IN JULY 1883, THE FOREIGN LEGION establishment had been increased from four to six battalions, and by the end of the following year only two of these would still be in Algeria.26 The 5,000-odd Navy troops in Vietnam and locally recruited Annamese Skirmishers were inadequate for what might turn into an all-out war with China; Admiral Courbet requested reinforcements, and some of these were drawn from North Africa. On 27 September 1883 a marching regiment embarked at Algiers, comprising a battalion each from 1st and 3rd Algerian Skirmishers and Major Donnier’s 600-strong 1st Battalion of the Foreign Legion .27
4.
The Year of the Five Kings
As soon as we had passed this crest the appearance of the landscape changed abruptly, as if by a magic wand. Just now it had been a laughing country, of shady woods full of flowers and birdsong; on this side it was a chaos of high, arid mountains, sad and desolate . . . The Annamese called this desert ‘the country of hunger and death’.
Dr Charles Hocquard, 10 February 18851
THE FRENCH TRANSPORTS made landfall in Halong Bay, where white-painted warships lay at anchor amidst a fairytale stone forest of natural pillars thrusting up from the blue-green water. Native sampans and naval pinnaces darted around the ships, while the heavily laden troops clambered nervously down into strings of lifeboats to be towed in through the labyrinth by steam launches. In November a fog hung over the sea, and the constantly shifting mudbanks in the mouth of the Cua Cam river played hide-and-seek with even the Vietnamese pilots. When the mist lifted it revealed a low ceiling of leaden grey cloud, muddy red riverbanks, and beyond them a flat chequerboard of green fields stretching away towards a line of blue mountains in the northern distance. Progress was slow, depending upon the water level, the skill of the pilot sounding at the bow with a pole, and the alertness of the French sailor at the helm.
At the inland port of Haiphong, tiny and squalid on its mudflats, the Legion battalion transferred to larger boats for the journey up the Cua Cam to Seven Pagodas, then west along the Rapids Canal to its junction with the Red river at Hanoi (see Map 4). The soldiers were happy enough; the officers had drawn a cash allowance for food in addition to standard Naval Troops rations, and Haiphong had provided rice, eggs, chickens and pork. Well fed, and snug under their greatcoats against the occasional drizzle, the légionnaires lounged like sightseers for two or three days as the boats made their sinuous way between fields squared off with raised dykes and sown with rice, maize and thickets of sugar cane. Every few hundred yards they passed a bamboo-and-thatch village, each shaded by a clump of fruit trees, plumed with a few tall, straight areca palms, and defended by a hedge of thick bamboo. Wading fishermen netted the shallows for prawns and crabs, children ran along the banks waving, dogs barked, and at every bend the boats disturbed ducks and white egrets. The waterways were crowded with traffic, and further amusement was provided by the sight of big junks loaded with troops and stores stuck fast on mudbanks waiting for the flooding tide.2
The Legion battalion arrived in Hanoi on 18 November 1883. There, on the west bank of the Red river, perhaps 100,000 people were crowded into a triangular city stretching roughly 3 miles in each direction to its fringe of suburban villages. The sluggish water was about 1,000 yards wide here, but there were no proper landing stages, so after the boats threaded their way to shore through the jam of launches, barges and junks the soldiers had to wade through treacly black silt. They clambered up treacherous mud steps into a scene of purposeful pandemonium, as hundreds of coolies with bamboo carrying-poles and ropes scurried to unload the boats constantly arriving from Haiphong. Beyond a riverside road bordered with almond trees, roofs showed above the loopholed palisade that surrounded the French Concession. Once the newcomers had been formed up by their bellowing NCOs they were marched inland along packed streets of thatched wooden cabins and rows of narrow-fronted brick houses with oddly stepped rooflines, broken here and there by the sculpted towers of whitewashed pagodas. Their destination was the other focus of the occupation – the Citadel, on the north-west edge of the city.
