Battle of Bohai Bay (2)
At the same time, dubious intelligence reached the Beiyang Naval Command that a massive transport convoy had sortied from the Korean Peninsula toward Yingkou and Lushun. Acting on the plan already laid down, Deng Shichang's mine-laying squadron, which had been standing by at Weihaiwei, entered Bohai Bay with the cruiser Fujing as flagship, the rest of the mine fleet in her wake.
Deng Shichang had finished his studies in Britain only to drift from desk to desk afterward. It was solely on the powerful recommendation of Ding Ruchang—Beiyang Naval Commander and architect of the Beiyang Fleet—that he had at last attained the admiral's post he had coveted for so long.
"And what good does that do me?"
Ding Ruchang's counsel that the Beiyang Fleet should hold back from sortieing on the grounds that it still needed to refit had been rejected before the implacable will of Empress Dowager Cixi.
"..."
And so he was not glad at all. Even having risen to the chair he had yearned for all those years, once a man understood that the chair had already been assigned to a killing ground, no amount of wanting could make him put on a show of joy.
A single thought filled his mind. Because that old vixen still lived and still dug in her heels, the Beiyang Fleet—this nation's sole military asset of any consequence—stood one step from being thrown away.
"Damn it."
His curse made the sailors flinch—men who had just lowered a boat nearby and were now carefully hauling a heavy mine, its tail streaming behind a packed cluster of heads.
Watching in silence as his flagship Fujing and the other warships lowered boats to lay their mines with painstaking care, Deng Shichang clenched his trembling right hand in his left and stole anxious glances at the horizon. From that dazzling white line of sea and sky, he could think of nothing but when the devil would come hunting them, black maw agape.
He stared at the horizon with unsteady eyes, then pressed a hand to his brow and let out a sigh.
"...I could die of this anxiety."
He could not tear his gaze from that line. At any moment the French Far East Squadron might come pouring into Bohai Bay, black smoke belching from their masts, and fall upon his mine squadron without warning.
And with good reason. Mine-laying in this era was infamous as one of the filthiest, hardest jobs in all of naval warfare—especially when fighting was already lively at sea, or when two fleets were circling each other on the eve of a great fleet action, each trying to seize the other by the tail.
"Father in Heaven."
An atheist, Deng Shichang nonetheless folded his hands and prayed to the sky.
"Please. Please just let this one day pass in safety."
His fear had grounds. Danger aside, with a reconstituted Fujian and Nanyang fleet that had never so much as drilled a mine-laying operation, let alone executed one, finishing the work on schedule and clearing the waters was next to impossible.
Moreover, the auxiliary vessels charged with the actual laying had to reduce their activity to a crawl—minimum speed, or something close to a dead stop—so as not to disturb the mines they were planting. At the same time, the flagship of the operational area had to linger in one place for a considerable stretch, charting the positions of every mine its ships had set.
And remaining for hours in a single spot in the middle of the open sea, with nothing but empty water in every direction, was as good as begging an enemy fleet with overwhelming firepower and ample fuel to come and eat you alive.
Thus the mine-laying operation to control Bohai Bay, beginning today, would take at least three long days. At the same time, the observation posts on the Shandong Peninsula—doubled in number to replace the destroyed watchtowers and lookouts lost with Liaodong—would have to report the French Far East Squadron's every movement, day and night, in minute detail.
If even a few of those reports were missed, Deng Shichang's fleet, mid-operation to seal Bohai Bay, would be lucky to escape by throwing a few warships out as bait.
"..."
Prayer finished, he turned his head east again and, with a face in which exhaustion, irritation, and rage all lived together, vented his fury at the people who had brought this situation about. In the end, every problem lay with an arrogant imperial house and an incompetent court that could not restrain it and was simply swept along.
Black smoke coughing from the funnels, the slap of paddle wheels on the dispatch boats, were eating away at a man's sanity in real time, and the Non-Commissioned Officers and commissioned officers were barking at the men to carry the mines carefully. Deng Shichang's patience had reached its limit.
"...Sons of bitches. Goddamn bastards! Goddamn court. Bastards who don't know the first letter of the word war go around setting fires and causing disasters, and then instead of cleaning up they have the gall to say it's because we didn't fight properly."
Someone watching might have condemned it as blasphemy, but fortunately no officer on the bridge was about to inform on Deng Shichang for denouncing the court and the imperial house.
The core officers of the mine squadron he had assembled were, for the most part, talents of the Self-Strengthening Movement returned from study in Europe. The younger rising men formed the backbone, and a good number of them were furious at the court's and the throne's overreach.
"If they'd just held on for ten years—if they'd just waited ten years—the empire would have had its one chance to rise again!"
Had they endured no more than a decade, France would never have had the insolence to hammer the empire's coastlines as it did now, and the Koreans, who had lost their heads entirely, would never have dared dream of rebellion.
Of course, having to abandon Vietnam, their second tributary, and withdraw might have been a humiliation the throne and the court could not possibly ignore. But what had come of being unable to swallow a moment's disgrace?
Mawei Harbor in Fujian, once called the flower of the Self-Strengthening Movement, had burned to the ground, and the Nanyang and Fujian fleets had been wrecked. Even if France had overplayed its hand, openly seeking to expand its gains and even tearing up the agreement—what good did it do to charge straight in, instead of waiting until another mediator could intervene?
The arrogant imperial house could not wait. And though the scars of war had not yet been washed away, the fruits of a Self-Strengthening Reform pushed through by force had been gambled away on reckless overseas expeditions and war. The result was the republican revolution that had erupted in Joseon, once their greatest tributary, and this war now spreading into Liaodong.
