The First Sino-Korean War (3)
At Uiju Fortress, a temporary command post had been established to check the Qing Empire's ambitions and to realize the Republic's long-cherished dream of a Northern Expedition.
There, the generals and staff officers of the 3rd Regiment of Pyeongan Province and the 6th Regiment of Hamgyeong Province—which had joined to support them—sat with their heads together over the maps.
Yun Ung-ryeol, commander of the 6th Regiment, had been staring in silence at the operational map that compiled every reconnaissance report and scrap of intelligence the 3rd Regiment had gathered. At last he spoke.
"So you're telling me that in the four days since we launched the operation, the Qing haven't mounted a single counterattack worth the name?"
"That's right."
"Good God..."
At Han Seong-geun's reply, Yun Ung-ryeol's mouth fell open in sheer disbelief. The bewilderment that surged across his blue uniform was, at a glance, written equally on the faces of every other officer in the tent.
A word here on the uniforms. The two regiments assembled at Uiju Fortress were not dressed alike. The 3rd Regiment wore black coats with gray lining, cut much like those of the Royal Guard Front Camp; the 6th Regiment that Yun Ung-ryeol had brought with him wore a deep blue reminiscent of the Union Army in the American Civil War. The 3rd Regiment of Pyeongan Province had been reorganized around the Pyongyang garrison troops and the Hobunwi, while the 6th Regiment of Hamgyeong Province had been built around the Bukcheong Corps that Yun Ung-ryeol himself had founded, together with the mountain riflemen of the surrounding hills. The new government, as it happened, had been able to buy surplus uniforms and tailoring dirt cheap from American merchantmen that had flooded into the port of Busan under the recent treaty—kit that had become nearly worthless on the American mainland after the war. At a glance, the two regiments gathered at the Uiju command post looked for all the world like brothers from a single Civil War household assembled in one place, and an American might not have found the sight merely comical.
In any event, from the opening pages of Operation Blue, drawn up for the Northern Expedition, the enemy had offered no reaction worth mentioning—only a steady, unbroken withdrawal. Han Seong-geun, commander of the 3rd Regiment, could not tell whether he was walking into a trap or watching a genuine rout. He had halted the advance and confined himself to probing attacks dressed up as reconnaissance in force. And who, in any age, would not have suspected a trap, when the enemy fell back with such stubborn consistency?
"There have been seven small-scale clashes in all, scattered along the entire length of the Yalu. Every one of them happened when we were crossing and ran into a Qing encampment bivouacked on the far bank."
Han Seong-geun had arranged the red pieces representing Republican forces on either side of the blue river marked Yalu. He went on with the situation as it stood.
"And contrary to the active counterattacks the Ministry expected, not only the elite Hobunwi but our infantry battalions—which had gone into scattered action all along the front to make the cavalry's crossing easier—successfully seized the far bank, every last one of them. I never imagined it would be this easy."
"Come now, even so. Are their commanders complete idiots? What on earth were they thinking, letting us cross this easily?"
Yun Ung-ryeol rejected the reality in front of him almost as soon as he heard it.
"That's what I've been saying. They didn't even destroy the pontoon bridges in the thick of the fighting. If they'd laid an ambush on the far bank, or held a reserve for a counterattack, that would be one thing. According to the frontline officers leading the subordinate units, after a few exchanges of fire the Qing would somehow fall into chaos among themselves and collapse..."
Han Seong-geun pointed past him, toward the jumble of odds and ends strewn outside the tent.
"We found something of an explanation out there. A kind of deduction, I'll grant you—one that leans on imagination."
"A deduction?"
"Our infantrymen, after the smaller fights, stripped the enemy of their arms and uniforms and brought them back as trophies. Every last piece of it was trouble."
"Trouble?"
"I've never seen such a godforsaken mess. Some of them are nothing but a barrel with the stock gone missing. Cartridges with no powder in the casings. Pieces with the trigger and firing pin broken clean off. An old matchlock or a rusty spear would have been more trustworthy."
Yun Ung-ryeol could only stare.
"We've been taken in by the Qing's paper-tiger prestige! Back when we went over as students on the Yeongseonsa mission, the rifles those Qing bastards swaggered about—the output of the Tianjin Arsenal and the Munitions Manufacturing Bureau—were nothing but this kind of phantom!"
From the tangled heap of loot, Han Seong-geun had managed to fish out a rifle whose firing pin and trigger had sheared off entirely, and another whose barrel had cracked from within and burst of its own accord. He held them up and shouted.
"You call this a proper Western rifle? I would never put a thing like this in the hands of men I think of as my own sons. A gun that blows up in your face when you fire it—what is that, some novel method of suicide?"
