This Ming official sent to Korea was also charged with looking into the suspiciously high enemy casualty figures that Li and his civilian superior, Song Yingchang, had reported to Beijing. According to Song’s report, the Japanese lost 16,047 men in the fighting, plus 10,000 others who burned to death in the fires that scorched the city, plus numerous others who were taken captive. Enemy losses were so extreme, Song bragged, that scarcely a tenth of the troops defending the city were able to escape.[412] As with the accusations of civilian killings, nothing came of the charges of exaggeration leveled against Li, although had the Ming official bothered to check with the Koreans he would have found that there had been no more than 15,000 Japanese stationed at Pyongyang, and that their losses may have been as low as 1,285.[413] This episode is but one of many examples of how the Korean historical record of the Imjin War is decidedly more accurate and more reliable than the records kept by the Ming Chinese. The Chinese were prone to exaggeration in ways that the Koreans were not, primarily because they had so much to prove. Their country, after all, was the Middle Kingdom, the most important nation in the world as they saw it, and as such could not afford to be seen as weak in any way. So we read of the emperor threatening to send a million-man army against the Japanese, when in fact the empire had only forty thousand-odd troops to spare. And so we find Ming commanders inflating victories at times to staggering proportions, for it was an easy step from exaggeration for the good of the nation to exaggeration for personal honors and rewards.
* * *
It took Konishi Yukinaga and his first contingent nine terrible days to retreat from Pyongyang to Seoul. After an exhausting day’s march they arrived at the first fort on the road to the south only to find it abandoned; the garrison commander had assumed they had been destroyed and had already withdrawn his force. And so Konishi’s men were forced to keep moving, without food or rest or a fire for warmth. The Koreans urged Li Rusong to lead his army in an immediate pursuit to cut them down before they reached the safety of the capital. The Ming general demurred. If the Koreans were so eager to attack, he said, echoing Shen Weijing’s earlier comment made to Yun Gun-su, they were welcome to do so on their own. In the end neither of the allies made a move to pursue and Konishi and his men were allowed to straggle back to Seoul unmolested, evacuating all remaining garrisons en route. They arrived on February 17, exhausted, starving, and suffering horribly from frostbite. According to Yoshino Jingozaemon, “The only clothes they had were the garments worn under their armour, and even men who were normally gallant resembled scarecrows on the mountains and fields because of their fatigue, and were indistinguishable from the dead.”[414]
While it would seem that Li Rusong was not overly eager to do battle with the Japanese, this was not the only reason why he was slow to pursue them after their withdrawal from Pyongyang. A more important consideration was the matter of supplies: food for his tens of thousands of horses and more than forty thousand men. The supplies that the Chinese had brought with them, coupled with the stocks that the Koreans had provided them in the far north, had got the Ming army as far as Pyongyang. But these were now nearly exhausted; more would have to be arranged before any further advance could be made. Li Rusong thus held his army in place for five days after the Battle of Pyongyang, giving National High Commissioner Yu Song-nyong, the Korean official charged with overseeing military affairs, time to race ahead to arrange the necessary food stores and horse fodder along the main road to Seoul. During these frantic days Yu was at times just a few hours behind the retreating Japanese, slogging through muddy roads churned up by the passage of their horses and men. Once again the official secured all that was needed and the great Ming army was able to resume its advance.[415]
As Li Rusong led his army south from Pyongyang he was pleased to find that the Japanese had evacuated all their garrisons along the road to Seoul. When he reached Kaesong, the main city and strongest fortification on the way to the capital, and found it too abandoned, the Ming commander began to feel very confident indeed, for it seemed he now had the Japanese well and truly on the run. His army marched into the city on February 19, the division under his younger brother, Li Rubo, leading the way through the gates. A halt was made here for a few days to rest the men, with the Koreans once again raising a chorus of protests for them to press on. Then the march was resumed to the Imjin River. After crossing this obstacle, the Ming and Korean allies established their camp at Paju, forty-five kilometers north of Seoul. [416]
* * *
By this time the order to fall back to Seoul had reached second contingent leader Kato Kiyomasa at Anbyon on the border of the remote northeastern province of Hamgyong. Kato, in his own mind the most daring and successful of all the daimyo commanders in Korea, was not eager to comply, for it meant abandoning all he thought he had achieved in Hamgyong to support his less able comrades in the south. The local situation, however, was not as rosy as Kato claimed. By the beginning of 1593 the citizens of Hamgyong, who had been so compliant the previous year, had become unruly and ungovernable, with guerrilla attacks increasingly common. There was also the Chinese army to consider. The farther south it advanced, first to Pyongyang, then to Kaesong, and then across the Imjin River toward Seoul, the greater the danger became that Kato and his men would be cut off in the north.
