Battle of Bohai Bay (3)
Just as Admiral Courbet had anticipated, the Qing mine-laying squadron under Deng Shichang had been thrown into the Bohai Bay interdiction with a desperate, round-the-clock fury—but the French Far East Squadron moved faster still.
"Quite the spectacle."
Less than thirty-six hours after expeditionary command issued its orders, some thirty imposing steam gunboats had sortied from Yingkou, Lushun, and Jemulpo and begun sealing the mouth of Bohai Bay. Their procession was a magnificent sight.
I was hanging on the rail, taking in the panorama of the fleet that carpeted the Yellow Sea, when a familiar English struck the back of my head.
"Admiral Courbet, unlike other French admirals, is a captain of considerable standing and genuine understanding. In the earlier Battle of Jinhae and the Battle of Seokpo Bay, he granted his subordinate captains broad autonomy in speed and daring, and so induced them to make their names. The Battle of Seokpo Bay, in particular, was commanded by his staff officers from first gun to last."
"You know a great deal about it."
I turned at a lecture too substantial to brush aside, and a middle-aged man with striking gray hair and blue eyes bowed his head and went on. A deep scar across his philtrum twitched as his lips moved.
"To my embarrassment, though I am now merely the captain of a small cargo vessel, in my younger days I had the experience of running blockade runners for the Confederacy."
"Blockade runners..."
"I was chief engineer of the Georgiana—one of the three historic runners."
The speaker was Captain Howard, an American hired on contract by the Song merchants, who had bought up a steamer the Republic sold into private hands when it abolished the State Steamship Bureau. He was also captain of the cargo ship I was presently aboard—the Huihwa.
The Huihwa, it should be added, had since been requisitioned by the government and placed under a fresh contract as a transport.
More to the point, I turned back to him with a look of genuine surprise at this old history I had known nothing of when he was hired.
Blockade runner! In the American South that name ranked, Robert E. Lee aside, as a legend on a level with the most revered figures of the cause. Among Southerners, at least.
During the Civil War, the Confederacy—whose industry lagged so badly behind the North—had sounded out the nations of Europe for arms. The ones who answered were the pirates of all mankind: the British. Driven from the New World, they moved eagerly to recoup their losses through the American war, and they met the Confederacy's approach with open arms.
The Federal government caught wind of it and sent a fleet to seal the coastline in short order. The South found itself cut off not only from the munitions the war required, but from the cotton exports by which the government had meant to fund it.
And the men who, to keep their families and neighbors from starving, boarded ships already sentenced to death and ringed by enemies on every side—those men were the Confederacy's blockade-runner crews.
"..."
The small scars and the great ones that still seemed to cover half his face, for all the weathering of the years—I saw them now in a different light, and I offered him no small measure of comfort.
"You did well to come through it alive."
"I didn't enlist intending to die. I was a newlywed, besides."
Captain Howard merely shrugged as if it were nothing. I was floored.
A newlywed—and a war. How cruel the times could be. And the place they worked him half to death was a blockade runner that might go down with the ship at any hour? If it had been me, I would have deserted long since. The Confederate Navy, unlike the Union's two-year enlistment, was so short of men that service was for life. Once you went in, you did not come out.
But watching his profile as he gazed, with a distant look of old memory, at the French squadron trailing long banners of black smoke into Bohai Bay, I quietly shook my head.
Madman or innocent—I couldn't tell.
Guessing that his hardships must have been anything but ordinary, I let a moment pass before I spoke again.
"Those can't have been pleasant memories. I heard the Union blockade was savage."
Savage did not begin to cover it.
They treated runner crews as pirates and used everything from summary execution to the firing squad and the noose, twisting themselves into knots to break the sailors' will to fight.
The other side of that coin, of course, was that the years when the Union blockade stood at its fiercest were also the years when the Confederate Navy was at its strongest. They lost in the end, all the same.
I was fairly certain I had muttered something small and reflexive about those fucking Union bastards, but the captain squared his shoulders and answered me.
"It wasn't entirely like that. Passing back and forth between life and death, I made a great many memories with my comrades that still mean something—and I proved to God that this life was not mine alone."
