Every Sinew Strained (2)
The labors of the Bureau of Ordnance, already twisting itself inside out for the coming war, were far from finished.
"Well. It would be a shame if that were all we had."
The soldiers had said they wanted a grenade a man could carry easily, and they had handed over a roughly sketched design. That was how it started. Yi Yong-ik smiled and told them to expect something new—something beyond the primitive grenade launcher they had already seen.
"This way, if you would, Your Excellency."
"Please—allow me to take that."
Lee Ha-young received the Martini-Henry Grenade Launcher from my hands. He and Yi Yong-ik sealed the pieces back into their crate, then led me toward a warehouse where wooden boxes—somewhat smaller than the last—stood stacked along the walls in dense, orderly ranks.
The moment I stepped inside, I gasped.
How in the world had they packed it this tight?
"Whoa..."
Shelves lined both walls, and between them the crates were piled layer upon layer. Lee Ha-young lifted the nearest box, the lid coming off with a clatter, and held it out to me.
"You said you wanted a bomb a man could toss lightly from the hand, so we agonized over it. No matter how we studied the design, there was hardly any description of the material, or of the vessel that would hold the explosive."
"We couldn't have the thing going off in a soldier's grip, so we debated whether to finish the surface in iron or make it from light bamboo. It was a genuine dilemma."
"In the end we thought—what if we molded the thing from clay, which you can find anywhere in the Eight Provinces? So we recruited potters and had them try."
"And would you believe it? When we tested them, they were the real article!"
Inside the box they offered sat a small ceramic pot, its surface glossy and smooth, with a white tail attached.
"This is the grenade Your Excellency named some time ago."
"Oh!"
I knew it at a glance. A murmur escaped me before I could stop myself, my voice trembling. The thing these two had wrung from their brains was a ghost from my own memory—something I had thought long buried.
"Type 4 ceramic grenade..."
"Hmm? Your Excellency?"
"Ah—nothing. You've made them better than I expected."
I waved off their puzzled looks, claiming I had misspoken, and lifted one of the ceramic grenades from the box, sinking into thought.
So people's minds really did run in the same grooves, no matter the era.
The weight is manageable even for a child like me. The material is just clay? But it's awfully small. The blast might be weaker than I'd hoped...
Lethality could be fixed by packing more fragments and powder inside, or by making the pot itself larger—but a soldier had to be able to grip it and throw it cleanly, so you couldn't just scale it up at will.
"Hrm."
The Japanese Type 4 ceramic grenade. Commonly, the Type 4 grenade. It was the anti-personnel grenade Imperial Japan, starving for resources as the Pacific War ground toward its end, had issued to frontline troops with a grimace—the so-called dirt-poor grenade.
I shifted my gaze from the ceramic grenade in my hand to the crates filling the warehouse, and I thought.
...This might actually be a perfect fit for our circumstances right now.
The body was a clay pot. They hadn't even had the resources for a proper fuze, so it was detonated with a five-second length of slow match—a primitive grenade. Which meant that if you could just supply enough explosive to fill them, the method was simple enough for mass production.
If every frontline soldier carried just two and threw them, it could swing a battle.
Or we could select men who specialized in grenades and explosives and create an entirely new posting—grenadiers.
"Your Excellency—if I may."
Yi Yong-ik hesitated at my side, breaking into my thoughts.
"The generals who watched the demonstration... their reaction has been rather lukewarm."
"What? What do you mean?"
"Well, that is..."
My eyes went wide at the news that the generals had been tepid about a ceramic grenade that could revolutionize infantry firepower. Lee Ha-young laughed awkwardly and explained.
"They said the attempt was sound. Easy to carry, and once combat is joined it can inflict unexpected casualties, letting our men seize the advantage. They rated that part well enough."
"Did they? Then what's the problem?"
"The—the way you hold the grenade and—"
Lee Ha-young struck a pose, holding the obviously light ceramic grenade and pretending to put fire to the fuse-tail with his other hand.
"They say the ignition method is hopelessly impractical. With hundreds of muzzles spitting fire in front of you, what lunatic is going to calmly light a fuse and hurl the thing with all his strength?"
"In a fortress, or fighting from cover inside a village, it would clearly favor the defender. But in a pitched battle, or on open ground, a man has to stand up straight and expose his whole torso to throw it. They say the risk is too great."
"And with violent movement the pot could shatter. If a bullet hits it, it might cook off."
"Ah."
