The Grand Decisive Battle That Opens a New Era (5)
The news struck them like a thunderclap. A Korean host six full regiments strong was driving hard against the front, and every unit sent to stop them had been thrown into headlong retreat. Nie Shicheng and Nie Zhichao lurched up from their seats with a cry.
"What!? Six regiments!?"
"Good God...!"
If the chief of staff and the commander himself reacted like that, the officers drawn from the Liaodong garrison army and the Beiyang Army staff were no calmer.
"They're insane!"
A staff officer who had seized the courier for a casualty report pressed a hand to his forehead and bellowed.
Six regiments meant at least two infantry divisions — thirty thousand men. And they had flung the whole of that host, from the first light of morning, onto a little rise that barely came up to a man's thigh, all for a single engagement? Now?
"What in God's name are these people...?"
The Korean army's audacity and sheer appetite for a fight had so far exceeded every estimate that the entire headquarters sat with their mouths hanging open. Nie Shicheng, staring blankly at the tactical map, muttered under his breath.
"How many... how many troops did we send out?"
"Perhaps three regiments..."
"Damn it."
At Nie Zhichao's answer the strength went out of Nie Shicheng all at once, and he sank where he stood like a puppet with its strings cut.
Three regiments, generously counted, came to fifteen thousand. Strip away the noncombatants that every formation carried and the number would have fallen short of twelve thousand.
"This is dangerous."
Worse still, a portion of the Beiyang Army had already been detached and dispatched to replace the non-commissioned officers and commanders of the garrison units still being reorganized, so the true leakage of fighting strength was greater still. However thoroughly the Beiyang Army had been drilled in the Western fashion, however modern its weapons, there was no denying that it had been overmatched in the most fundamental matter of weight.
Valiant struggle and being hopelessly outnumbered were just word games. Both of them meant you had lost.
From the beginning the Qing formation, crowded against the far edge of Shenyang and half-encircled though it was, had still possessed enough mass — a host a hundred and ten thousand strong — to fight several genuine pitched battles against the Koreans. But successive defeats, political pressure from the Forbidden City, and the taut, unspoken contest of nerves with the Zhili General's Office had driven them to the brink of their psychological endurance. And it was into that exhausted weighing of choices — between preserving their strength and staking everything on a battle that might decide the war — that the Korean army had forced the Liaodong defense force to pick one or the other.
Fight properly here and die together. Or keep running to the very end, and die anyway.
Nie Zhichao was the first to recognize the dueling ground they had been herded onto. He turned and spoke to Nie Shicheng.
"We must commit the reserves immediately and plug the line."
"I know that."
"Then why do you hesitate? His Excellency Zhang will already be maneuvering in secret to seize the high ground on the right, and our forward troops resolved themselves to sacrifice from the moment this operation was drawn up, all to silence those batteries. If the command wavers here, our Great Qing will lose both objectives!"
Nie Zhichao's forefinger tracked Zhang Zhidong's detached column across the map — the force racing to seize the flanking heights — and then stopped. Nie Shicheng covered his face with a dry palm.
"It's useless."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The failure is mine. I did not foresee that they would want the matter settled here and now. We must change our thinking as well."
The staff and Nie Zhichao stared at him, baffled by what sounded like so much empty vapor. Nie Shicheng, who had already seen the shape of what was coming, went on.
"Even if we throw the reserves waiting in the rear into the line this instant, we cannot save the detached force already isolated at the front. The distance between the foremost line and Zhang's column has grown far too great. All we can do now is hope that His Excellency Zhang takes the high ground, knocks out the French batteries, and returns in one piece. The problem is the method the Koreans are using. It is the tactic the great powers so love — the central breakthrough. The unexpected scale of their numbers played its part, no doubt, but the enemy will certainly have committed a great many of their elite in the opening clash, and they will already have seized the momentum."
The commander's account of how the initiative had already been torn from their hands ran as clear and swift as a mountain stream.
He had been in the rear for this campaign, but from the Indochina Peninsula through Zhejiang and on to Taiwan, Nie Shicheng had, young as he was, walked a remarkable variety of battlefields. He possessed at least a working knowledge of how the armies of the Western powers drew an opponent into a contest of firepower, and of how they built a strategy. He knew perfectly well that the Korean army before him was imitating something very like that method — meaning to smash his center and, in the end, to end the war.