He gave an embarrassed laugh and absently set a cigar between his teeth, then, sensing my look, quietly took it out again. Captain Howard murmured with a somewhat melancholy face.
"There is something a little depressing in it, though."
"Hm?"
"I am merely a cargo-ship captain, hired in haste on company orders—but I cannot help regretting that this vessel has ended up belonging to a war it had no business getting mixed up in."
He opened the locket he wore on a chain about his neck and showed me a family photograph. Three daughters—a rich man in girls, then.
Looking at the captain's sullen face among the brightly smiling children, I let out a small laugh.
"Is that so."
"Yes. Though I am a man who fled his homeland, I had hoped that here in this peaceful Far East, war would remain for my family nothing more than a strange tale of some foreign country, happening far away. But a world without war does not exist, after all."
"..."
His last words left me briefly without an answer.
He had it right. A world without war does not exist on this earth.
A near example: if the captain lived a little longer, he might well watch his children and grandchildren swept, directly or otherwise, into the greatest hellscape in history—the First World War.
Come to think of it, I didn't die a clean death either.
My last memory was an orange pillar of light punching through Seoul. Faced with Captain Howard's pessimistic murmuring, as if he had already seen through the world, I merely hung on the rail and nodded.
Just then a scout ship of our Republic Navy cut across the starboard side of the Far East Squadron, wildly working hand signals and flag codes. Captain Howard read them in an instant and rendered the meaning for me.
"Unidentified warships, seven vessels, bearing west thirty-eight degrees. Proceeding slowly in line-abreast at a baseline of two knots. Maintaining distance."
"The Beiyang Fleet's mine-laying squadron."
Two knots on the open ocean. The only ones who would hold a speed that slow were those bastards.
Captain Howard nodded as if in agreement, and the French warships ringing our transport, the Huihwa, all sounded their whistles at once.
WHEEEEEEEE!!!
As the frantic steam-whistle tore the air, sails bloomed wide in the hands of sailors rushing this way and that, and the funnels that had been coughing only now and then began to vomit enormous clouds of smoke.
When that whistle—impossible to get used to, loud enough to split the eardrums—at last died away, dark gun barrels began to poke out through the ports along both broadsides of the French escorts.
In no time the French fleet had become a porcupine, its threatening spines honed sharp—not toward us, but outward, shielding us.
As I watched in a mixture of wonder, Captain Howard explained.
"Thirteen escorts including the flagship, seventy-seven guns in all. The small ones are a hundred and sixty millimeters; the big ones, a hundred and ninety. Looks as though they've been refitted to carry heavier pieces. The French seem to design their bows better than I expected. Hmm. At this rate the Qing fleet won't even be able to stand a gunnery duel before they have to fall back."
"You can tell all that at a glance."
"If I couldn't, I'd have been at the bottom of Wilmington Bay long ago. Naval warfare is simple, you see—stay clear of anything bigger than you and that's the whole of it. You go in, you get out."
"What? Haha!"
"I'm quite serious. The actual fighting probably won't even be interesting. Honestly, if I were commanding the Beiyang Fleet, I'd turn tail first thing. The French naval strength presently in the Far East is considerably more than the occasion requires."
In other words, he was good at running and only ever picked on the weak. I burst out laughing at Captain Howard's verdict.
And looked at another way, he was right: the Qing court had tried to work a clever trick against an opponent far outside its weight, and was about to be thoroughly wrecked for it.
As we clung to the rail and talked with genuine amusement, thick reports of gunfire had already begun, now and then, to hammer the cloud-heavy sky.
Meanwhile, just as the mine-laying work was reaching its final stage, Deng Shichang—uneasy after receiving dubious intelligence that two or three unidentified small vessels of unknown origin were prowling suspiciously near the operational area—had been about to issue a hasty withdrawal when the result before his eyes confirmed that his instincts had not been wrong.
Hiss—BOOM!
"Reload!"
"Reload!"
"It doesn't matter if you miss—keep firing! Make them feel, even a little, that we are a threat! Chief engineers of every ship, full engine speed! Do not slacken! If they take us from astern, we all die!"
