The Taiwan Expeditionary Force (2)
Major General Brisson, commander of the French garrison in Taiwan, had marked the coming thirtieth of August as the day his forces would open a sweeping military operation to crush the armed resistance still holding the island and whatever Qing remnants remained.
To that end he committed the naval infantry of the Far East Squadron, the Fifth Regiment of the Taiwan garrison, and the detachment holding Port Lespes, the French outpost on the islet off Taiwan's northern coast. The fourteen thousand men of the Republic's expeditionary force under Hong Gye-hun were, of course, folded into the plan as well.
"When the operation begins, the Korean commander will sweep additional guerrillas and holdouts along the western coast and rejoin us from the south."
The French staff received Hong Gye-hun — commander of the Korean auxiliary expeditionary force, three or four interpreters in tow — with scrupulous courtesy and laid out their design with methodical clarity.
The French garrison had put nearly thirty thousand men into the field to finish the conquest of Taiwan. Half of that number, the fourteen thousand Koreans, would have to lock down the rear areas the French had already fought through — the supplies, the prisoners — and seal off every reserve band that had melted into the mountains and the forest. Only then could this wretched island finally be put to rest.
A navy major jabbed a pointer here and there across the campaign map and added a further note.
"If you descend along the western coast, the Third Division of our Far East Squadron and three older-pattern gunboats can furnish you with naval gunfire. Should any town or village along your axis require a siege, you need only keep the signals open."
"We'll furnish your signals detachment with a communications wagon from our side, Hong."
"Mm. Understood, General."
Listening to the French staff walk through the operation, Hong Gye-hun could tell they were not simply ignoring him. Not entirely.
Those victories in Liaodong really did raise our standing.
Yingkou, Lushun, Jiulian, Shengjing — decisive triumphs at city after city, strongpoint after strongpoint across the Liaodong Peninsula, and the Republic's prestige had climbed by the day. The French, who had been in the habit of looking at an Oriental army with something close to contempt even while calling it an ally, had begun to soften that stare. That same current, he suspected, had lifted the reputation of the old royalist-faction regulars under men like himself, until even the Taiwan garrison headquarters was willing to share the plan with Hong Gye-hun and the units beneath him.
"I understand there has been friction over weapons supply and the allotment of ammunition. I believe our garrison quartermaster can settle that. Major."
Would you look at that. He hadn't said a word, and they were already offering rifles and cartridges, watching him with expectant faces.
"Five thousand deficient rifles and three hundred and fifty thousand rounds have already been landed, sir. When you return today, send men tomorrow to draw the stores."
"Ah—thank you."
Clap. Clap.
"That's enough of the particulars. Let me summarize the object of this operation. The heart of it is deception."
Major General Brisson gathered every officer's eyes upon himself and tapped the map.
"As the Korean army advances along the west, our garrison will strike east, and we will make certain the Taiwanese resistance understands that we are prosecuting an active campaign of annihilation."
"So you mean to frighten them into concentrating, sir?"
"Exactly so. We gather their mosquito-swarm of guerrillas into one place and smash them in a pitched battle. The stage will be the island's extreme south. A flying column will cut across the mountains and drive them down like a broom — lightning-fast, all the way to the bottom."
He went further: a clandestine night operation, a rapid dash that would slice the island in half and scour the resistance villages still lingering in the north at the same stroke. Hong Gye-hun let out a low sound in his throat.
Summer here comes with a long rainy season. Does the general not know that?
And the lunar eighth month was nearly upon them. A rain that would last two weeks at the least would pour across the whole island, and then there would be no night marches at all — only a hell of sucking mud on the mountain flanks, even in daylight. A cloudburst wore soldiers down in the body; the damp heat broke their spirit. A night march on top of that was the finishing blow, oil on the fire.