News of this looming peril was brought to Kato by an envoy sent from Pyongyang by Ming commander Li Rusong, together with an order that he surrender with all his troops. But Kato was not the surrendering type. By way of an answer he had one of his Korean captives, a young woman reputed to be the most beautiful in the kingdom, tied to a tree, and then with the Ming envoy looking on he impaled her with a spear. With this demonstration of Kato’s determination in hand, the Ming envoy turned about and headed west to make his report. Kato and Nabeshima Naoshige, meanwhile, began the long march to Seoul. They left Anbyon in a rainstorm on February 22, the Korean princes Sunhwa and Imhae in tow.
The journey must have been hard. The second contingent had more than two hundred kilometers of rugged mountain wilderness to cross in the freezing cold, and were harried along the way by bands of guerrillas. No major engagements took place, but the constant strain must have deprived Kato’s men of sleep at night, and left them constantly fearful throughout the day of falling behind or being separated from the group. There were freezing streams to ford, and raging torrents that could only be traversed by cutting down trees and floating across, immersed in the ice-cold water. Despite these difficulties, Kato and Nabeshima managed to get their contingent south in good order, arriving at Seoul on the first of March to bring the total forces congregated there to fifty-three thousand.[417]
* * *
While this consolidation in Seoul of Japanese forces was taking place, one unit stubbornly remained encamped fifteen kilometers north of the capital, its leader refusing to fall back within the safety of the city walls. He was Kobayakawa Takakage, the feisty old commander of the sixth contingent. Kobayakawa, it will be recalled, had spearheaded the failed attempt the previous year to subdue the southwestern province of Cholla. After this, in October, he had been redeployed north to garrison the city of Kaesong, the main town on the road between Pyongyang and Seoul. With the tide of the invasion having turned by the beginning of 1593, Kobayakawa was ordered to evacuate Kaesong and pull his forces back to Seoul. He refused. He disagreed with the decision to retreat, viewing it as an indication of both lack of resolve and lack of experience among the leadership of the Korean campaign. During Konishi’s retreat from Pyongyang, the remaining garrisons along the main road to the capital were evacuated. But still Kobayakawa would not move. It finally took a personal visit from Otani Yoshitsugu, one of the three commissioners assigned to oversee operations in Korea, to persuade the commander to withdraw his forces, and then only after Otani agreed to grant Kobayakawa the lead in what was regarded as the coming decisive battle with the Chinese.
