified Chinese artillery line that had been prepared. And they began bombing the shit out of the Allies as they advanced, which led to the Battle of Yangon on August 6th. Man, you know, as this series has gone on, I didn't think when we started that I would be on the side of the Boxers, but…

You get it. Like, it's like you said, we don't have to have compassion towards what the Boxers did because they were, you know, lunatics and violent as shit, but you kind of get where they're coming from, right? Same with the Chinese government, like fuck these guys. When you're the Chinese Imperial government in 1900 and you've suffered through all of the humiliation, the exploitation, all of these other things for the preceding decades and the add the first allies that show up to your door or Like dudes who are terrified of period blood and doing like ritual kung fu

But they want to work out what they want like want to work with you. You're like Okay It's it's like we've talked about a million times. It's a grand universal theory of fuck that guy except It's fuck all eight of these guys There's eight guys and a fucking hate all of them some more than others They seem to really hate the Japanese for very valid reasons and invalid reasons simultaneously Look if you're gonna pick If you're gonna pick a side and that beef you're kind of you got one side or other. Yeah, nobody's ever hated the Imperial Japanese military for incorrect reasons, I feel comfortable

saying. As well dug in as the Chinese were, the real enemy of the Allies was the fucking heat. It's August, and remember they're in what could be considered the Gobi Desert. It was well over 100 degrees and they spent their days marching through the heat already through swamps and shitting their insides out while they're being sniped and shelled. They're horrifically dehydrated and men began to drop out from heatstroke in the middle of the battle as their officers ordered them forward to the point it eclipsed the

number of dead and wounded inflicted on them in the battle by the Chinese By two like double it every time you look over someone else just be keeling over from heat exhaustion or heat stroke Mm-hmm, then you're eating their boots and the the the They're safer if they had a little bit of water and then facing the Chinese weapons and they were facing the sun. A full 20% of allied forces involved in the battle, 20% total, not just 20% of casualties, but 20% of everybody succumbed to the heat, either dead or injured, but most of them were injured.

Now, in some of its situations, that was not the case what caused the most casualties within a specific nation's ranks. There was the Americans, whose injuries they absorbed were almost entirely due to friendly fire. Listen, one thing I gotta say, American Marines, they're consistent. They advanced toward the Chinese positions so rapidly, spurned forward by the blood orgy of Smedley Butler, that everyone lost track of them. So the Russians and the Japanese artillery bombed the hell out of them, and the French

got so confused that one of their rifle units just fully opened a fusillade into the side of the American Marines. This whole, this whole conflict would have ended so much quicker if the Marines had Blackhawk helicopters, like boxers would have won in like two days. If they had a V, if the American Marines were using the V 22 Osprey, the boxers would have won with spears. Yeah. The people who can actually have the ability to fly lose so much quicker to the people who believe they can fly. However, if you have a Blackhawk helicopter and inside

is just Smedley Butler chained to a bed like fucking Hannibal Lecter and you have to let him go upon landing, you win every conflict. But every conflict would also be a genocide. Deploying Smedley Butler like a fucking insane version of Captain America. Like a drop trooper from Warhammer 40k, just a capsule fired from a space station that crashes in somewhere. Like a Saiyan pod, if you will, just crashes the earth and opens and it's thisangely thin marine covered in a thin coat of blood at all times. Yeah, Smedley Butler is Freeza. No, that's not true, cause Freeza eventually lost. Yeah, true. Heh, I don't know what he is.

Wait, is he Majin Buu? Mmm, no Majin Buu eventually lost too. Smedley Butler... ...does not die in combat. Yeah, I suppose. Dunno! Smedley Butler is like Smedley Butler does not die in combat. Yeah, I suppose. Dunno. Smedley Butler is like Smedley Butler but in anime form. Yeah, add Smedley Butler into Dragon Ball Z. That'd end the whole series really quickly.

Oh, you're coming to Earth to threaten us for the 16th time. We'll deploy this weird farm kid from Nebraska. Goku throws the spirit bomb at him and Smedley Butler is just still standing there. Everyone else dies around him and they just have to give Smedley Butler another Medal of Honor because he has, again I need to stress this fact, more than one. However, most of this battle was for nothing. The Chinese tactic of not sticking around for a long time held true. As soon as the Allies got close, the Chinese would withdraw, and they'd give up the battlefield but suffer very few casualties and hypothetically preserve their force to fight another day. While the Allies had been dragging themselves through the fields and fighting a losing campaign

against the sun itself, the Chinese army along with the Boxers were still mostly fine, intact, and had supplies as they continued their organized withdrawal towards Peking. The Allies however were quick on their heels, and that is where we'll pick up next time on the conclusion to the Boxer Rebellion. I am so scared for this next episode. You should be. As time in memoriam, man has always been at war with nature. But like, yeah, given how bad this got, I can't imagine what's in the next one. For anyone listening, I don't know anything about the Boxer Rebellion, so I don't know what's coming. It's not good.

I will say like I knew I would, I'll say slightly more than surface level things about the Box rebellion going into researching the series and even I was pretty shocked about what What happens throughout this entire thing because you expect a certain amount of it. You don't expect what happens, right? Like you Because I don't know about in other places in the world, I know in the United States, at least when I was in school, you don't learn about the Boxer Rebellion. Um, you get like a snippet that America- like,

oh, isn't this an interesting picture? There's Americans, Japanese, and Germans all fighting on the same side just before World War I and World War II. That's about it. It exists as a footnote. Yeah, this is just like a fucking corn and Zinches wet dream. I mean, we did involve a, we, we did invent a pod based, uh, Smedley Butler deployment system, uh, chaos Smedley Butler. Listen, if anyone wants to draw anything out of this series, if you can draw Smedley Butler

as a chaos marine Go right ahead. Please tag us in it. So Tom we are four parts in To this series one part left to go. How you feeling not good? I can say that right off the bat not cool I don't understand about which part was it the horses or were the unspeakable cruelties of war? Everything. Yeah, just everything. Yeah. But that's what you get. I promise the next series we do will. I'm not going to promise you. I don't want to lie to you, Tom.

It's bad, isn't it? Probably. Yeah. Tom, you host the podcast. Would you like to plug your podcast? Yeah. Beneath Skin show about history of everything told through the history of tattooing and I am also the producer and editor for Glue Factory. It's a comedy podcast that has literally no theme and is just all jokes. And this is the only thing that I host. And if you like what we do here, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 gets you six years of bonus content, extra series. We're doing video series now as well.

It gets you access to recordings of the live shows that we did in London. It gets you first dibs on future live show tickets and merchandise. Gets you access to our Discord community. Every single episode we do early, and we will send you horse meat in the mail

Donate today You could deal with shipping that from the Netherlands. I mean you live near a Tesco. You should have the easiest supply of horse meat Yeah, yeah, and until next time everybody Don't do anything that we said happened during this entire episode. We cannot be held liable. We will be just descended upon by an army of horse lawyers. So we will talk to you next time.