But night assaults and surprise attacks were already written into the plan. Hong Gye-hun shut his mouth. He had nothing useful to say. If the Republic's troops, sent here under the name of an auxiliary force, started arguing that the advance should be pushed back two weeks to suit local conditions, the whole arrangement would start to look very strange.
Nothing for it, then.
Hong Gye-hun's brow furrowed. Behind him, a French officer spoke up.
"General, how does the marine regiment that was to land at the island's midpoint make its junction?"
"A fair question. The marine regiment will construct a temporary bivouac and a timber fort at a village the locals pronounce Ma, and wait there."
"On the coast, then...?"
"Yes. The coast."
As the officer's question implied, the place called Ma sat on the eastern shore, at the island's waist, in a hollow like a bite taken out of the land.
"This is the physical midpoint of the island. The Chinks' throat, if you will! Above it, the Korean army will finish sweeping the guerrillas. Meanwhile we drive a general offensive into the south."
He split the map on the table with his pointer, then dragged the stick hard toward the bottom with a sharp rap. The little wooden pieces that had stood for the Qing army tumbled off the table in an undignified clatter.
His voice and his eyes were full of confidence. Somewhere deep in Hong Gye-hun's chest, the French general's boast left a knot of unease that only grew.
Or so he would have said. Once the operation actually began, Hong Gye-hun wanted nothing more than to call the whole of it an old woman's worry.
First: Taiwan's climate, that awkward tangle of temperate weather and jungle, did not produce a two-week deluge the way the homeland did. The rains never quite became that kind of monsoon.
"General! They say the rain's stopped!"
"Do we advance?"
"...We do."
Second — and it followed from the first — Brisson, the garrison commander, was a far more lucid and reasonable man than Hong Gye-hun had feared.
"Rain, you say? Cancel the operation!"
"Sir? Cancel it?"
"Do you want the boys drowning out there? You send them on a night march in this weather and a landslide hits, they're all dead! Cancel it!"
A man whose caution looked, at times, a shade excessive. But the general's hard decision kept the collateral damage within bounds, and both expeditionary forces held their non-combat losses to a minimum.
Hong Gye-hun had half expected the French expedition to be riddled with its own factional knife-fights. He called on Major General Brisson intending to offer some consolation for the delay — and found the man utterly untroubled that the operation had been pushed back.
Third came the work of the marine regiment and the French Foreign Legion, sent up from the Indochina Peninsula to stiffen the Taiwan garrison.
"First time you've seen them, Hong? Those are our finest mercenaries — the Foreign Legion."
The rumor that they had won brilliant distinction on the Indochina expedition was, it seemed, no exaggeration at all. Every last Legionnaire was a genuine veteran. They rolled through the mud of the undergrowth as if the jungle were their own front yard, and they fought the local Qing troops better than the Qing fought themselves. The Taiwanese natives and the Qing soldiers, the ones who actually knew this ground, were the ones being ambushed in the forest. That said enough.
Which left only one remaining problem.
"Sir! Ambush!"
"Goddamn it!"
The only fighting the Taiwan expeditionary force had ever known was the Bloody Five Days in the capital. What now unfolded before them was every kind of disgrace and hardship the island could invent.
Ah, I want to go home.
But everything above was nothing more than a victor's complaining.
Nie Zhichao and Nie Shicheng, who led the Taiwanese resistance, and Sun Kaihua, the commander at Keelung, had never imagined a supporting army on Hong Gye-hun's scale, nor firepower that beggared invention. They could not even get their hands up. The front buckled in a rush wherever the enemy chose to push, and they reeled.
"Fengshan County has fallen!"
"French colors sighted at Tainan! The enemy has shown himself on the southern coast as well!"
"Keel— Keelung is...!"
Fallen. Destroyed. Scorched. In flight.
The moment the rains that had held the enemy's fury at bay came to an end, those were the only words left filling the Qing command posts across Taiwan.
The French main force struck with a violence that was almost personal. The guerrillas who had relied on jungle and forest, who had still managed the occasional vicious ambush, were taking losses that piled up like a snowball rolling downhill.