This was the largest in the country, but its architecture was typical of all the strongholds of the Annamese royal government that the légionnaires would occupy. It was essentially a separate quarter within the city; inside a stagnant, reedy moat loud with bullfrogs, high, thick brick walls enclosed a rectangle measuring nearly 2 miles on the long sides, with five monumental gatehouses set in protruding half-moon bastions. Protected by an inner rectangle of walls in the centre of the great compound was a magnificent Chinese-style palace built to accommodate the king on his occasional visits, splendid with carved gables, upswept eaves and varnished red-tile roofs with decorated ridge-lines. An octagonal brick ‘flag tower’ rising close to the palace was now used by the French for their optical signalling system.3 Around the inside of the Citadel’s outer walls handsome mansions once occupied by the governor and his mandarins were set in pleasant tree-shaded gardens, and one corner of the enclosure was filled with big brick granaries where the gathered rice-taxes were stored. Otherwise the wide expanse between the walls and the central palace had been empty, but the French now fulfilled its original purpose by crowding it with temporary buildings of clay cob, timber, bamboo and matting to accommodate the swelling garrison.4
MAJOR DONNIER’S LÉGIONNAIRES did not have long to explore the wonders of the Orient. The rainy season of May to November, when insupportable heat and constant downpours made military movement nearly impossible, was over. In the second week of December, Admiral Courbet, now reinforced to about 8,000 troops, took advantage of his limited window for operations: the end of the monsoon made cross-country marches possible, but before long water levels for the essential river traffic would start to sink again. His first objective had to be the Black Flag stronghold of Son Tay about 25 miles upriver, where Liu Yung-fu was again taunting the French to come on if they dared.
Courbet sent Lieutenant-Colonel Maussion’s Naval Infantry upriver on junks and gunboats, but the Legion, Algerian turcos and local troops marched up the west bank through a heavily cultivated landscape of paddy fields and orchards. The légionnaires were still in their blue greatcoats and red trousers, and had not yet been issued with Naval Troops’ pith helmets; they trudged along under 50lb packs, envying the coolness of the ‘desmoiselles’ who marched ahead of them. These Annamese Skirmishers, in their little bamboo hats, loose black cotton uniforms and red sashes, were burdened with nothing but their weapons; their women – who always accompanied them on campaign – carried the rest. (Their nickname was unsubtle: since Vietnamese men seldom grew more than 5 feet tall and were slightly built and beardless, and since both sexes wore trousers and folded their long hair up in a chignon, off-duty légionnaires were prone to embarrassing mistakes.)5 The causeway road through the fields was straight and quite broad, with hump-backed bridges across the many creeks and irrigation ditches. The column passed isolated, tree-shaded pagodas, and every few hundred yards a hamlet; at their approach dogs barked madly, gongs sounded, and everyone got out of sight – or, if surprised far out in the fields, took off their broad hats and bowed deeply.
The town of Son Tay, lying with its north side against a bend of the Red river, was a considerable obstacle. Turreted gatehouses rose at the cardinal points of an enclosure of thick mud-brick walls about 14 feet high, loopholed for rifles and light cannon along upper galleries; these were topped with bamboo hoardings from which rows of wicked spikes pointed out and downwards. A wide, deep moat ran around outside the walls, and the narrow strip of earth between them was planted along much of its length with a hedge of growing bamboo, up to 12 feet tall and thick enough to explode impactfuzed shells before they struck the brickwork. The flats outside the moat were obstructed by a bristling double line of interlaced bamboo barricades; X-shapes of sharpened stakes were lashed tightly side by side along crosspoles to form dense chevaux-de-frise as high as a man’s head – what the Legion’s German NCOs called ‘Spanish riders’, and as basic to all Vietnam
ese defences as barbed wire is to Europe.
Although division and indecision had hampered the build-up of Chinese garrisons during the rains, about 1,000 Yunnan regulars had joined the 3,000 mercenaries at Son Tay but, to Liu’s frustration, the mandarin Tang had only been able to contribute a few hundred Guangxi soldiers. The 5,000-odd Annamese troops who were also in the area were of very uncertain morale, and Liu had contemptuously driven them out of town into the outlying villages. In Son Tay itself, Courbet’s 5,500-strong expedition still faced about equal numbers of fighting men, many of them installed behind solid walls with perhaps 100 muzzle-loading light cannon and ‘rampart guns’.6 As the French approached Son Tay on 14 December they came up against the first palisaded villages, which had to be taken by troops deploying laboriously across the flooded fields. When the two causeways they were following converged towards the defended village of Phu Sa south of the town the resistance became stiffer; both dykes had been cut and the far sides of the gaps blocked with earth and bamboo defences. These were taken without too much trouble, but at the Y-junction of the dykes more serious fortifications had been built, and were held and flanked by Black Flag riflemen.