The paper cartridges were no better. Those that had a bullet had little or no powder behind it, and would have lost all force in flight and dropped somewhere short of the target. Those without a bullet were blank rounds, pure and simple.
"What kind of corruption produces—"
Only then did Yun Ung-ryeol seem to have his eyes opened. He drew a long, ragged breath, and understood that among the garbage piled outside the tent, the rusty spears and swords were the respectable items. So this was what the Qing's Self-Strengthening Movement had amounted to: the rifles they had lined their own pockets producing were trash, every one of them. Even Empress Dowager Cixi, shut away in the Forbidden City, had surely known her country was rotten through—but she could not have known it was rotten quite like this.
"Our officers thought it strange that whenever a fight started, the Qing soldiers would start screaming among themselves and then simply run. Who would have guessed there was a reason like this behind it?"
"...Well, I'll be damned."
The two regiment commanders, Han Seong-geun and Yun Ung-ryeol, fell silent as if by agreement. Reporting this to the Wolf's Lair in Hanseong was one thing. There was still no guarantee that every Qing force stationed across Liaodong and Manchuria was in the same condition.
Which left the question: what became of the operation now?
Yun Ung-ryeol sat thinking for a long while. Then he opened his eyes and spoke, slowly.
"As planned, the heart of the operation was this: your 3rd Regiment raises hell around Liaodong, and my 6th keeps the enemy occupied so you can cross without trouble. After that we fall back successfully all the way to Pyongyang, with the enraged enemy hanging on our tail. But they've taken fright and pulled everything back. The lure has already failed."
"Mm."
"What do you make of it?"
Yun Ung-ryeol's judgment was that the spine of the plan had already come apart. Han Seong-geun propped his chin on his hand and groaned over it, then answered.
"The Han Chinese Green Standard Army and the old-style Eight Banners are one thing. But the Beiyang Army and the Huai Army will be different, won't they? In arms, and in quality."
"Different, certainly. Better equipped—and more than that, they're the foundation of the Beiyang Minister's power, so someone will have taken real trouble over them for once."
"Then let's do this."
He drew Yun Ung-ryeol back toward the inner table and began sliding the red pieces north across the jumble of maps, laying out a plan that was, to put it mildly, provocative.
"I beg your pardon...?"
Yun Ung-ryeol and the officers around him could only gape at the audacity of Han Seong-geun's decision. In twenty-first-century terms, he had planted his baton squarely on the domain of the Shengjing General—where present-day Liaoning Province and the city of Dandong now stand. His face was utterly serious.
"After the Self-Strengthening Movement, the Qing reorganized the Three Eastern Provinces—that is, Liaodong and Manchuria—under the General system. It was a natural reaction to Russia's southward push. They meant to check that advance, and to reassert ownership over virgin land that Han Chinese and our own Korean people had been freely opening up. In other words, they turned every major border city into a military garrison."
There was no time to be startled by the sudden history lesson. Han Seong-geun's mouth kept moving.
"Mukden—the Manchus call it Fengtian now, as if it were some holy site, but we needn't dwell on that. The point is this: of the land we call Liaodong, only a sliver has been opened into country a man can live on. The rest is swamp and mire. So if we strike Shengjing, which serves as the enemy's last rear base, and destroy it utterly, the culminating point of any offensive aimed at the Republic's homeland is finished then and there."
"Ah."
Go for their throat, and guard our own at the same time. Yun Ung-ryeol nodded, struck by both the insight and the strategic eye behind it.
One decisive problem remained.
"I follow you that far. But striking Shengjing means a siege—and neither my regiment nor yours has an artillery train."
"If you have no teeth, you use your gums. There are any number of other ways to handle it."
Han Seong-geun shrugged, reached to the waist of a sentry standing behind him, and unhooked something familiar. It was what they called a Tujuk Bomb—a kind of grenade with a ceramic head and a bamboo body.
"It flies farther than you'd think. Even a toss right over your own head will do it."
"Oh."
Yun Ung-ryeol remembered then: as a border unit, they had received early issues of the Ordnance Bureau's new weapons—handmade grenades, percussion bombs, and the rest—items that had enjoyed the President's keen personal interest. He inclined his head, readily enough, at Han Seong-geun's confidence.
"Do we have reconnaissance on the height of Shengjing's walls and the defensive works?"
"As it happens, we have a report from Major Yi, who leads the Hobunwi."
"That's a long way to go for a reconnaissance."
"They are elite cavalry, after all."
