The Battle of Shenyang (4)
"—that, we believe, is the scheme the Qing commanders and their staff have cooked up. At least, that is the assessment of our advisory corps."
"I see. That would make sense."
I nodded along as Lieutenant Colonel Ninsted, serving as chief of staff, finished his explanation, and murmured to myself as I studied the tactical map hung on a chalkboard that had been dragged in like something from a schoolroom.
"But I never imagined they would attempt a river crossing this honest. This is nothing short of—"
Even granting that we were putting on a performance to draw out the enemy's intentions and arrange the board for our own victory, the thought that I had been standing, only moments ago, in the largest field hospital in the north made the screams and tears of our wounded still drifting across the river feel unbearably heavy.
I was about to raise my voice in concern when Brigadier General Dye, seated beside me, spoke up.
"A slaughterhouse, yes. Our advisory corps offers its regrets as well, Tongryeong. But from that vast pool of blood, Your Excellency and the people of the Republic will seize a glorious victory — and stand, at last, fully among the ranks of civilized nations, as the very horizon of a new age."
He drew himself up as if personally guaranteeing the outcome, his gaze earnest throughout, urging me to give him the chance to prove that faith.
And it was not only the two American officers. The other military advisors dispatched by Admiral Courbet, commander of the French expeditionary force, were likewise rushing about to persuade me and the Republic's generals.
"First, we would like to make clear how we came to take the lead on an operation this aggressive."
"How you came to it?"
"Yes, Your Excellency."
"Go on."
I tipped my head in permission, and Lieutenant Colonel Ninsted stepped forward again. He laid his pointer across the tactical map and began.
"At present, our supporting artillery battalions are not dispersing their fire to cover an amphibious landing along the riverbank over a continuous twenty-four-hour bombardment. Instead, we are concentrating the batteries to exploit the breadth of the field — drawing the enemy's guns first, then suppressing them in a counter-battery duel."
"I am well aware of that."
"Then this will go quickly. The soldiers Your Excellency is committing in the first wave are the foothold for that purpose."
Dozens of red arrows, each no thicker than a forefinger, came rushing in as if to encircle the banks of the Hun River. Against them, the Qing defensive line was a thin blue thread, so fragile it looked ready to tear at the slightest pressure.
Ninsted shoved several of those arrows still deeper inland, punching them clean through the blue thread, and went on.
"It is beyond what we anticipated, but the Qing army's will to fight is weaker than we thought. We did not expect the enemy to be driven back this easily as far as mid-river, and we did not expect them to have no answer whatsoever to the naval guns of our coastal gunboats."
There had been, for instance, the incident in which a single Republic platoon had driven a company-strength Qing outpost off a dike with a bayonet charge. Along a front that had stretched the length of Shenyang itself, our defenders — ammunition gone, even their grenades spent after a string of small engagements — had barely held against a swelling Qing assault, then thrown themselves into a desperate bayonet charge and shoved the enemy back down the hill, holding the dike.
The trouble was that those Qing soldiers were not the same men who had attacked the dike before. They were a freshly committed reserve, fighting their first action, and their fighting spirit had been so wretchedly low that they had not even managed an assault. They had shuffled almost to the crest of the hill, then broken before our men's half-mad charge, thrown down their weapons, and fled.
The result was that the United States — fighting its first proper war in East Asia, if only by proxy, and unlike the French advisory corps that had actually stood in the line beside us — had come away with the distinct impression that the Qing were not even worth calling incompetent.
Ninsted's excess of confidence sat uneasily with me, but I kept my face in order and answered.
"So what you are saying is that the Qing garrison's counterattacks have fallen far short of the strength we expected."
"That is correct, Your Excellency."
"The enemy is so inept that we, in turn, have simply rammed our heads straight in."
Whether they were truly inept or only playing at it, I could not say — but setting aside the Beiyang Army, the quality of their troops was nothing to speak of.
Even our own Republic conscript divisions, in the short span of the advance to Liaodong, had grown reasonably familiar with musketry, fire-net construction, and route marching, thanks to Brigadier General Dye, our training specialist. Dye himself had boasted that they would not, at least, shatter their ranks and bolt for the rear at the mere sound of cannon or rifle fire. And it was also true that the young men of Hamgyong and Pyeongan Province were a hard-boned lot, stubborn enough to have absorbed even Dye's rather pigheaded drills reasonably well.
"And our forces must also keep in mind, Your Excellency, the filthy, complicated brawl that will unfold in the streets of Shenyang."
"I have heard it from the staff until my ears are callused. The report that refugees and urban chaos may have deformed the city's streets and roads until they resemble sunken trenches."
"That is correct, Your Excellency."
This was the briefing I had been hearing without pause since the moment I arrived in Lushun. The military advisory corps, of course — but also the handful of generals in the army actually worth anything, Han Seong-geun and Seo Jae-pil among them, men who had personally fought the sieges of Shengjing and Fenghuangcheng — had all been tearing their hair out over the prospect of entering a Qing city, with all its tangled, filthy streets.