LIU YUNG-FU’S MEN were no mere guerrillas who would run from a couple of volleys or shells; they were aggressive, quick to seize any chance in combat, moved under command in disciplined companies, were good shots with rifles mostly as modern as the légionnaires’ Gras, and were not afraid to fight face-to-face. Taller and stronger than the Annamese, Liu’s soldiers proudly kept the Manchu hairstyle – the front of the head shaved and a long pigtail at the back, rolled up under a small turban when in battle. They wore long loose blouses, broad trousers and puttees of dark blue or black, identifiable by lacking the big coloured disc on the chest and back that distinguished Chinese regulars; swords, long knives or bayonets were thrust into their coloured sashes, and they carried plentiful ammunition in belts or vests looped for cartridges. Observers unanimously describe the Black Flags as more skilful and motivated than the Chinese regulars who fought beside them in 1883. Like the légionnaires, the Black Flags were mercenaries, but in Chinese eyes they too were a patriotic expeditionary force, and – like the Legion – they had earned that reputation in battle.7
On the confined 20-foot frontage of the causeway it was difficult for the French to get their artillery up and into action, and the infantry fought throughout 14 December without managing to break through the Chinese works. At nightfall they had to fall back along the two dykes to the outworks they had already taken; they had little rest, and repeated harassing attacks were only driven off thanks to the unusually bright moonlight. The next morning they found that the Chinese had abandoned their ramparts and fallen back into the town, taking with them the heads of the French dead who had unavoidably been left on the field the night before. A Chinese poster found at Son Tay, dated 11 December, listed bounties for enemy heads: 40 taëls for that of an Annamese Skirmisher, 50 for a turco or légionnaire, and a sliding scale of 100 and upwards for French officers, depending on their number of rank stripes. (This eager head-hunting put considerable pressure on French medical personnel to stay close behind the fighting line, going forward to rescue the wounded immediately.)
On 15 December the French guns were dragged up along the dyke and brought into action, joining the gunboats on the river in shelling the walls and gates of Son Tay, though apparently without achieving any serious breaches. Maussion’s Naval Infantry landed and assaulted the north river gate, but without success. The morning of the 16th found Major Donnier’s I/LE forming up under cover of the paddy-dykes of Phu Nhi village, facing the town’s west gate across 300 yards of open fields. At 1pm the bugles sounded and the légionnaires moved forward, coming under fire from the walls as soon as they left cover. French shells did not make much impression on either the walls or the bamboo chevaux-de-frise (which yielded and sprang back under anything but a direct hit), but they did smash up the wooden hoardings and clear riflemen off the broad wall-walks, and soon 3rd Company were within 50 yards of the west gatehouse. A platoon rushed forwards across the moat bridge, but this led them to a blank-faced half-moon bulge of brickwork surmounted by a crenellated tower. The légionnaires had to turn to one side and follow the wall round until they reached side entrances in the bastion, which led into the arched tunnel of the inner gateway. When they got there, they found it blocked with bamboo entanglements and the gate itself bricked up.
The rest of the battalion gradually made their way across and pressed up against the base of the walls; when the French artillery necessarily ceased fire the Black Flags swarmed back to the parapets, to shoot and drop ceramic powder-grenades down on them (one of those killed here was the quartermaster, Captain Mehl, a veteran who had left his proper post in the rear to join the assault party). The artillery opened fire again on another sector of the wall, and by about 5pm had created a practical breach. The 3rd Company clambered up the ramp of smashed bricks, led by a big Belgian private named Minnaert, who tore down a black banner and stuck an improvised tricolour at the head of the breach. Once the outer wall had fallen, the légionnaires drove the Chinese back through the streets into the formidable citadel in the centre of the town – a scale model of that at Hanoi, with its own moat and bastioned walls about 500 yards on each side.