Just as the Beijing gossips fretted, with their theatrical panic, that the Koreans had not merely thrown off the empire's eastern fence but smashed through the eastern wall and come all the way into the inner courtyard—the throne and the court now stood like a candle in the wind.
Deng Shichang knew that even if they sealed Bohai Bay without incident, neither the Far East Squadron that remained nor the Korean army attacking Shenyang would simply withdraw. He wanted to cough blood from the sheer frustration of it.
"Damn it. Damn it...!"
If they had just held on a little longer!
The arsenal and shipyard at Mawei, into which more than a decade of investment had been poured, had been annihilated by those godforsaken French guns before they could even bloom—the joint handiwork of an arrogant imperial house and an incompetent court. Deng Shichang's rage boiled over as he glared at the horizon.
Deng Shichang and the other Self-Strengthening cadets had volunteered for the long road of study in a distant land, determined to fulfill their duty of maritime defense. But years later, what had awaited them was a burned fleet and shattered tributary states. How many of them had simply gone limp and sat down at the sight?
When Deng Shichang himself realized that all that remained was a remnant of the Nanyang Fleet, on the verge of scuttling itself after its defeat, and the strength of a Beiyang Naval Command that had still been preparing to found its fleet—no one knew how deep his disappointment had run.
The Qing dynasty was doomed. Thoroughly, irretrievably doomed.
Whether thanks to Deng Shichang's tearful prayers or to the Zhili Governor-General's headquarters on the Shandong Peninsula getting all its observation posts in order at once, Admiral Amédée Courbet and the French Far East Squadron—who had seized complete control of the Yellow Sea coast and were ranging the South China Sea, conducting commerce raiding, reducing batteries, and raiding harbors—received word that the Beiyang Navy had begun its operation to seal Bohai Bay a full day late.
"Have you ever seen such a pack of rats?"
Courbet, commander of the Far East Squadron and concurrently commander of the expeditionary force, crumpled the telegram with a look of sheer insolence. A single emotion ruled his mind. Those bastards who had been too frightened even to poke their noses out of harbor—and now they dared?
After studying the sea charts several times and roughly reckoning the hours, Courbet slowly summoned his chief of staff and first navigator and issued his orders.
"Mobilize the fleet standing by at Lushun. Immediately."
"The entire fleet, sir?"
"That's right. The Beiyang Fleet will have to come out of harbor anyway to cover the ships laying mines, won't they? Let's sweep the lot of them this time and end the war."
There was no hesitation in the admiral's words, and the two senior officers, hearing the order, agreed without a shred of doubt.
The only embers of resistance left to the Qing were the Beiyang Army, whose strength had been preserved by not being committed to battle, and the fleet of the Beiyang Naval Command, whose founding ceremony had been set for next year. Smash or annihilate those, and Beijing and the Zhili Governor-General's headquarters would have no military resource left capable of inflicting meaningful damage on the French expedition.
"Given the Chinks' level of training and experience, laying enough mines to fully seal Bohai Bay will take at least three to four days. Even if we commit only part of the squadrons waiting at Lushun and Yingkou, we can crack them across the back of the head at dawn tomorrow, while they're exhausted."
"Will they still be operating at night, sir?"
"Night will only make them happier—they'll work with their guard down. They're probably under blackout already, throwing mines like madmen so they can finish and crawl back into harbor."
Just as Admiral Courbet predicted, the mine-laying fleet under Deng Shichang was even now hurling mines into the sea through the night with every last ounce of strength, desperate to seal Bohai Bay before the French fleet caught on.
"We split the fleet in two. Here to here—and we detach a squadron at Jemulpo to check the Beiyang Fleet when it falls back on Weihaiwei."
Dozens of red lines and blue lines began to dance across the operations map, drawn by the admiral's finger. Charts and formulas were sacrificed to the calculation of longitude, and before long a meaningful equation emerged to tell the old admiral—who had been waiting for the hour of the hunt—how much time the Qing navy had left.
The instinct of an admiral tempered by decades of expeditions and battle spoke. This was the big one.
"We commit the decoy fleet provided by the United States. Tell them that as of this hour they are to conduct armed reconnaissance and bombardment along the southeastern coast. We'll spread false intelligence that our forces are being committed to the reduction of Yunnan and Guangdong."
"In that case, the enemy might expand their operational area from Bohai Bay all the way to the Liaodong Peninsula?"
"Exactly. And we set a bigger trap."
Having the false flags creep slowly north from the Indochina Peninsula, the admiral at the same time drew the main fleet at anchor in Jemulpo and repositioned it at Lushun, the gateway to the Liaodong Peninsula, as he spoke.
"And the main fleet cuts precisely between the Qing navy committed to the mine work and the Beiyang Fleet."
"Then we can force them to choose. Abandon the mine-laying fleet entirely—or accept a proper gunnery action, take losses to the Beiyang Fleet, and withdraw in good order."
"That's right."
Courbet waved off the admiration of his chief of staff and officers, then pressed his palm to the operations map and spoke with a grave look.
"But we must not grow careless. Even a rat will bite a cat when it's cornered."
That was the most elementary of principles among the European powers, where naval tradition still lived. It was the Qing navy that was wanting—a fat infant and nothing more—not that he himself was so very brilliant.
So one must not be arrogant, must not grow careless, when going into battle. A lion hunts a rabbit with its full strength. Was that not why Korea, a newborn republic of small stature, had nonetheless produced clear results and won victory after victory against a Qing of vastly greater weight?
A true Frenchman had to study precisely that.
Having planned the operation and assembled the commanders and staff of every combatant ship in one place, Admiral Courbet gave the order.
"As of this hour, we hunt the old dragon."
It was a golden chance to spread, even to this far corner of the East, the fearsome renown of La Royale—a name every bit as notorious as those Englishmen they called the pirates of the sea.