Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 21
The force came up against three Chinese positions on 4 February, and the Legion and the 2nd Bat d’Af were sent into the attack up a precipitous slope crowned by the fort of Thai Ho Ha. Artillery were ordered to climb a hill just under a mile away to give support; the mules stumbled their way up an incline of rolling stones, slipping and falling in holes and gulleys masked by long grass. The légionnaires and ‘pimps’ were invisible while they descended the near slopes, but from a ridge Hocquard could soon track their progress by the waving elephant grass in the valley below; the French guns fired over their heads, but the fort remained silent. Eventually the doctor saw a single légionnaire emerge from the foot of the valley, pulling himself up the slope by grabbing at the undergrowth; other blue-and-white figures followed him, and soon the whole Legion battalion and two companies of joyeux could be seen clambering steadily up towards the fort – Hocquard particularly noted that they were still wearing their big marching packs.
The artillery ceased fire; the Chinese fort was still silent; but suddenly, when the légionnaires were about 400 yards below the palisades, these were wreathed with the smoke of a crackling fusillade. The légionnaires paused only to dump their packs, then continued to climb; at 200 yards their buglers sounded the charge: ‘. . . we saw them bound, jumping into the ditches, crawling up the parapets and disappearing inside the walls. Thick smoke hid the entrenchments and the action. After ten minutes’ fighting . . . the Chinese were running back down the slopes, abandoning their flags.’ The day cost the lives of 17 men including Captain Gravereau of II/1st RE, and 99 others were wounded.49
The advance continued on the 5th, laboriously fighting its way past one hill position after another. At the aid station in the rear, wounded officers translated the sounds for Hocquard: first the far-off, muffled crackle of the vanguard’s rifles; then the continuous firing of a company sent against a fort, like tearing cloth punctuated by the occasional boom of artillery. Over 10 miles, the doctor counted at least 30 captured or abandoned forts on bare hills on either side of the track. The hostile country closed in again behind the column as they advanced; they had left the occasional outpost on a height, but no secure line of communication back to Chu. For lack of men to escort them back, Hocquard’s wounded had to be carried forward with the column, four coolies struggling with each stretcher; at difficult places on the narrow, switchback track the casualties were sometimes tumbled painfully from their litters.
On 6 February the ‘Celestials’ continued to retreat before the column, abandoning below the heights of Dong Son a large camp of bamboo barracks, where the column rested for three days while ration convoys caught up with them. Two companies and a battery were left here, with ‘the malingerers and the lame’, when the column marched again on 10 February. The valley road following the Hoa river was pleasant; flocks of jewel-coloured parakeets shimmered through attractive woodland, where orchids grew on old mossy trunks above carpets of wildflowers. The path itself was squalid with the discarded gear of the Chinese retreat; there were fresh graves by every cold campfire, and the French began to find abandoned dead in the elephant grass. (They had often wondered how the Chinese managed to remove their casualties from the battlefield so quickly, and now they found dragged corpses with a noosed rope around the ankles.) The terrain became suddenly more forbidding when the path led steeply up into the bare 1,500-foot mountains separating this route from the Mandarin Road away to the left; ahead lay only ‘a chaos of high, arid mountains, sad and desolate . . . The Annamese called this desert “the country of hunger and death”’.
After the busily populated lowlands the terrain of this lonely Middle Region seemed mysterious and sinister. The Chinese had long since reduced the scattered villages of the Tho highlanders to charred ruins; unlike the river-jungles to the west, the patches of forest seemed empty of game, and on every side silent hills brooded down on the thin line of troops pushing deeper into the unknown. They were steep, closely packed cones, like a child’s drawing of hills; they pushed in aggressively, invading the soldiers’ sense of space, their lower slopes dark with trees and impenetrable scrub, the upper shoulders naked green or pale with dense elephant grass. Some broke off into sheer limestone cliffs veiled with hanging lianas, and any little glen of abandoned paddy fields was crowded round by what the French called calcaires – weirdly abrupt pillars and blades of karst left by eons of unequal erosion. Fissured and riddled with caves under a cloak of scrub, these natural castles provided an agile enemy with vantage points and hideouts practically unreachable by European troops. All round the horizon the hills climbed, wave after wave, into saw-toothed mountains; sunlit peaks against a blue sky can be uplifting to the spirits, but here China’s southern jaws were constantly shadowed by a dismal grey ceiling. The entire landscape seemed to breathe menace from concealment.
