Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 20
On 7 February, Chinese guns on the blockhouse spur opened fire, and at such short range they quickly perfected their aim; bombardment now became the norm, forcing the garrison into their trenches for all movement around the perimeter. On the 8th, Sergeant Bobillot spotted earth piling up behind a trench facing the north-west wall: the Yunnan engineers were starting to tunnel a mine, to set off explosives under the walls. Bobillot responded by starting a counter-mine, with his few sappers instructing rotating gangs of legionnaires.36 From now on Chinese mines from round the whole western quadrant seemed to breed almost nightly, and Bobillot was hard-pressed to keep track of them. On 10 February, Major Dominé noted that the shelling included air-burst shrapnel and some kind of incendiary.
On the night of 12/13 February infantry massed in trenches about 40 yards outside the north-west wall, and in the pre-dawn darkness the first mine was blown; it cracked the wall and blew a hole through under the parapet, but it did not make a breach. The Chinese attacked anyway, trying to drive the légionnaires from the parapets and scramble over; but when they gave up after about 45 minutes they left the ditch piled with their dead. As soon as the morning fog cleared the relentless bombardment and sniping resumed. The following night another mine went off, this time blowing down 15 yards of wall at the west corner. The Chinese rushed up the rubble ramp into the breach only to find that it was funnel-shaped, so that Captain Moulinay’s légionnaires were able to hold the narrow inner break – though at a cost of five killed and six wounded – and the breach was later sealed off with a hasty trench and palisading. Corporal Beulin was promoted sergeant on the spot for leading four volunteers to bring in a comrade blown outside the wall (although he proved to be dead already). The next night there were no assaults; Lieutenant Goulet, Sergeant-Major de Berghes and 30 of their Tonkinese Skirmishers celebrated the Tet new year with a successful sortie from Little Gibraltar, giving the besiegers good reason themselves to be nervous of the dark.37
DURING THE FOURTH WEEK the siege ground on without assaults, although each night the duty officers had to keep their platoons alert for any alarm (and each night young Ensign Sènés slipped ashore from the gunboat and up the water trench to the south-east gate, to get the latest news and orders from Dominé). The stench of the unburied dead outside the walls was nauseating; to break the defenders’ rest and work on their nerves the Yunnan soldiers constantly blew trumpets and the Black Flags their moaning conch-shells, and every night men crept close to Little Gibraltar and shouted enticements and threats to the Tonkinese Skirmishers. By day the légionnaires took their turns to work on the defences and in counter-mines, or sniped their tormenters when a clear shot made it worth the cost of a cartridge. The Chinese never stopped digging; the French officers obsessively swept the surroundings with their binoculars, trying to predict the next threats, but the saps were now protected and masked by palisades.
Bullets whined off the stone parapets whenever a man showed himself, and all movement outside the communication trenches was made at a crouching run; their own digging had turned the greasy yellow earth of the enclosure into a squalid building-site, and the brick pagodas were battered and holed by shells. By 1885 the légionnaires’ curtained képi had been replaced with a conspicuous white cork helmet, but these were darkened with drab cloth covers; many men had acquired loose, dark-coloured Vietnamese cao ao in preference to their issue white linen blouses, and after weeks in trenches their red or white trousers were too filthy with earth to draw fire. While the days were sometimes warm, the nights here in the hills could be bitter, and the men were glad of the heavy blue wool tunics that the Legion had drawn from Naval Infantry stores – perhaps especially on those dreary mornings when they hastily buried another comrade before the fog lifted. Dr Vincens did what he could for the growing numbers of wounded lying on the hard, straw-covered floor of the hospital pagoda, but the heavy soft-lead bullets of those days made huge, bone-smashing wounds fouled with shreds of dirty clothing, and shock and sepsis were frequent killers. When a nominally Catholic légionnaire was wrapped in a native mat and dropped into his last cold bed he was usually sent on his way with a verse read by the compassionate Captain Borelli; there were few Protestants here, even among the many Alsatians, and Pastor Boisset could do little but help tend the wounded.38
Being passive targets and unable to strike back tempts frustrated soldiers to take risks (Lieutenant Naert’s men amused themselves by popping up to empty latrine-buckets down into the nearest trench). Major Dominé was a tirelessly encouraging commander; the légionnaires now trusted him completely, but his orders that they build a new central redoubt had discouraging implications, and he understood that for the sake of morale he had to balance caution with occasional outlets for their frustration. In the early hours of 18 February, Sergeant Beulin was allowed to lead 24 volunteers out before dawn to hit a new sap that had been spotted; it was not a success – they did plenty of damage and killed five engineers, but lost four of their own number. On the 18th the Chinese unveiled more guns on the blockhouse hill and the bombardment intensified; Lieutenant Derappe reckoned that the batteries now had two field guns, three howitzers and two mortars. Morale among the Tonkinese Skirmishers slumped that day when their Captain Dia was killed in Little Gibraltar, and among the whole garrison when the popular Sergeant Bobillot took a mortal neck wound.
