Our Friends Beneath the Sands

by Martin Windrow

  The international situation then spiralled out of control, as Jules Ferry, Admiral Courbet, and the war party at the Dowager Empress’ court embroiled France and China in a costly and ultimately pointless naval war on the mainland coast and Formosa that lasted nine months, from August 1884 to April 1885. It was against that background that some of the Foreign Legion’s most notable actions were fought in Tonkin – where, on 27 August 1884, Liu Yung-fu of the Black Flags was formally named as a Chinese general with responsibility for local operations.25

  WHILE PARIS AND BEIJING MANOEUVRED, and Admiral Courbet shelled Chinese ports, the Expeditionary Corps faced three distinct enemies: Chinese regulars from Yunnan and Guangxi; the Chinese-sponsored Black Flag irregulars; and local outlaws, whose banditry was sometimes lent a colour of patriotism by the encouragement of the hostile regents in Hué. Villagers both on the upper rivers and deep inside the Delta continued to suffer from persistent raiding by large numbers of these ‘pirates’. In the Delta, French counter-insurgency was hampered by the involvement of local mandarins incited by Hué. While enjoying a degree of immunity from French arrest, the mandarins passed information to gang leaders; with their connivance the pirates acted in many areas as a pseudo-government, levying protection-money for their own and the mandarins’ profit. Both sides depended on spies and informers, but since only a tiny handful of officers learned Vietnamese, the French were always at a great disadvantage. The rest were reliant on interpreters of questionable loyalty from among the ‘lettered’ minority, whose employment made them obvious targets for bribery. Minor operations up and down the waterways brought little but heatstroke and frustration; a company or two of local Skirmishers and French infantry, either marching across country or landed from boats, would usually arrive too late to catch the raiders, and most of the few successes were the result of chance encounters. Just a day’s journey from Hanoi, isolated posts and gunboat crews would see the glow of burning villages almost every night.

  While the Black Flags mainly haunted the upper river valleys, in the lowlands the bandits were usually local criminals dispersed in small groups in hamlets whose elders were bribed or terrorized into providing refuge. They kept in touch with one another – there were two loose networks, in the western and eastern Delta – and pooled their strength to attack promising targets.26 A few men had flintlocks or very occasionally a more modern firearm, but most carried swords and lances. They approached a village after dark by several separate paths, surrounding it quietly while a few scouts crept forward to reconnoitre the defences. The typical village was protected and masked by a high earth bank planted with a thick bamboo hedge rising to perhaps 12 feet; the ironwood gates could defy a battering-ram, and a look-out kept watch from a stilted bamboo platform. Cutting a stealthy gap through the hedge was difficult – the village dogs slept lightly, and an alert watchman often had time to rouse his neighbours. At the sound of the alarm the villagers would rush to barricade their houses and arm themselves with machetes, fishing-tridents, hunting bows and fire-hardened bamboo spears; if the attackers were few and spotted early they might be driven off empty-handed. But if the raiders numbered scores – or even hundreds, which was not unknown in these years of anarchy – then the houses would be burned down over the villagers’ heads while the bandits pillaged, killed and raped at leisure, often taking women with them when they left.

  During a gunboat trip up the Clear river in December 1884, Dr Hocquard’s eyes were drawn by the behaviour of feeding birds to three corpses that came bobbing past, two men and a woman; they had been impaled lengthways on thick bamboo stakes, and various hacked-off body parts were festooned around their necks on cords or stuffed into their mouths. All types of ‘pirates’ made examples of villagers who resisted them unsuccessfully, and with only word-of-mouth to spread their message they expressed it in the most unmistakable and eye-catching ways.27 When the appalled doctor exclaimed at this sight, the young Navy lieutenant told him that he routinely saw such evidence of Black Flag activity upriver; a few days previously he had passed four bodies impaled along a single stake. Considering (if we can bear to) the mechanics of creating such a human brochette, it becomes easier to understand French complacency over the Annamese law sentencing captured pirates to death by instant beheading. French witnesses to these executions who published protests in the liberal press perhaps failed to take sufficient account of the local context.28

  ON 8 SEPTEMBER 1884, GENERAL BRIÈRE DE L’ILE passed his 1st Brigade to Colonel Dujardin and took command of the Tonkin Expeditionary Corps. By that date the CET counted about 18,000 all ranks; the six infantry regiments numbered some 16,900 men, of whom nearly half (7,300) were Vietnamese, and the rest marching regiments each comprising three battalions of Naval Infantry, Algerian Skirmishers, Legion, joyeux, or Metropolitan Line infantry.29