An optical telegraph station was set up at the head of the Deo Quan pass, with lines of sight back down to Chu about 20 miles south, and westwards along a transverse valley to the Mandarin Road; there the powerful telescopes could make out dark masses of outflanked Chinese troops marching north for Lang Son.50 The two brigades took turns in the lead as the column climbed higher up the eastern flank of the mountains, on narrow tracks or earth-cut steps; they passed still-smoking abandoned forts, and waded swollen streams where bridges had been destroyed. On 12 February the Chinese stood, to fight; the 1st Brigade were leading the way through the morning mist across a valley of paddy fields when they came under fire from forts on the left. The Naval Infantry and Algerians took two lines of fortified hills by early afternoon, at a cost of 30 killed and 188 wounded; one sweeping charge by the marsouins passed close by Hocquard’s forward dressing station, attracting heavy fire that killed three of his patients and shot a canteen out of the hands of a fourth. The tents had not yet come up when nightfall brought heavy rain, and Hocquard was grateful when a passing company of Tonkinese Skirmishers demonstrated their usual uncanny skill by quickly raising sturdy little bamboo and tree-branch shelters over the wounded. Thunderous downpours lasted all night, and few men got any sleep.51
At about 10 on the morning of 13 February 1885, the leading troops of 1st Brigade let out a spontaneous cheer as they breasted a ridge and looked down on a wide cultivated plain scattered with villages, pagodas and occasional calcaires. An hour later they were marching into the deserted town of Lang Son, the object of French ambitions for nearly two years. Now, at last, General Brière could spare troops to rescue Major Dominé; the fact that he chose to accompany them in person suggests that the garrison at Tuyen Quang had never been far from his thoughts.
THE RELIEF FORCE MARCHED after two days’ rest; Négrier’s brigade were to stay at Lang Son to watch the frontier, and it was Colonel Giovanninelli’s marsouins and turcos who took the Mandarin Road road south for Kep and Bac Ninh on 16 February.52 It would take them 15 days to cover about 190 miles of bad roads (or no roads at all). By 27 February they had reached Phu Doan, where Giovanninelli picked up reinforcements – two small mixed battalions under Lieutenant-Colonel Maussion, including a company and a half of I/1er RE.53 From there they marched up the west bank of the Clear river, which would allow resupply by boats. The relief force had met no resistance by the night of 1/2 March when they camped about 3 miles short of Hoa Moc, the village where they would have to swing left to cut off the river bend. From there they sent up flares in the hope that there was still somebody alive at Tuyen Quang to see them, and at first light on the 2nd they set off on what they expected to be the last day of the march, groping up a narrow wooded valley that obliged them to move in three successive groups.
The thick forest limited visibility, and at about noon the leading scouts reported Chinese fortifications only 300 yards ahead, on a line of hills that slanted from behind them to the left, and forwards across the line of march, reaching the river to their right front. There were about 25 separate works; those blocking the route straight ahead, nearest to the river, seemed to be the strongest, and any force atta
cking these would be under fire from others to the soldiers’ left flank and rear. At about 1pm a probing company of Tonkinese Skirmishers were rushed by Black Flags from a trench hidden only 30 yards away in the bush, and the many casualties were beheaded on the spot. After a brief bombardment, at about 2pm Giovanninelli wheeled his Algerian Skirmishers left and up the hills forming the Chinese centre; it was a nightmare climb through 9-foot-high bamboo, and as they broke into the first defences a mine exploded under them.
At about 4pm, Giovanninelli committed his second group, the Naval Infantry wheeling in their turn and attacking uphill on the Algerians’ left. Visibility in the thick jungle was down to 10 yards, preventing anything but a primitive frontal attack, and losses were very heavy. The Chinese had built successive lines of thick palisades, masked by the forest; artillery seemed to have little effect, so the infantry had to be led by sappers with axes and powder-charges. They were under intense fire as they tried to break gaps, and the Yunnan style of dugouts – with heavy roofs and rifle-slits at ground level – were deadly to men who often could not spot them until they opened fire at the last moment. Although some positions had been stormed by the time darkness and fog ended the fighting at about 6.15pm, the troops could make no further progress; some pessimists on General Brière’s staff even suggested abandoning Dominé to his fate until higher water allowed gunboats to come up river and shell these forts.