With the prospect of another costly assault ahead, the French troops rested around the town that night; but when they probed forward next morning they found – remarkably – that the entire remaining garrison had somehow slipped away in the darkness, and local civilians were already inside the citadel, looting the mandarins’ houses. The Chinese left enormous stores, and more than 1,000 corpses; the final number killed may have been at least twice that many, since after finding their comrades’ heads stuck on bamboo stakes the French did not take prisoners. The French losses at Son Tay were 83 killed and 320 wounded.8
The Legion battalion loaded their wounded on to riverboats and marched back to Hanoi, where they spent the rest of December. To his disappointment, Admiral Courbet soon reverted from his overall command to that of the naval squadron only, since Paris recognized that steering this campaign would demand professionals in the art of land warfare. During the winter months the number of troops in Vietnam almost doubled, and by February 1884 they would form a 15,000-man expeditionary corps commanded by Navy General Charles Millot. Its two constituent brigades were to be led by Navy General Brière de l’Isle (1st Brigade, Hanoi), and Army General Francois de Négrier, whose command of 2nd Brigade at Hai Duong would bring a reunion with his familiar légionnaires. The Legion contingent was reinforced on 28 February by the arrival from Algeria of Major Hutin’s 2nd Battalion, 800 strong, bringing with them nearly 200 replacements for the already fever-worn 1st Battalion.9 One of the French ships that left Toulon that winter was L’Annamite, a steamer of the Messageries Maritime company, which sailed on 11 January 1884 carrying a battalion of the 23rd Line, two artillery batteries, 30 horses and 60 officers, including Médecinmajor de 2e Classe Charles Hocquard – a uniquely valuable witness to the coming campaigns.10
WHILE THE FRENCH REINFORCEMENTS settled in, their adversaries were not idle. In January 1884, at the new Black Flag base at Hung Hoa further up the Red river, Liu Yung-fu – recovering from a wound received at Son Tay – was visited by the Chinese governor of Yunnan province, Tsen Yu-ying. Liu had been disgusted by the feeble support received from Guangxi, but Tsen promised that he was bringing 12,000 Yunnan troops across the border and down the river corridor. On the strength of this, and his promise of future support in Liu’s own territory, Tsen succeeded in persuading Liu to lead his Black Flags – now reconstituted to about 3,000 men – eastwards to join the Guangxi garrison at Bac Ninh, reportedly the next French objective, in the first week of March.
The Cau river and its southern continuation, the Thai Binh, flow roughly parallel to the Red river and to its north-east; Bac Ninh lay on the west bank of the Cau about 20 miles across country from Hanoi, and perhaps 30 mile
s north-west of the French base at Hai Duong further down the Thai Binh (see Map 4). Bac Ninh was an important hub of road and river transport where a Chinese garrison guarded the Mandarin Road; this led north-east to the strategic town of Lang Son about 70 miles away in the Middle Region, just inside the Tonkin – China frontier. When Liu arrived, he discovered that although the garrison had constructed about two dozen rather flimsy forts immediately surrounding Bac Ninh, the outlying hills were mostly unguarded, and the Guangxi troops themselves were unimpressive. They numbered several thousand; they had plenty of equipment, stores and modern weapons (single-shot Snider, Remington and bolt-action Mauser rifles, even some Krupp field guns); they blew their trumpets a great deal; but their training and morale left much to be desired. Their pillaging had also earned them the hatred of the locals – not something to which Liu Yung-fu usually gave a thought, but here the Guangxi troops had allowed weapons to fall into the peasants’ hands. Confirmed in his prejudices, Liu took his Black Flags up into the neglected western hills to await developments.11
General Millot’s spring campaign was a conventional two-pronged advance on Bac Ninh, by Brière de l’Ile’s 1st Brigade moving east from Hanoi, and Négrier’s 2nd moving north from Hai Duong. (It seems to have been on this occasion that somebody attributed to Négrier a spectacularly stupid exhortation to the Legion battalions: ‘Légionnaires, you are soldiers in order to die; I am sending you where men die.’ This has the unmistakable whiff of journalistic invention; there is no identifiable authority for the alleged quotation, and it contradicts everything in Négrier’s known record.) The preparations took several days of apparent but deceptive chaos, while perspiring staff officers endured contradictory orders, querulous demands, misplaced documents, colliding working parties and strayed couriers. At each brigade base more than 5,000 troops had to be brought in from the outlying pagodas where they had been lodged, to be assembled, kitted out and given their movement orders.12
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 17