Yun Ung-ryeol took the brief report Yi Gyu-tae had sent, ran his eye down it, and at last blinked in assent. If the intelligence was accurate, smashing the walls themselves might be hard—but bombs that could easily crush a gate of wood and hinges were another matter entirely.
"The odds are better than I thought."
Opinion on the siege plan had been divided at first. But starting with Yun Ung-ryeol, the mood turned steadily in favor, and once he had the room with him, Han Seong-geun brought the council to a close.
"First, we send an express dispatch to the Wolf's Lair with our decision, and both regiments prepare to cross. In three days the other two regiments already posted in Pyeongan Province and northern Gyeonggi can fill the gap we leave."
"Swift and decisive, then. Smash Liaodong to pieces before the Qing realize the state they're in and start answering in earnest."
"Exactly."
An unexpected stroke of fortune, and the hollowness the enemy had so readily exposed, had given the Republic its opening. It was time, for a little while, to reverse the roles of attacker and defender.
Meanwhile, at Tianjin in Zhili, where Li Hongzhang, the Beiyang Minister, had established his general headquarters and was directing the French front, a peculiar report landed on his desk and threw the entire staff into confusion.
"What in heaven's name is this? A Korean army in Taiwan, all of a sudden?"
Taiwan, at present, was a quieted front: General Sun Kaihua was still holding his own against the French, and French blunders after the failed Keelung expedition had driven them north and taken the heat out of the fighting. But with the defeat of the Nanyang Fleet, and the subsequent rout of the Fujian Fleet, command of the southern seas had passed entirely to the Far East Squadron. Only now did headquarters receive word of unidentified Korean troops who had landed on the island.
Strange uniforms, unfamiliar flags, a red banner at their head—advancing south down the island side by side with French soldiers, who were the enemy. The officers, faces blank with shock, all began talking at once.
"S-surely this is some kind of mistake...?"
"How did the bastards even get ashore?"
It was not only the Beiyang Army officers who attended Li Hongzhang at close hand. The admirals of the three fleets—Beiyang, Fujian, and Nanyang—raised in 1884 under the doctrine of prioritizing maritime defense after Japan's invasion of Taiwan, were present as well, and they looked equally lost.
"Silence, all of you!"
Li Hongzhang alone, who held command over every man in the room, had already pieced the situation together with that keen insight and sharp instinct of his. The Koreans had given up scheming from behind the curtain. They had decided to enter the great-power contest themselves, with their national fate on the line.
Vietnam was already lost. France was eyeing Guangxi and Yunnan at once, and the situation there was ugly enough. Empress Dowager Cixi's political backstabbing from within had worn him to the bone. And now Korea had come around behind him and struck him across the back of the head. His mind went briefly white.
This is actually dangerous.
It was no exaggeration. To Li Hongzhang, who still counted himself a loyal servant of the Qing, the present crisis was more dreadful than the Taiping Rebellion. If Taiwan were lost as it stood, and the French Far East Squadron established smooth communications with Korea, the Great Qing would be threatened from north and south at the same time.
"Nngh."
And there was worse—though the report had not yet climbed as far as the Beiyang Minister himself. Zhang Zhidong and Zhang Peilun, hawks of the Qingliu Party, had swallowed Empress Dowager Cixi's secret order to put insolent Korea in its place. Li Hongzhang had warned her early that even he—who had kidnapped and imprisoned the Daewongun and earned every scrap of his infamy in Korea—had no leisure to meddle in Korean affairs while a war with France was eating him alive.
Cixi had taken the warning as an insult and a challenge. That was the seed of the trouble. She had reached out to Zhang Zhidong, Zhang Peilun, and the Qingliu Party, who were politically cornered under the blame for the outbreak of war on the Indochina Peninsula. Crush the Korean rebel clique that was throwing All Under Heaven into disorder, she told them, and help the royal house reclaim its power. The rest, as you know.
The problem was this: the Qingliu Party, with no plan worthy of the name, had hastily assembled Eight Banners and Han Chinese units from Liaodong, Manchuria, and Shanxi, and marched them beyond Liaoxi. Korea, taking the move as a threat, had gone off like a poked beehive. And of that fact, Li Hongzhang was still unaware.
The incompetents who still occupied generals' chairs with empty heads, unlike the Beiyang Army, had no inkling of any of this. They simply flapped at him.
"I beg your pardon?!"
"W-what do you mean by that, Your Excellency?"
"You're saying those arrogant Korean bastards have crawled into bed with the foreign devils?!"
"Ah, forget it. What's the use of talking."
Thanks to children like these, Li Hongzhang felt once more, and all too clearly, that he was bearing the fate of the Great Qing on his own back. The lines in his face deepened another degree.