The shivering, worn-out soldiers tried to sleep on their arms in a worryingly discontinuous perimeter of captured trenches and jungled hillside, but they were jumpy; the Chinese above them kept up a sharp tapping on the bamboo, fired at the briefest flare of a striking match, and slipped down to collect heads from casualties left helpless in the undergrowth. At about 3am on 3 March they launched a heavy attack; Major Comoy’s Algerians responded with a furious blind charge into the mist, while Giovanninelli brought up his last reserve – Maussion’s rag-bag of légionnaires, Algerians and Tonkinese – and sent them up on the far left flank. The attack was repulsed, but the men in the front lines must have been tense as the first grey light allowed them to pick out vague shapes close to them in the mist. There was no sound except the dripping of water from the bamboo; and when a Legion captain, sick of waiting, sent a patrol forward, they (like Dominé’s men a few miles north) found that the Chinese had slipped away in the night – again, except for a single drunken or forgotten outpost, which was quickly wiped out. The relief force stumbled down the defile to Yuoc village, and that afternoon Dominé’s lookouts at Tuyen Quang saw the pale blue vests of the turcos filtering through the trees. The battle of Hoa Moc was the costliest of the campaign so far; Giovanninelli lost nearly 500 men killed and wounded, and one source suggests a great many more than that. 54
When General Brière went back downriver to Hanoi a few days later he was no doubt intent on studying the latest report from General de Négrier, whom he had had left at Lang Son two weeks previously with a single weakened brigade.
AT LANG SON, the Mandarin Road crossed a bridge over the Ky Kung river and continued north for about a mile to the wealthy little Chinese merchant town of Ky Lua; beyond this the plain ended in a hulking cul-de-sac of cliffs, and the road turned sharply left to follow the border hills north-westwards. When the two Legion battalions had arrived on 13 February 1885 they found only the debris of hasty flight, and within days Ky Lua had become the brigade’s main camp.
Négrier’s immediate problem was feeding his men, since in this bare and devastated country even rice and buffalo-meat were hard to find. Everything had to be portered painfully up from Chu along the precarious tracks, and rations even of tinned meat and Army biscuit had to be cut in order to last until the next convoy.55 After a week at Lang Son the seven-battalion brigade was still at only about half-strength due to the casualties of the advance, sickness and fatigue, and Chinese troops were reported to be digging in around Dong Dang, a village 8 miles to the north-west. There the road ran parallel and close to the frontier, both of them aligned almost north to south, and the actual crossing into China was in the hills north-east of Dong Dang. The general decided that he needed to clear the Celestials right out of Tonkin, and on 23 February he left only a single company in Ky Lua to guard the sick when he marched for Dong Dang with his three Line battalions, two from the Legion, one Bat d’Af and one of Tonkinese.
Chinese troops were driven out of Dong Dang in a brief, methodical action, their attempt to fire the village being foiled by the speed of the Tonkinese Skirmishers, and in the late afternoon Négrier marched on northwards. 56 The frontier crossing was only a couple of hours’ march through the hills, at the end of a narrow defile; the approach was marked by a tiger’s head carved into a rockface, but when they arrived at Cua Ai the soldiers found the renowned Gate of China something of an anti-climax. The claustrophobic gorge was blocked by a small, deserted complex of stone buildings pierced by a vaulted passageway. The men bivouacked for the night on the greasy turf, while inside the buildings Dr Hocquard shared a pile of abandoned rice sacks with huge and active rats.