"Ambushes are useless now. Worse — a great many of the villages that used to hide us are cut off and calling for help."
"Damn those Koreans!"
And there was the killing blow. Guerrilla raids and night attacks by the resistance ought to have delayed the enemy's advance. They had not. An unexpected Korean reinforcement on a massive scale had bled the tactic dry. Wherever the French main body punched through, the Koreans stepped in to plug the holes along the front and settle the rear. The Taiwanese resistance, which had been locked in a slugging match with the French, found itself stunned by the new tempo and the sudden speed of the offensive — unable even to scream as the island closed around them, driven to the brink of being surrounded and slaughtered where they stood.
The guerrillas who had been raising hell in the rear were being hunted down for them. The French, granted the unheard-of luxuries of reorganization and rest, were in towering spirits.
Boom.
"At this rate we will all be annihilated! We must take extraordinary measures, General!"
Nie Shicheng spoke in a fury at the enemy's sheer, insulting ease — more than fifty thousand men committed to this scrap of an island, a number that defied all reason.
"We are already at less than half their strength, General!"
"Extraordinary measures? You cannot mean—"
"Yes. We need a pitched battle. A great battle, to stop their advance and buy us time."
Nie Zhichao slammed the desk and gathered the stunned Qing officers around him.
The two of them — able men, and young — looked as if they had seen this entire sequence coming.
"The forts and watchtowers we laid across the island's midsection are worthless now. Small-unit melees are precisely what an enemy with superior individual firepower wants."
"The pacification of the rear villages and the occupied zones is moving very fast as well. The Korean bastards are Orientals like us, and they have made themselves the Frenchmen's hands and feet — so of course the villagers roll straight over to the enemy."
"But have the ambushes not paid reasonably well? We have been using them to foul their attacks and slow the advance."
"For the moment. If we go on losing the island half at a time, village by village, we will be rats in a jar. Guerrillas only work when there is wide country to hide in and the support of the local people and their villages. The Koreans are scouring every settlement they can find and searching it bare. The room a guerrilla band needs to move is shrinking by the day."
In other words, the French garrison's old strategy of linking point to point had, through the Korean auxiliaries, turned into a war of occupation — the securing of surface after surface. It was a resource of the first importance for wiping out what resistance remained on Taiwan, and it was brutally effective. The Baisha Army that Nie Zhichao had led so well had been unable to lift its head; it had come stumbling down toward the south as if a broom had swept the island clean.
"And through Keelung, more French marines and reinforcements are likely to keep arriving. The longer this runs, the wider the gap in numbers will grow. That much is certain."
At the center of the map the French pieces multiplied. The red pieces that stood for the Korean army had the northern island in a fist. The yellow pieces, driven into the south, had come to a halt at the island's furthest tip.
Sun Kaihua's brow tightened. He made a low sound and spoke.
"Has there been no word of reinforcements from Shandong?"
Relief. In that moment it was the word they wanted most, and the one they missed most.
For a breath the mood inside the tent tilted toward hope. Then Nie Shicheng's answer sank it.
"There has not, General."
"General. You must face it now. We have been abandoned."
The two officers drove the spike home one after the other. Sun Kaihua's beard trembled.
"Nngh."
In the end this place was only a sliver of the Qing realm, one scrap among countless others. The Beiyang Fleet, which had been meant to replace the already-destroyed Nanyang Fleet, was so cowed by the Far East Squadron — now parading its strength up and down the Yellow Sea — that it would not even think of leaving its hole in Shandong. The resistance on Taiwan had been driven to the point of running short of ammunition.
"Three years, General. We have held out a very long time!"
The pleading of Nie Zhichao and Nie Shicheng. The staff, who had at last understood that Taiwan had never much mattered to Li Hongzhang, the Minister of Beiyang, or to the Forbidden City, sank into silence.