Major Dominé had been kept in intermittent touch with Viet Tri by a series of extremely courageous Vietnamese couriers making the 80-mile round trip down river and back by small boat and on foot. Now, on 21 February, he sent a message asking – for the first time – when the fort could hope for relief. He was a realist, and he knew that for the past six weeks the bulk of the Expeditionary Corps had been committed to a major operation far away on the Lang Son front, but concern for the strength and health of his garrison now obliged him to ask for help. That day the sapper Corporal Cacheux warned him that he believed the Chinese were ready to explode another mine.
THE MOST INTENSE FIGHTING of the siege began soon after 6am on the morning of 22 February. Shouts and movement were heard in the mist outside the north-west wall, and Captain Cattelin called his guards back from the parapet just before a deafening explosion wrecked 15 yards of it. As the stones pattered down, Chinese infantry came clambering up into the breach through the smoke, but rather hesitantly. Captain Moulinay (a promoted sergeant-major from the Franco-Prussian War, and a veteran of Son Tay and Bac Ninh) confidently led his duty platoon in a charge that drove them back easily – at which point a second mine exploded right under the légionnaires’ feet, killing Moulinay and the men around him, and the Chinese surged forward. As a few blackened and stupefied survivors crawled back, Major Dominé passed them at the head of Sergeant Cremp’s reserve platoon – and a third mine blew, only about 10 yards to one flank. The fighting lasted until 7am, and in the end the assault was repulsed, but only at the price of 14 killed and about 40 wounded. (Pastor Boisset recorded that the explosion had driven both Moulinay’s thighbones up into his groin). Private Hinderschmitt went down the breach four times to bring in wounded men, but two were shot dead on his back as he carried them up; he himself was hit on the fifth attempt, but 20 cursing légionnaires charged out without permission and dragged him and the other casualties inside – they were determined not to see their mates’ heads raised mockingly on bamboo stakes above the nearest trench.39
At this rate the three weakened companies would soon be unable to cover their perimeter. After two more days of shelling, sniping and crippling lack of sleep, at about 4.45 on the morning of 24 February the Chinese tried different tactics. This time there was no preliminary mine; they gathered quietly in the fog at the very foot of the roughly barricaded breaches in the west corner and the north-west wall, then rushed up in force. At both points they reached the head of the breach and fired inside the fort, and both Sergeant-Major Hurbaud and Sergeant Thévent fell during the guards’ struggle to hold the stormers back. Then Captain Cattelin arrived at one breach wit
h a meagre half-platoon, bugle braying, and Warrant Officer Reber at the other, and both succeeded in clearing the parapets with the bayonet; the corpses they later rolled back into the ditch wore the uniforms of three different Chinese regular units. Corporal Cacheux reported signs of no fewer than five more mines.