One by one they relayed the hazards the generals had pointed out, then looked at each other with sheepish smiles, as if only now realizing they had made a mistake. And I had to nod along. These officers had built up a certain immunity to modern combat through the two Western Disturbances, the Unyo incident, the Imo Mutiny, and the rest. Their advice carried weight.
Never mind some marksman actually hitting that little pot—you could turn into a sponge just trying to throw the thing.
They were right. The ignition method on this pauper's grenade was a perfect invitation to get your head blown off by an enemy sniper.
"Hrm. What to do."
So I started thinking fast. Abandoning a slapdash handmade grenade that needed no special tools and could already transform infantry firepower was one thing. But we had manufactured these things in bulk. We had to find a way to use them.
Think. What grenades do I know...
The familiar American pineapple grenade, the Soviet RGD, the British Mills bomb—they flickered through my mind.
Then—
"Ah!"
There it was. There it was. A new kind of grenade that would let us recycle these ceramic ones instead of throwing them away.
"We'll do it like this!"
"Eh?"
"Your Excellency?"
I hurriedly sketched the new form that had flashed into my head, then issued orders to the two men waiting in silence.
"Anyone have matches? Ah, that's a stupid question—anyone who smokes will have them. Go get a lot of matches right now. Someone else, bring me a thick hollowed-out bamboo stalk. One that fits the hole in that ceramic grenade exactly!"
The two of them stared at each other like idiots for a beat, then bolted out and came straight back with everything I had described.
"Here you are."
"Oh, this will do nicely."
Matches—the country had been open for well over a decade. Everyone knew what they were. As I recalled, the first matches recorded in Joseon's history had been brought back from Japan in 1880 by Yi Dong-in, the self-styled enlightenment monk, and shown to the public. Large-scale distribution hadn't begun until 1885, when the German firm Meyer & Co. opened in Jemulpo and started supplying them.
Still, people have been buying them here and there on their own, so it's fine.
Bamboo you could find anywhere. No need to belabor that.
I took the materials they had brought, pulled a ceramic grenade from the crate, and began explaining as I drew out the fuse hanging from its mouth.
"First, you snap the heads off the matches. Like this—wait, huh...?"
The moment I opened the matchbox to start the demonstration, I hit a wall.
Why were the matches white...?
Ah, right! White phosphorus!
That's right. White phosphorus. I had forgotten. Until 1888, before The Times of London launched its campaign for safer matches, the most common match was white phosphorus. Which meant we were still a full decade away from greedy, unethical manufacturers being forced to ban the stuff.
"...This is more dangerous than it looks. Let's use something else."
I had forgotten. White phosphorus was too sensitive. I set it far aside and opened another box, hunting for matches made with red phosphorus—and was startled again.
"What is this now..."
The heads were red, but they were clearly different. They had the reddish heads of safety matches, yet the smell was nothing like what I remembered, and they were stuck in a gummy mass against the inside of the box. I was thoroughly thrown by the unfamiliar appearance. It was Lee Ha-young, who had been watching in silence, who rescued me.
"Those are called pitch-sulfur lights—pine resin dried and mixed with sulfur, then painted onto a twig."
"Ah, is that so?"
"The smell is dreadful, and they don't catch as readily as the matches from the West or Japan, but they're easy to make at home, so common folk have always used them."
There was such a thing? I hadn't known.
In the end I described the safety matches I was looking for, and before long they handed me a box that had come from Germany. Just as I had been hunting for. Red phosphorus, thankfully.
"Now, as I said—snap off all these red heads. Then completely hollow out a bamboo stalk that fits the pot's mouth exactly. Like this."
I had luckily found a piece that matched the vessel perfectly. I dumped the snapped-off match heads in—leaving the fuse I had already pulled running out both ends.
"Then spread paste evenly on the inside. Mix it into the fuse and the red phosphorus powder as well."
I found some paste to bind the fuse and the red phosphorus, then fitted the bamboo stick to the ceramic grenade as carefully as I could.
"That's it."
"Ohh."
"It's like a mace."
Lee Ha-young and Yi Yong-ik took turns marveling at what I had finished.
That's right. What I had made was the ancestor of the stick grenade the Third Reich had loved so well in the Second World War.
"Once you seal the mouth and the stick firmly, you're done. The thing to watch is this: if this fuse is pulled even a little, it will explode."
They were astonished by the simple mechanism.
"It can't be this simple!"
"So if you yank this fuse, it lights itself?"
"That's right."