There had been a suggestion, naturally, that we simply burn those cities to the ground and force the enemy to abandon their strongpoints. The rear, however, had sent back a tart reminder that once Liaodong became our territory, every last scrap of that property would be government property, and would we kindly stop talking like lunatics. I had been able to set that particular worry aside.
After watching Ninsted work the chalkboard for some time, I raised my hand and put a question.
"But could this not be a trap meant to draw us in? What if they are allowing us to cross the river precisely so they can encircle and annihilate us on the far bank?"
It was the sort of unease anyone who was not a complete fool would feel.
I did not know who commanded the enemy, but if Li Hongzhang, the Minister of Beiyang, possessed even a shred of common sense, he would not have sent an incompetent to the field for political reasons — not when the dynasty itself stood on the brink of ruin.
At my question, Ninsted and Brigadier General Dye answered in the same breath.
"Which is precisely why the American and French engineer corps collaborated to build something so remarkable, is it not?"
"A masterpiece, really."
At Dye's gesture, an operations officer seated nearby handed me a thin sheet of paper.
It was a blueprint.
"Length, five meters. Width, two meters…"
"Assembly at each connecting joint is simple, and the weight is so light that three grown men can carry a section without strain."
"Material supply is ample as well. We will have every piece finished before the operation is complete."
"A thoroughly encouraging state of affairs."
The masterpiece they were talking about was a temporary pontoon bridge, built by hollowing out bamboo procured in Pyongyang. The entire construction — a total span of twenty-seven hundred meters, some three hundred and eighty prefabricated components — carried, at the very bottom, the signature of Seo Jae-pil, Vice Minister of War, and the hand of Eo Yun-jung, Minister of Finance.
Calling it a prototype, Brigadier General Dye had even brought a few of the bamboo planks themselves and given me a demonstration. He stroked his beard as he spoke.
"The enemy will never imagine that we intend to attempt pontoon construction simultaneously at seventeen points along the entire face of the Hun River. They have concentrated what little artillery they possess on the central sector, where we appear to be massing, and are just barely holding the line — but the crossing site headquarters has selected is the downstream flank, on the right."
Seventeen points. A great many. Enough to make the other side's guts twist.
"You mean the place that cannot link up with Fushun."
"That is correct, Your Excellency. Your 1st Guards Division and the Northern Expedition's 5th Division — the ones reported to have force-marched there in secret — are in that very spot."
He traced their movements across the map as he explained. Unlike the 7th Division, which now held Fushun, Woo Beom-seon's elite 1st Division and the 5th had boarded transports at Lushun and sailed to the opposite side entirely.
"This is what comes of not sitting idle through the past two weeks of armistice talks."
"There was never any need to fight honestly from the start."
In truth, even I — the highest-ranking man in the room — had been saying outright for some time that the negotiations were a deception, so the observation was hardly surprising. This was a war in which people died, and a war that only improved if the other fellow died in my place. There was no call to fight it honestly. War was not an elementary-school field day. Who needed to talk about fair play?
"The Qing commander will know, by instinct if nothing else, that Fushun is the watershed. But the balance has already tipped a great deal. We can throw all one hundred and seventy thousand of our troops in Liaodong onto a single field. The Qing, with a garrison of barely one hundred and ten thousand scraped together from wherever they could find them, will tear a hole in the entire front the moment they shift those men even once in the wrong direction."
"And if they abandon the river defense and fall back, so much the better. The center, successfully linked with the flying columns striking from both flanks — Fushun and Yingkou — could quite literally sit on the enemy with all the weight of its heavy backside and smother them in a single motion."
Hearing that, I looked again at the whole of Liaodong as a single picture, Shenyang at its heart, smothered in pale blue lines and red arrows. Indeed. Even before the armistice talks had collapsed into catastrophe, the enemy had been so busy staring at the little tree called Shenyang that they had not even thought to consider the forest.
Our army and the advisory corps had been grinding their teeth for a long time now, determined to annihilate them completely and break the Qing army's will to fight once and for all.
"Even if that proves impossible — if a force of some forty thousand were suddenly to smash into the west from the southern tributaries of Shenyang, the ones linked not to Fushun but to Yingkou — the enemy headquarters could hardly help but fall into chaos. They would take a punch they never imagined and not even have time to collect their wits."
"And that is the place that serves as Qing's lifeline, supplied by land alone."
"So we grab them by the collar and slam them into the floor."
Admiring the generals' genuinely excellent strategy and judgment, I pictured Shenyang surrounded on every side, and clapped my hands once, shortly.
"They're in a bad way. A very bad way."
Open a crossing on the Hun River, and if they took our offensive for a frontal assault and committed their reserves to strengthen the banks, they would be fooled. If they decided the crossing was a feint, swung those reserves toward Fushun, and watched the east, the west would break open. And if some shaman's fit of second sight told them a surprise would come from the west and they reinforced there anyway — well, then there were the gunboats, pounding away at their leisure on the Hun. It was no different from burying a man up to the neck with his hands and feet bound, then lining up to smash watermelons on his head.