The price of being caught in the ambush was truly steep. The dispatch vessel Hoyong, already split in two by the enemy's surprise bombardment and sent to the bottom, was one such cost; the Paseong, sinking with its enormous paddle wheel thrust into the air, was scorching the surface of the water.
"Grrrk!"
As if they had been possessed, the French fleet had at some point quietly fallen upon their rear, already devouring two of Deng Shichang's wooden gunboats, and now, still hungry, had begun fiercely pursuing what remained of his force as it bunched together and tried to break away eastward. Equally terrified, the mine-laying squadron was making a desperate run for it.
He was watching from the bridge with a twisted face as his men on deck fired wildly, trying to keep the enemy from simply closing, when screams from the chief engineer and the stokers burst through the thin metal pipes—the speaking tubes that jutted from every corner of the wheelhouse.
"We're already at maximum engine! If we shove in any more coal the boilers may blow first!"
"If the boilers blow we die, and if their shells hit us we die! Better to evaporate alive—shove more in!"
"That's—even harder—"
"Damn it."
The chief engineer's voice was buried under the ensuing mechanical noise and screaming and the unrelenting gunfire from the deck. Deng Shichang spat a curse and hurriedly studied the chart.
He had to cover the shortest line at full power toward where the Beiyang Fleet—the force that was supposed to be protecting them—lay, and run with everything he had.
He praised his past self for having ordered the boilers filled with coal the moment the intelligence came in.
Without that foresight, the two warships already sunk would have been well on their way to becoming all nine.
That the Hoyong and the Paseong had been hit first was purely a matter of luck.
"Good thing I had the boilers stoked in advance. If we hadn't even gotten them running by now..."
No need to think further: total destruction, or capture. If one remembered that the greater part of the officers and sailors presently assigned to the mine-laying squadron were men of Fujian and Nanyang, whose fleets had already been annihilated fighting the French Navy, their will to fight was nothing to lean on. That they had not fallen into panic and were still silently carrying out Deng Shichang's orders was simply a struggle toward survival. That was all.
"Loaded!"
"Don't wait—fire!"
"Fire!"
BOOM!
KA-BOOM!
"Aaaagh!"
"God damn it."
A near-miss from the enemy's shells threw up a wave that left Deng Shichang looking like a drowned rat. He slammed the rail hard, his face contorted.
"So a hundred and sixty millimeters isn't even close?!"
The disparity in firepower was far too unfair. The hundred-and-sixty-millimeter naval guns produced at the Fuzhou Arsenal were excellent in their own right—but the only ones currently landing hits or near-misses were the French cruisers mounting hundred-and-ninety-millimeter pieces.
The flagship Deng Shichang himself rode, the Fujing, was classified as a cruiser, but it still had to fight with specifications vastly inferior to a cruiser of the regular French naval establishment.
As shells fell ever closer about the fleet, a cold sweat ran down Deng Shichang's nape at the instinct that the enemy would soon be able to plant a truly threatening round in his side.
Then—
CRACK! KA-KRACK!
A pillar of scorching fire erupted, bright enough to blind every eye.
By wretched luck, a shell had punched into the magazine of the three-hundred-ton wooden gunboat Zhihao. The ship seemed, in a trick of the eye, to lift slightly into the air—and then shattered to pieces before them.
The sailors on deck, witnessing that horrific spectacle, were swept by a small panic and began to shout. Even seen from a distance, it seemed impossible that any crewman of the Zhihao had survived.
"The Zhihao!"
"Gunboat Zhihao wrecked! Wrecked!"
"Admiral, sir!"
"..."
The dizzying smell of powder stung their noses.
But Deng Shichang was not so weak-spirited a man as to fall in with cheap emotion, panic alongside his sailors, and make a fool of himself.
Having watched the losses climb from the previous two gunboats to three, his orders grew even harsher.
"Throw the mines on deck and every scrap of unnecessary cargo into the sea at once! Reduce the ship's weight to the utmost! If it comes to it, tear out the guns!"
The Chinese struggle for survival, driven to the very threshold of hell, was only now beginning to bloom.