Before dawn on 25 February guards at the west corner heard movement in time to take cover; when a mine blew they were able to occupy the breach immediately and meet the assault head-on. Another rush hit the old north-west breach, but again Cattelin led about 25 men in a counter-charge and threw them back; the night cost the Legion another 4 dead and 12 wounded. However, under cover of darkness that evening a messenger slipped into the fort with a reply to Dominé’s appeal of the 21st: word had reached Phu Doan that far off in the eastern hills the Expeditionary Corps had finally taken Lang Son a week earlier, and that a relief column was well on its way. Lang Son was less than 100 miles away on the map, but twice that on the march; the defenders began obsessive but pointless speculations about feasible routes, rates of march, terrain and the effects of the weather. They needed every encouragement Dominé could give them during the next three sleepless nights, during which the Chinese attacked relentlessly.
On the night of 27/28 February a mine blew under the south-west wall, and successive assaults hit this and the other breaches over the following four hours. The fighting came to hand-to-hand at the hasty barricades built across the tops of the rubble ramps; the Chinese threw powder-charges and fire-pots into the faces of the defenders, who lost another dozen men before the storming parties grudgingly fell back over their heaped dead. The garrison now had to guard six breaches, totalling 120 yards of holed wall. While more could still handle their rifles in static positions, Dominé had only about 180 légionnaires still fit to take part in counter-attacks. Some 300 shells hit the fort each day, as well as perhaps 2,000 rounds from rampart guns and small arms.
On the night of the 28th another messenger slipped in: Colonel Giovanninelli was only a few miles away with 3,000 men. In the early hours of 1 March, lookouts saw flares in the southern sky. There were no assaults that night, and the next day the shelling was slacker, though the rifle fire on the parapets was undiminished. Every man strained his eyes and his imagination towards the south (it was on 2 March that one sergeant’s mind finally broke, and he blew his own brains out). In mid-afternoon they heard the dull thunder of cannon fire, but the echoes among the hills gave no real idea of direction or distance. On the night of 2/3 March more flares were seen, and Dominé fired his own in reply, but these silent reachings-out in the darkness conveyed nothing beyond the bare reassurance of survival. Before dawn the garrison heard a faint rattle of rifle fire far away, but then nothing more.
The morning of 3 March was eerily quiet; outside the walls nothing could be heard through the fog but the occasional squabbling of buzzards and big white-collared crows as they picked at the rotting dead. When the mist began to lift the silence was unbroken – not a shot was fired, and there was no sign of life in the trenches. After an hour or two Dominé sent out a patrol, which soon confirmed the extraordinary truth: the Yunnan troops and Black Flags had simply gone, leaving nothing but their trash and their abandoned corpses. More men were sent out, to pick through the nearly 5 miles of trenches and dugouts that surrounded the fort; in just one redoubt – inexplicably – they stumbled on a handful of Chinese, and Private Streibler became the last man to die when he threw himself in front of Captain Borelli, saving his Officer’s life at the expense of his own.40
At about 2pm on 3 March 1885 – the thirty-seventh day of the siege – the first Algerian scouts of Giovanninelli’s relief force came cautiously through the fringe of the forest from the south. In the dank hollow of Tuyen Quang, ‘All the approaches – churned, blasted, lamentable – were covered with corpses, and the carrion rotted in the air . . . The pestilential emanations of all these putrid corpses turned your stomach.’ At last able to leave the fort, Pastor Boisset, too, was wandering about the battlefield: ‘What a spectacle! What desolation! What ruin! . . . Our liberators cannot believe their eyes.’41 Twenty-four hours later the commander-in-chief himself, General Brière de l’Ile, addressed extravagant praise to Major Dominé and the dirty, sallow-faced soldiers drawn up before him on the flats by the river. Of 400-odd légionnaires, about one in three had been killed or wounded. 42
Among the relief force, Captain Cattelin’s légionnaires saw men of the 3rd Company of their battalion, who had a story of their own to tell.