"Oh!"
I took the two admiring men out to the broad lot behind the Bureau of Ordnance, handed over the thing I had just made, and gave the order.
"Grip the base, then throw it lying down or crouched."
"I beg your pardon?"
"It'll be far easier to throw than the ceramic grenade you made first."
"Y-yes, Your Excellency."
Half-convinced, Yi Yong-ik bent low, pulled the fuse, and hurled it at the target with everything he had—then turned back to me, startled.
"I-it really is ea—"
BANG!
The blast swallowed the rest of Yi Yong-ik's sentence, but for a stick grenade slapped together on the spot, the effect was tremendous. A considerable plume of dirt erupted, and the explosion was powerful enough to shake the entire Bureau of Ordnance. In that moment the two of them grasped the enormous change that had come from nothing more than attaching a stick to the crude ceramic grenade, and they talked over each other, clicking their tongues in wonder.
"You don't have to carry a separate wick, light it, and then throw—it's so convenient!"
"And the motion is so much faster!"
"It feels like it flies farther, too!"
"If you've got any cover at all, you don't even have to expose yourself to enemy fire to throw a grenade!"
"Haha! Now we just need to demonstrate it for the generals!"
And so the ceramic grenades that had been headed for the scrap heap found a new place in the world. Match heads and bamboo were nothing we couldn't get our hands on, given our present circumstances.
And the stick grenade was not the end of it.
There was one more thing.
"...It's a Bamboo Mortar, sir."
Our commotion had drawn craftsmen boiling out from every corner of the Bureau the instant the explosion went off. Beyond grenades and grenade launchers, they had been designing new weapons of their own in preparation for the coming war with the Qing—and they took this as their chance to present them to me, the Tongnyeong.
I accepted the heavy thing the craftsman offered and let out a breath of admiration.
This one... this one was no joke.
"Oh."
I asked about the bundle of bamboo the craftsman called a Bamboo Mortar.
"How do you use this?"
"A chongtong is a chongtong, Your Excellency. Aim the muzzle packed with iron shot at your target, plant it in the ground, brace it against your knee, and fire. That's all there is to it."
"Oh—like this?"
I took the stance as advised, and I recognized the thing at once.
This is a mortar, isn't it?
No wonder the shape had looked familiar. Five bamboo tubes bound together, a thin iron plate backing the rear tubes—the Bamboo Mortar held a mouthful of iron shot or small stones in each muzzle.
Canister shot.
In other words, put fire to the back of this thing and anyone standing in front of it would be turned to pulp in an instant. I pictured Qing soldiers collapsing in every direction as so much bloody mince, and I shuddered at the horror of it.
"An excellent weapon! Easy to make, cheap materials! Good—give the craftsmen who made this a reward, and proceed as planned!"
"Thank you, Tongnyeong, Your Excellency!"
I readily authorized production of the Bamboo Mortar on the spot. After that I sat through demonstrations of any number of new weapons, but there was little else worth salvaging.
Because—
"This one is armor that stops bullets!"
"Get that man out of here."
"Y-Your Excellency! Your Excellency!"
Most of them were trying to show me something no better than the cotton-and-silk armor old Yi Ha-eung used to tout as bulletproof—layers of hemp and silk stuffed together and billed as proof against shot.
But there were craftsmen who had made something I hadn't expected.
"It's heavy, I'll grant you—but this boy will stop a bullet for certain."
I asked the swaggering old master, my voice dubious.
"Can a man even run in that...?"
"Of course he can! We've worn it ourselves—jumped in place, rolled, the lot!"
When I still looked unconvinced, the craftsman put on the solid iron suit himself, determined to show me. But I had my reasons for doubting. What he had brought was a Cast Iron Cuirass—the kind German stormtroopers had worn in the First World War.
"See here, Your Excellency—you can roll, you can drop, you can get back up—"
But the craftsman's swagger wasn't empty. He moved with surprising agility in the cuirass, just as he had boasted.
"Ohh."
"Hah—hah. Well?"
"Good. It needs work, but it's decent enough. This one's approved as well!"
"Wooo! Yes!"
It inspired far more confidence than the cotton armor they had dragged out earlier, though the weight was clearly going to wear a man down. Still, if we armed even a small detachment with these, it might deal a serious shock to Qing troops of weak nerve and poorer will. I ordered production of the Cast Iron Cuirass as well.
After all, Joseon was overflowing with obsolete cannon and matchlocks we weren't using.