A Complete Shambles (2)
Tension. Silence. Terror. Dread.
In a hush so absolute that a single dropped needle would have rung like a bell, a sharp, ringing voice carried along the ramparts.
"Fingers off those triggers, all of you! Panic-fire now and we are finished!"
A Manchu officer thrust his sword high above his head and bellowed himself hoarse, shouting again and again at the men who clung for their lives to the cover of the battlements and the stone stairs behind them.
A coordinated volley—a proper field of fire—was the single most important thing in a fight like this. Firepower. That was the word. The age when one man could hold off ten thousand and end a battle in a blaze of glory had died the moment the firearm was born. And in this moment, for the officer charged with Jiuliancheng's south gate and for every man under him, there was only one thing that might keep them alive.
"Do not be afraid! The enemy are flesh and blood like any other—they fall to arrows and bullets the same as we do! Do not be afraid!"
The words were meant to put heart into the garrison. But the eyes of the Manchu officer who roared them were bloodshot and raw, his lips cracked dry, his face as ashen as a sick old man's. He dragged in air like a patient already dying, then shouted again, his raised arm shaking violently from shoulder to wrist.
"We have walls to hide behind, and water and grain enough! A great army will come down from Shengjing and sweep these vermin away—we need only hold for three days!"
He poured courage into his soldiers with the promise of relief. The tip of the blade in his hand, however, trembled without mercy. From the very first breath he had been lying to his own men without a flicker of shame. He had warned every soul driven up onto those walls not to be afraid, and perhaps he was only refusing to see that no one on the rampart feared the enemy massed below more than he did. Whether Shengjing even knew of Korea's invasion, whether the city lord had sent word at all—a mere gate commander had no way of knowing either thing. He was the warden of the south gate. That was all.
Then, far off, the enemy's crimson banners lifted a sense of ill omen into the air, and a familiar drumbeat began to roll across the world as the line came on.
Boom. Boom. Boom!
A sentry saw it and cried the news in a voice that was nearly a scream.
"They're coming!"
"Steady, all of you! Present arms! Prepare to fire!"
A red tide was rolling in. Beneath the plaque that bore the name Jiuliancheng, crimson banners packed the windows of the little watchtower spanning gate and gatehouse and streamed in the wind, a sight so striking that the Qing officer swallowed without meaning to.
A mountain of corpses. A sea of blood. Was that drumbeat they were pounding, those foreign war-shouts—were they already playing a funeral dirge for the men on this wall?
He swallowed hard. The Korean soldiers came on at a measured pace until they were drawn up in ranks hard against the foot of the wall, and he was just opening his mouth to give the order to fire when, in a single heartbeat, a flash of light blotted out their sight.
"Th-they're sh-shooting...!"
The Koreans had been a step quicker in deed as well as in nerve, bold enough to seize the first blow.
Crack—crack-crack-crack!!!
Someone screamed at the sight of the flames winking along the base of the wall and the smoke boiling up after them.
"Aaaagh!!!"
The defenders, bewildered, lifted their heads to see what had happened—and the slaughter came on again.
Crack! Crack-crack!
"Guh!"
"Ah—!"
"Kh—!"
With a crackle like beans thrown into a scorching pan, Qing soldiers clutched at some ruined part of themselves and pitched forward or back. One man's skull burst into pulp. Another lost half his cheek, stared stupidly at the comrade beside him, and folded slowly to the stones. A soldier groped at the hole a bullet had punched through helmet and forehead. Another leapt in place at the searing kiss of a round across his throat, and a second shot finished him where he stood. Even huddled behind the merlons, the men on the wall saw friends, comrades, and officers cut down by the murderous fire boiling up from below, and a deep shudder ran through them. However stout the battlements, they could not cover a whole body—and they had just watched, with their own eyes, how easily a man might leave this world to an enemy bullet.
And then—
That was the first blow that landed on the stirring rampart, and it was the last. No one ever learned who had cried it. But the raw, honest terror in that voice drove a spike of overwhelming fear through Jiuliancheng's garrison, and it hung the scales of a battle that had barely begun without so much as a word from either commander. In other words, the fight was over at the instant it started.
Then, as if to drive the wedge home, a strange Korean shout rose from the foot of the wall—half command, half war-cry—and the acrid stink of powder surged up with it. It was a rolling volley of terrible force, meant less to kill than to crush the will to fight. Men who dared not even lift their heads sat where they were, faces crumpled, and the line began to break apart.
"R-run! Everyone run!"
"Aaaagh!"
Crack-crack-crack!
A Korean officer's order fell, and the flash and the roar slammed against their ears; the reek of powder rasped the roofs of their mouths and set their hearts hammering. Nearly three volleys in succession hammered the wall and the merlons, and the brick and stone, evenly pointed with lime, began to bleed dust and grit as the wounds opened in them.
"Aaaagh!"
"Khuh—!"
The firing had not even ceased, and Qing soldiers who missed their instant to flee down the stone stairs paid for that slip with their lives, coughing blood as they went down. Here and there men looked at the comrades crumpled at their feet and wet themselves where they stood. A few of the defenders, seized as if by a fit, did not even aim—they simply flung their arms up over their heads and blasted into the empty air.
"Nngh!"
"Die!"
Crack, crack-crack!
"Gah—!"
There were, to be fair, men on the wall who turned a reckless impulse into action—courage, if one wished to be kind; folly, if one wished to be honest. Those men were the first to have their skulls blown apart, or to leave this world still frowning in dull surprise at their own shattered faces.
"Got one!"