By this point the Chinese and Korean allied army was on the verge of entering
Kaesong. Kobayakawa managed to get his troops clear of the city only hours ahead of the advancing enemy and back across the Imjin River to the vicinity of Seoul. But even then he refused to enter the capital itself, choosing instead to camp alongside the main road fifteen kilometers to the north. As he explained to his annoyed colleagues who rode up to urge him to move his troops back, “You have always been under the great Taiko (Hideyoshi), who has been ever victorious. You know nothing of defeat, and consequently nothing of how to turn defeat into victory. But that’s an old experience with me; so leave this matter in my hands. There is a vast difference between our numbers and the enemy’s. Suppose we do win one or two battles; they will yet keep pestering us like so many swarms of flies. Unless it is a life-and-death fight, these fellows won’t be cowed. We’ve gone back far enough; now is the time to seek life in the midst of death.”[418]
And so Kobayakawa sat down to await the arrival of the Chinese, and with them what he believed would be the decisive battle, the tennozan, that would turn the course of the war back in their favor. The place he had chosen to camp was near the first rest station along the main road north from Seoul. It was called Pyokje.[419]
* * *
It was now February 27. At his camp at Paju just south of the Imjin River, Commander in Chief Li Rusong’s confidence was running high. He had forced the Japanese out of Pyongyang, driven them back along the main road south, taken Kaesong without a fight—and now, he hoped, was on the verge of capturing Seoul. To begin the final phase of the advance on the capital, he sent a party of three thousand men on ahead under Ming commander Zha Dashou and Korean general Ko On-baek as the rest of his forces slowly geared up to follow. In the vicinity of the rest station at Pyokje, fifteen kilometers north of Seoul, Zha and Ko came upon a lightly armed unit of Japanese and gave them a severe mauling. Initial reports put the number of enemy heads taken at six hundred;[420] the actual figure was probably much lower. Upon receiving word of this, Commander Li raced ahead of his main army with just one thousand cavalrymen, evidently expecting to win an easy victory against what he assumed was a weak and demoralized foe.
The omens were against Li Rusong from the start. As he drew near Pyokje, where Zha and Ko had scored their victory, he was thrown from his horse and sustained a cut on his face. Things seemed to brighten shortly thereafter when his men spotted a small and apparently isolated party of Japanese soldiers watching them from the slopes of a nearby hill. Li divided his cavalry into two groups and charged to the attack, chasing the fleeing Japanese up the hill and down into a long, narrow valley beyond—and straight into the bulk of the Japanese army.
Kobayakawa Takakage himself stood at the fore. He commanded 20,000 men, drawn mostly from his sixth contingent, divided into four groups. They had recently been joined by four units of reinforcements sent north from Seoul under the overall direction of young Ukita Hideie, bringing the total Japanese presence at Pyokje to 41,000 men.[421] Li Rusong and his cavalry were at first hopelessly outnumbered and in desperate peril. Li himself was very nearly killed when one of Kobayakawa’s officers closed with him, but was spared at the last moment when one of his commanders sacrificed his life to save him.
Before Commander Li’s force could be totally annihilated, General Yang Yuan hurried to the rescue with the main body of the Ming army, bringing the Chinese forces to 20,000 men. The fighting now took on epic proportions, a total of 61,000 combatants crowding the narrow valley, the Japanese unable to put their muskets to good use in the great push and shove, the Ming cavalry for their part bogged down by mud and deprived of space, forced to dismount and fight on foot. The outcome of the battle was thus determined mainly by swords in hand-to-hand combat, the short, straight, double-edged stabbing weapons of the Chinese against the gently curving, single-edged Japanese katana, sharp enough to cut through bone. The battle raged from ten o’clock in the morning till noon, until the superior numbers and weapons of the Japanese forced Li Rusong and his army to begin to fall back. The fighting continued up the pass on the road north to Paju, the Japanese making better use of their musket squads now, the Chinese leaving a trail of dead bodies behind. Finally, with the onset of darkness, Kobayakawa ceased his pursuit and led his men back to Seoul, reportedly returning with 6,000 Ming heads.[422]
Li Rusong downplayed the disaster at Pyokje in his subsequent report to the Koreans, leaving them with the impression that only a few hundred men had been lost. The true figure was much higher, although perhaps not as high as the Japanese claimed. In any case the debacle took all the fight out of Li and his generals. They had now had a good taste of combat against the Japanese, fighting them behind walls at Pyongyang and on open ground at Pyokje, and wanted nothing more to do with them. The Koreans, led by High Commissioner Yu Song-nyong, urged Li to press on with his southern advance and try again to retake Seoul. Li refused. It was not that he was discouraged by recent setbacks, he explained. The problem was the weather. With the rains having left the ground too muddy for battle, it would be better to fall back and rest his men and wait for conditions to improve before attempting any further advance. He accordingly withdrew with his army first to the Imjin, then back across the river to Kaesong.