The effort he made, drawing on that experience, to cut a path out of the present disaster was almost painful to watch.
In those years the Liaodong garrison army was corruption raised to an art and a breeding ground of clannish patronage. The Manchu Eight Banners and the Manchurian Green Standard Army were worse. They were commanding ghosts. The names stood on the pay-rolls, but the men themselves had long since died and were wandering shades of the afterlife.
The mounted bandits? Those creatures had not even come to pay their respects to the new Defense Commissioner, Zhang Zhidong, or to Nie Shicheng. Whatever treasure they had sucked from the Forbidden City over the years, the moment the Korean army marched north they had fled all the way to Inner Mongolia.
By contrast the Beiyang Army — the most elite force of the age, and by the standards of the time a remarkably clean one — was desperately short of men. Budget was part of it, but the deeper cause was the struggle for power between Beijing and Zhili. While Prince Gong had still sat in the Zongli Yamen there had been no great obstacle to the Beiyang Army's growth. Once Empress Dowager Cixi purged him, that growth had faltered hard.
"The enemy commander is almost certainly hoping that we will feed our reserves in piecemeal behind the troops already breaking at the front."
"And with the ranks already in confusion..."
One of the staff murmured in agreement. Nie Shicheng nodded.
"Even if we commit the reserves, the entire center is coming apart. Mix them with the men already in flight and confusion will pile upon confusion. We will barely be able to throw back their vanguard as it is. If their reinforcements then add their weight, it becomes a vicious circle, repeating itself..."
He rested his chin in his hand and stared at the map for a long time. At last he lifted his head. Something like resolve flickered through his eyes like a comet, and was gone.
"Pull the reserves back behind the main camp. The troops already in flight are to fall all the way to the rear and re-form there as well."
"General?"
There was no answer left in the present course.
The Korean army, having already seized the winning momentum, would keep shoving troops into the center to widen their success. The Qing forces, inferior in overall numbers and in morale, had already permitted a central breakthrough. If they tried to stop the next wave of attacks by feeding men in piecemeal, they would only grind their strength away until they were exhausted enough to raise the white flag of their own accord.
Knowing that circle for what it was, to be dragged along it any further was true annihilation.
Before the bewildered staff — men still trying to digest an order to withdraw both the reserves and the fleeing forward troops to a point behind the main camp itself — Nie Shicheng straightened his posture and drew his spine taut.
Yellow epaulettes and the gold cords bestowed by the imperial house ran down over his shoulders. At the fingertips resting against his hip, a sword finished in brass pointed cleanly toward the floor.
He was wearing the Beiyang Army's original dress uniform. Not the traditional armor of Qing generals, but a blue uniform copied wholesale from the Western powers — a uniform that proclaimed a new age.
His resolve set, Nie Shicheng opened his mouth to Nie Zhichao and the rest of the staff.
"...We use the main camp as bait to break the Korean vanguard. We ourselves will be the bait. Once we have taken the edge off their offensive, our reorganized units will launch a general counterattack."
"..."
At first they could not even grasp what he meant. Then they understood his will, and the color drained from their faces.
This was nothing less than an order to die.
"..."
But not a man among them could raise an objection to the supreme commander's decision. Nie Zhichao himself, the chief of staff who ought to have talked him down, had evidently reached the same conclusion. He moved to Nie Shicheng's side as if to share it, and his eyes pressed the other commanders and officers to fall in line.
Had Zhang Zhidong — a man of another faction entirely — been present, some other counsel might have been offered. He was at that moment isolated on the foremost line, and no one knew whether he still lived.
In the end the Liaodong headquarters resolved, with one heart, to throw themselves out as bait and pray the counterstroke would succeed.
But neither Nie Shicheng nor Nie Zhichao, nor a single man in that staff, had yet imagined what would come of it.
"And that... is the result?"
"That is correct, Your Excellency."
It was nearly evening, the sun almost gone, before I received word that the fighting had ended. The place I was guided to was a rather prominent somewhere.
To be precise, it was a small hill presumed to have been the Qing headquarters. Human corpses had been heaped into a mountain there, until in the end you could no longer tell whether you were looking at a cluster of tents or one enormous communal grave.