Even so, that scrap of nerve did put a small crease in the battle. A few Korean soldiers, climbing the wall or raising axes to smash the gate, were seen to take those shots and fall. The Qing officer, poking only his head past the merlon, clapped his hands and shouted down at his men.
"Yes—shoot! Return fire!"
It did not shift the scales in any way that mattered, and it did not turn the result. Now and then an enemy went down to their fire, or was dragged back by his own comrades—but they were a handful. A hundred muzzles had spat flame. Seven of the enemy had fallen.
"Good God!"
One Qing officer, watching until he could not bear it, roared at his men with a face twisted in sheer frustration. You fools. What a waste of powder.
"Aim, damn you! Please—please!"
The gate commander pressed his hands together and all but wept at the men beneath him. It did no good. A shot has to be aimed to hit. These men would not even put their heads out, let alone take a sight—they just lifted their arms and yanked the trigger, whether the ball flew into the sky or into a man. Terrified past any thought of a proper return, the garrison jammed their faces into the merlons and would not move, or else stared only at the stone stairs, their one way off the wall, and loosed the odd round with no earthly reason it should ever find a Korean.
The Korean soldiers, by contrast, might have had hearts of steel. They sent their bullets over with faces set hard the whole time, holding their ground in silence, their eyes narrowed in something very near contempt.
"Damn it all...!"
And as both sides kept firing, the artificial fog of powder-smoke thickened and the field of vision shrank by the second. The defender's advantage—the one clean gift of fighting from a wall—began to bleed away. On a battlefield, sight is everything.
A moment later the Korean line, quick to read that change, made a great movement. Like an ebb tide, the blue ranks and the crimson banners that had hung over them like a cloud fell back in a single breath.
Crack-crack-crack!
Then, bursting from the front in their dozens, came Korean soldiers the garrison had never seen—big men in black tunics, rifles slung across their backs—running straight at the wall.
"What in hell is that!?"
Hidden in the acrid stink and the dirty gray smoke, the black-clad Koreans came on toward the gate with a heavy tread and a dull, pounding sound. There was no fear at all in those footsteps. Fear. Yes.
"You—look at that!"
A sentry and a few sharp-eyed defenders caught it and pointed, startled. Did those mad Koreans truly not know their lives were worth keeping?
"Wh-what...!?"
"What are those men?"
"They're running...!"
Out of a line of enemy soldiers who had now simply planted themselves where they stood, tearing cartridges from belt and bandolier with their teeth and pouring on independent fire, these men came striding as if they meant to show the world in their own bodies what nerve actually was. In both hands they carried bundles the size of a laying hen. Which meant—
"B-bombs!"
Someone understood what filled those satchels, clapped both hands to his cheeks, and screamed, and the terror went through the wall like a contagion.
"Bombs!?"
"Everyone take cover! They're going for the walls!"
"Run!!!"
The soldiers who had, by some miracle, kept putting their heads out past the merlons and lived to do it screamed with one voice. The Qing gate commander and his officers were no exception. After all—where, exactly, had the men in command been standing?
"Their target is the gate!"
The gentlemen of rank understood it, went white, and began to shove their own soldiers aside as they ran for the stone stairs.
"O-out of the way!"
"Everyone move! No—take cover!"
"Get the hell out of my way!"
They had held—or had bullied their men into holding—until they saw the enemy's insane notion of walking up with bombs and smashing the gate themselves. Then the officers and commanders, seized with terror, began to scramble backward, and Jiuliancheng's garrison came apart in an instant, its courage in free fall.
The Korean soldiers who had gone forward slipped back into their ranks, well clear of the gate again.
And then, at last, a single enormous concussion rolled over the field.
BOOM!
A little while after that last great roar, crimson banners and the Taegeukgi rose together over the gate tower of Jiuliancheng and streamed in the wind.
"It's over."
Colonel Han Seong-geun of the 3rd Regiment, together with his staff and officers, swallowed hard as they watched the south gate tower of Jiuliancheng shatter under the blast and slump in on itself, taking in that ruin with their own eyes. The bomb His Excellency the Tongnyeong had warned them of again and again—dynamite, had he called it?
"The firepower exceeds anything I imagined, Regiment Commander."
"That it does, Captain."
The infantry battalion commander who had directed the assault on the gate was talking at him with joy written all over his face. Han Seong-geun managed a wry smile, though his thoughts were anything but simple.
Which means the old forts on our own soil, and the walls of Ganghwa, will be just as useless.
With a bomb like this dynamite the Westerners had made, the ancient ramparts and strongholds they had kept in service by patching the masonry and stuffing the cracks as a temporary expedient would no longer be worth a thing. Lost in that thought, he watched the black cloud billow and climb into the sky—and at the edge of his gaze the men who had made this day's work came striding back toward the main standard, their bearing as proud as a victory parade, while the soldiers of the 3rd Regiment tore the air with raw cheering.
Long live the Revolution! Long live the Three Principles of the People!
Unlike the common soldiers, every one of them wore a helmet of iron. Where the regular infantry stood in blue, these men wore black tunics and gray trousers. Beneath the black cloth, a solid breastplate jutted with the dull sheen of cast iron. A rifle rode each man's back; at either hip and over the seat hung three small satchels, and those satchels were packed with the terrible explosive they had just heard named dynamite. For whatever might come, they carried as well an iron mace the thickness of a forearm and a short, wicked point of a sword. Han Seong-geun studied those bodies, built as if they had been made for a battlefield, with something almost tender in his eyes, and murmured under his breath.
"Grenadiers..."
In the months of the army's reorganization, under the Tongnyeong's own eye, a fighting unit had been raised and placed under the direct command of every elite regiment. They were Korea's armored grenadiers—known commonly as armored infantry.