In his report to Beijing Li made it clear that he had no intention of attacking the Japanese in Seoul, no matter how dry the ground or how rested his men. There were more than 200,000 enemy troops in the capital, he claimed, far too many for his meager forces to defeat. (The actual figure was between fifty and sixty thousand.) The terrain in Korea would remain too wet for fighting throughout the summer season. An epidemic was sweeping through his ranks. There was dissension among his officers. And Li himself was sick and no longer fit to command, due perhaps to the fall he had taken from his horse. It would be best, he concluded, if someone were appointed to replace him.[423]
In the days that followed, additional reasons presented themselves to Li Rusong that served only to firm his resolve not to stay and fight. First, the Japanese had burned the grass off most of the fields in the vicinity of Seoul, leaving the Ming cavalry when they arrived with no fodder for their horses. The situation was so critical that ten thousand horses died within just a few days, worn out from the journey south and the fighting, and now with no pastures in which to graze and recover their strength. Then word arrived that Kato Kiyomasa was marching toward Pyongyang from his area of operations in the northeast. This was not true. Kato was making straight for Seoul. The false report nevertheless provided Li, whether he believed it or not, with an excuse to retreat all the way back to Pyongyang, ostensibly to protect the city from Japanese counterattack, and so prevent his army from being caught between Japanese forces to the north and the south.
The Koreans, having placed so much hope in China’s “celestial army,” must have been beside themselves with frustration as they watched Li and his men turn away from Seoul and fall back to the north.
* * *
Seoul by this point was a smoldering ghost town, with scores of corpses lying unattended in the streets. In the early hours of February 24 local citizens had started a number of fires in an attempt to assist with what they hoped was their imminent liberation. The Japanese garrisoning the city had responded with terrible ferocity. Prior to marching north to join Kobayakawa, they massacred every Korean man they could lay their hands on to preempt further uprisings occurring while they were away. The only men reported to have escaped the slaughter were those who disguised themselves in women’s clothing. Large areas of the city were also burned, in part in retaliation, in part to deprive Chinese and Korean troops of cover when they eventually arrived and laid siege to the place. The city was therefore further depopulated as women and children, their homes destroyed, fled into the countryside in search of shelter.[424]
This was the city that the victors at Pyokje returned to, a once great capital of culture and refinement, now reduced to little more than a blackened walled enclosure. In such grim surroundings elation over the mauling they had given the Chinese could not have
lasted long. The battle, after all, had cost them considerable casualties. It also promised to be only the first round in a long, drawn-out fight, for the Chinese would certainly be back. The question thus arose among the Japanese commanders: should they remain in the capital and await a second Chinese attack? Or should they retreat to the south? Kato Kiyomasa, just back from Hamgyong Province, joined Kobayakawa Takakage in opposing the idea of retreat on principle alone; now was the time to stand and fight, they argued, and show the Ming what Japanese warriors were really made of. The pragmatic Konishi Yukinaga and others were less eager to risk their lives to prove such a point. The option of retreat, however, was by no means without risk, for it meant abandoning the relative safety of the walls of the capital and taking to the open road, where they would be vulnerable to attack.
Indeed, although the Ming army had retired to Pyongyang, the Japanese in Seoul were now surrounded on all sides by native Korean troops, guerrillas, and monk-soldiers, and were thus unable to venture into the surrounding countryside in anything but large, well-armed groups. Several companies of Korean government soldiers still remained to the north, forces under Commander in Chief Kim Myong-won at the Imjin River, General Yi Bin at Paju, and Generals Ko On-baek and Yi Si-on at Haeyu Pass.[425] Twenty kilometers to the west at Chasong, a force of one thousand monk-soldiers attacked a Japanese unit and, at a cost of nearly half their number, succeeded in driving them back within the city walls. Two thousand monks under Yujong achieved similar results ten kilometers to the northeast at Surak-san, driving the Japanese garrison there back into Seoul and claiming the mountain for themselves. A third contingent of six hundred monks made an attack at Ichon in the southeast, again suffering heavy losses, but again driving the Japanese back into the capital.[426]
The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China Page 37