The next morning he found a ‘pretty machine gun’ abandoned on the terrace in perfect condition, sheltered by a little straw shed. To the north, the view into China was cut off immediately by a tall mountain, with the road curling away round its foot, guarded by forts on flanking hilltops. A search of the buildings turned up rifles, many boxes of Italian and German cartridges, dynamite and – oddly – spools of waterproofed electric cable. Négrier had his gunners pile the munitions in the gate tunnel and light a long fuse when they left; Hocquard heard the muffled roar as the column reached Dong Dang. There the general posted Major Diguet’s II/1st RE, with a platoon of Tonkinese and a couple of mountain guns, before taking the rest of the brigade back to Ky Lua. On 13 March (sadly for the historian) the admirable Dr Hocquard left Lang Son and marched south with his wounded. At Chu he learned of the relief of Tuyen Quang, but less welcome news reached him in Hanoi at the end of the month.57
THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF informed Négrier on 17 March that Paris had cabled him to say that negotiations with Beijing might benefit from a robust stance on the border. Since Yunnan troops and Black Flags were still showing aggression on the upper Black, Red and Clear rivers, Négrier could not expect immediate reinforcement, but Brière reassured him that he had explained to the ministry that Négrier’s supply position made any major offensive action impossible. Nevertheless, Négrier had reason for concern: the veteran General Feng Tzu-tsai had at least 8,000 Guangxi troops camped at Bang Bo only 5 miles beyond the frontier, with more arriving daily, and scouts reported two new Chinese forts now being built inside Tonkin close to Dong Dang.
On 22 March, firing was heard from the north; when Négrier arrived at Dong Dang with two battalions he learnt from Major Diguet that Chinese troops had attacked that morning but had been driven back by the légionnaires without difficulty. With so few men, Négrier decided that passive defence was an invitation to General Feng to get troops south of Lang Son to cut him off, but that a bold attack on Bang Bo might cool Chinese ardour. He marched for the frontier at 7am on 23 March, with the equivalent of three weak battalions – fewer than 2,000 men.58
At about 10.30am Major Farret’s 143rd Line ran into the new Chinese entrenchments on slopes on the Tonkin side of Cua Ai. They and the 111th failed to take the first fort, but an attack by Diguet’s légionnaires showed le biff how it should be done, and the second position was abandoned by its defenders under shellfire. Négrier then led his men through the wrecked Gate of China and about a mile into enemy territory; they took two lines of works, and the artillery drove off an attempted manoeuvre against their right flank before the brigade bivouacked for the night. At 9am on 24 March the general ordered the 111th Line forward against the third and last set of positions, while Lieutenant Colonel Herbinger, commander of the Line marching regiment, led the 143rd and the Tonkinese Skirmishers around to the right.
Survivors told Hocquard that in time both regiments took their obj
ectives, but that at about 3pm a massive counter-attack hit the French, forcing the Line troops out of the captured works and into a general retreat. There was some disorder, redeemed only by the Legion battalion’s stubborn rearguard fighting from hill to hill all the way back to Dong Dang. Official losses for what was called the battle of Bang Bo were 72 killed and 190 wounded, of which II/1st RE suffered 12 killed and missing and 52 wounded. The worst aspect for the légionnaires was that some of their wounded had to be left on the field, with predictable consequences.59
The first report of this action to reach Paris caused uproar in the National Assembly. The Ferry government was under constant pressure for its inept handling of negotiations with Beijing, for the expense of a Chinese war that Ferry refused even to admit was a war, for the obviously pointless stalemate on Formosa, and (always) for its hollow boasts about suppressing ‘piracy’ throughout Tonkin. Elections were imminent, and Ferry had to face down his critics with declarations that reports of a setback on the border were inaccurate – Lang Son was still firmly in French hands.60
Négrier decided that the isolated position at Dong Dang was indefensible against such numbers, and fell back to Ky Lua, where he was grateful for the arrival of some 1,700 replacements to fill the gaps in his weak battalions.61 On 27 March the Chinese probed French outposts; early on the 28th their scouts fired on Captain Romani’s company of III/2nd RE, and the lifting mist then revealed Guangxi regiments flooding down the road from Dong Dang. Despite the efforts of the artillery, some of the infantry at first recoiled under the weight of numbers, but they rallied and went forwards again, driving the assault off with heavy losses. Only Chinese skirmishers remained in contact, and the flags of the massed columns disappeared over the skyline. French casualty returns listed only 7 killed and missing and 37 wounded – fewer than the cost of the original capture of Dong Dang a month before; but one of the latter was General de Négrier, who was shot in the chest at about 3.30pm. Since no full colonel was present, brigade command passed by seniority to Lieutenant-Colonel Herbinger of the 3rd (Line) Marching Regiment. Accounts of what happened next were shamefully massaged, and the exact truth is lost to us.