FACED WITH A WAR against China, the ministry had made a number of decisions that directly affected the Legion. On 15 November 1884, the 3rd and 4th Battalions were ordered from Algeria to join the first two in the Far East, and after a six-week voyage, Major Schoeffer’s III/LE disembarked at Haiphong on 12 January 1885. (Major Vitalis’ IV/LE was diverted to join the force that Admiral Lespès had landed on the north coast of Formosa in October 1884. They would arrive in the stagnant and over-extended Qui Lung beachhead on 21 January 1885, to join a brigade that in three months had been reduced by cholera and scrub typhus from 1,800 men to 600 capable of bearing arms, and whose dead were being dug up nightly by Chinese infiltrators for the sake of the bounty on French heads.)43
While these battalions were at sea, the name of their regiment had been changed; a decision to expand the Legion led on 14 December 1884 to a decree dividing it once again into 1er and 2e Régiments Étrangers, each to be raised to four battalions as soon as possible (the 1st Foreign was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Grisot, who fourteen years previously had fought with V/RE in the streets of Paris). The two battalions already in Tonkin became the 1st and 2nd of 1st Foreign Regiment (I/ and II/1st RE), and the newcomers the III/ and IV/2nd RE.44 Collectively, of course, the corps continued to be known as the Foreign Legion.
On 7 January 1885, General Brière de l’Ile was freed from the divided control of the ministries of the Navy and of War; from now on the Tonkin command would answer to the latter alone, whose latest minister, General Lewal, authorized Brière to react vigorously to Chinese movements north-east of the Delta. The troopers Comorin and Chandernagor had brought him two fresh battalions (Schoeffer’s légionnaires and Major Comoy’s turcos); these would be useful for a drive in strength towards Lang Son and the Chinese frontier, provided that he could solve the considerable problems of gathering enough supplies, and the coolies to carry them, at his forward base at Chu. The shortage of porters was serious; despite exceptional inducements offered there were never enough, and French agents sought contract labour as far afield as Hong Kong. Without enough porters, the troops had to carry more ammunition and five days’ rations, raising the weight of their packs to about 80lbs – much too heavy in this terrain and climate, particularly for the young Line conscripts.45
Chivvied by steam launches, scores of heavily loaded junks, sampans and gunboats ferried men and materiél up the Luc Nam river to camps of bamboo hutments, Chinese tents and house-sized stacks of boxes and barrels stretching 2 miles over the grassy plain of Chu. Dr Hocquard gives a vivid picture of the diversity and bustle of the camps in late January, as some 7,200 troops and 4,500 coolies prepared for the march on Lang Son. The porters had been tempted with lavish rates of pay given directly to them rather than to their unscrupulous mandarins, plus new hats, palm-leaf rain-capes and blankets in the red colour of happiness. One useful novelty was the arrival, after General Brière’s repeated requests, of some big Algerian mules to supplement the ponies used to pull and carry his artillery.46
On 23 January news reached Brière of the siege of Tuyen Quang, but the momentum of his campaign could not be dissipated; Major Dominé’s légionnaires would have to hold off the Yunnan incursion as best they could until the Expeditionary Corps had settled matters with the Guangxi army.
ON 3 FEBRUARY 1885 the Lang Son column left its camps at Chu and headed north for the hills. The force took two hours to pass Dr Hocquard’s field ambulance unit waiting to take its place at the rear of
2nd Brigade, which included two battalions of the Legion.47 The sun burned off the mist as the muddy track appeared slowly climbing into the hills, revealing forest and tall elephant grass closing in on each side. General Brière was again avoiding the direct Mandarin Road north, and had chosen a more punishing parallel route through the heights to its east; that night they camped in the rain, forbidden to light tell-tale fires. Next morning found the troops inching up a narrow path on the flank of a 45° slope, with creeper-covered rockfaces on their left and a steep drop to the treetops of the valley on their right. When they reached the crest, an uninterrupted succession of bare mountains stretched ahead, with the narrow Deo Van pass twisting its way into them between steep heights riven with gulleys. Négrier’s 2nd Brigade was in the lead – Dr Hocquard’s journal:To prevent any surprises, infantrymen had to follow the crests along the left and right of this deep pass. From the bottom of the valley we could see the little silhouette of each soldier outlined against the sky. Heavily burdened, delayed from minute to minute by a rock that had to be climbed, a gulley that had to be jumped, the footsloggers made only slow progress . . . Already night was falling; great black clouds covered the sky, the rain fell in torrents . . . lightning-flashes flared every few moments, followed almost at once by violent rolls of thunder . . .48