"..."
Arms and legs tangled together jutted from the mounds of earth at intervals. Torn Yellow Dragon banners and Beiyang Army flags, half-burned, had been planted in the pile. Or rather, it would have been more accurate to say they were still standing only because they had been wedged upright among the bodies.
The dead had been gathered toward the center. Desperately, as if trying to shield someone.
I managed to recall that neither the Sino-Japanese War nor the Sino-French War had produced a last stand quite this grandiose. I wet my lips with my tongue and spoke.
"...It must have been fierce."
"The staff's conclusion is that the entire Qing command resolved to die with honor and sacrifice themselves in an attempt to reverse the line."
Yang Heon-su, who had directed today's battle from the foremost positions, offered the explanation, and I nodded quietly.
"Our soldiers' sacrifices must have been considerable as well, then."
I was thinking that even a dying empire still had loyalists like these, and asking, in the same breath, whether my boys had been badly hurt. Yang Heon-su shrugged with an expression I had not expected at all.
The answer he gave me was not the one I had braced for.
"No."
"As they say, even a cornered rat will bite a cat— wait, what?"
No?
I stared at him, unable to believe it. Yang Heon-su answered again, his face perfectly even.
"The casualties among our men are not that severe."
"...No, how can the losses possibly be light? If a Qing general offered himself up as a sacrifice so that their army could re-form, the scale of the counterattack should have been far heavier than we anticipated. And we have been fighting since morning."
I put the question back to him with my eyes wide. Yang Heon-su pointed aside, to where the Hobunwi were cutting across the open field at a hard gallop, hooves striking tak, tak, and said,
"The Qing commander appears to have trusted his subordinates. But the terror of our army carved into the Qing soldiers seems to have exceeded all imagination. Not only did the reorganization fail — the greater part of the troops who moved to counterattack scattered, quite literally, the moment the Hobunwi launched their mounted charge."
"With that handful of cavalry...?"
Did that even make sense? A cavalry force that did not even number six hundred, playing the decisive part on a field where regiment after regiment and division after division were trading tens of thousands of rounds?
"When an army that has already permitted a central breakthrough throws its own headquarters out as bait and falls back in a blind rush, it is not impossible that the appearance of enemy cavalry on top of all that would convince them the end had come. It was most likely a tragedy built of misunderstanding piled on misunderstanding — but the forward troops already in flight simply kept fleeing, and the reserves sent in to stop them received contradictory orders from two directions, fell into confusion, and, I suspect, turned on one another."
In short, the Qing commander's will to fight to the last had never reached his soldiers.
The only formations that had answered the counterattack, swung their lines around in a great conversion, and dealt our army any real damage as we came pouring madly into the center were the elite regiments of the Beiyang Army. Even they, however, had found an effective riposte all but impossible, hampered as they were by the Liaodong garrison troops and conscript militia already streaming back in disorder across a broken front.
And then came the finishing blow. In the midst of that chaos the Sword Drawing Corps launched a close-quarters charge of terrifying momentum; the Armored Infantry smashed into the line hurling grenades and dynamite in every direction; and last of all the Hobunwi — sheathed from head to foot in iron plate, leveling cavalry lances nearly thirteen feet long — drove home their charge. Whatever fighting spirit remained was snuffed out completely.
It had been a magnificent collaboration: the Youth Vanguard, nicknamed the black wall that never broke because they were armored in revolutionary doctrine; the Sword Drawing Corps under Seo Jae-pil; the Armored Infantry, who trusted their plate so stupidly they flung lit dynamite into the enemy ranks; and the Hobunwi, who still carried the last romance of the age.
I had lost whatever I had meant to say and was scuffing idly at the dirt with the toe of my boot. I turned my gaze and asked, quietly,
"Ah — well. Then the enemy commander...?"
"Ah. He surrendered just before the end. We have taken him into custody unharmed."
"So he died in battle after all. In that case we should accord him every honor due an enemy comman— wait, why is that man still alive?!"
"Ah. He watched his own men abandon him and flee in real time, and in his despair he tried to take his own life. Fortunately, the pride of our army, Second Lieutenant Hong Beom-do of the Armored Infantry, was the first to charge in at the head of the vanguard, and so we were able to preserve the enemy commander's person."
And that was how we won.