  As the 1884 rainy season came to an end, Brière reacted to Chinese activity far south of Lang Son. There were reported to be two groups of about 5,000 and 3,000 regulars; to create some fresh air between them and the north-east approaches to the Delta, Brière despatched General de Négrier with three parallel columns totalling perhaps 3,500 men. In the east, Lieutenant-Colonel Donnier was to lead four Legion and two Line companies up the Thai Binh and Luc Nam rivers towards Chu; to Donnier’s west, Négrier himself would take nine Line companies and strong artillery up the Mandarin Road to Kep, while Major de Mibielle’s Algerian battalion would float between them according to need.30 On 6 October, Donnier advanced upriver with three gunboats, landing infantry to picket ahead up the banks. Two Legion companies ran into resistance at once, but Donnier drove the Chinese back steadily, capturing the defended village of Chu on the 10th. By nightfall his force had suffered 32 killed and 119 wounded, including Captain Beynet of the Legion and 2 other company commanders. Some Chinese units retreated quickly after contact, but others did not.

  On 8 October, Négrier’s 1,500-odd Line soldiers reached the village of Cham a few miles short of Kep, to surprise Chinese troops holding a series of defence works and forts across their path and on heights to their right. These were not the sort of Chinese who had fled before them at Bac Ninh. One unit manoeuvred aggressively under artillery and infantry fire, using the terrain well to get a determined counter-attack within 150 yards of the gun line, and stood their ground returning fire for a good ten minutes before withdrawing (one of their bullets broke Négrier’s leg). The Chinese in the fortified village itself showed themselves to be courageous and seasoned soldiers, holding out for three hours under shellfire and throwing back two assaults. During the five-hour battle Dr Hocquard (whose horse was killed under him) could not persuade his ambulance coolies to follow him forward and recover the wounded, whom he had to tend as well as he could in the front line under the inadequate cover of a bamboo thicket. The heat was pitiless, and Hocquard describes a man with smashed legs dragging himself towards a patch of shade with his clawed hands. The village finally fell to the third attack, in savage close-quarter fighting among the blazing houses; then, at last, the sky clouded over and a blessed drizzle began to fall on the delirious wounded. In the last redoubt the Chinese forced Négrier’s lignards to kill them all where they stood.

  In a pagoda that night Hocquard was extracting bullets in a pool of candlelight, with a line of wounded laid out on the shadowed stone floor under the remote gaze of the Buddha. The French had suffered 32 dead and 61 wounded; it would have been many more had the Chinese been better shots with their Remingtons and Mausers, but they habitually fired with the butt tucked into their armpit rather than shouldering it properly, so most shots went high. Some of their officers had shown real leadership and the troops great individual bravery, giving the lie to the French slander that they would never stand a charge; they had left perhaps 600 dead on the field.31

  Nevertheless, General de Négrier was still confident that he could take Lang Son (his nickname was ‘Mau-len’, from the Vietnamese for ‘Hurry up’; for German légionnaires this was also a pleasing pun
on ‘grumble’). For the time being Paris forbade this for political reasons, and while his leg mended during November and December 1884 he was limited to sending out aggressive columns through the hills. When Négrier was finally let off the leash, the Chinese would enjoy by chance the advantage of a coordination that they seemed unable to achieve by design, and the eventual outcome would be memorable both for the Legion and for the French prime minister. First, however, the eyes of General Brière’s staff at Viet Tri were drawn in another direction.

  TUYEN QUANG, HELD SINCE JUNE 1884 by Major Fraudet’s two companies from I/LE, stood in the path of Liu Yung-fu’s ambition to take Black Flags and Yunnan regulars back down the Red and Clear river corridor, and during September, Fraudet’s patrols found many signs that they were arriving. The old fort sat on the west bank of an elbow of the Clear river (about 150 yards wide here), in a swampy bowl overlooked by steep, wooded hills to the north, west and south and opposite on the east bank. There was hardly any cultivated land on the riverbank, but fishermen occupied hamlets spread a few hundred yards apart down the west bank below the fort.

  On the night of 12 October 1884, shots were fired at the walls and the nearest village was burned, and this harassment was repeated with increasing frequency and boldness over the following weeks. In this unhealthy post Fraudet’s 3rd and 4th Companies had been badly weakened by dysentery and fever, and he had too few fit légionnaires to risk sorties out of sight of the walls. Escorted supply boats came up from Phu Doan in the first week of November, but when the empty junks returned downriver on the 12th and 16th they were ambushed, and the gunboats Trombe and Revolver had to fight their way through. By now the fort was under fire almost every night, and General Brière decided that the garrison should be replaced. On 16 November a convoy sailed from Viet Tri under command of the Legion’s Colonel Duchesne: 1st and 2nd Companies I/LE, two companies of Naval Infantry, one from 1st Tonkinese Skirmishers, and an artillery section.

  The upper Clear river was shallow, and the junks and gunboats had to pick their way between rocks and gravel banks in cold, misty weather. By 18 November they were into rapids and gorges north of Phu Doan; the shallow-draft gunboats could keep going but not the junks, so the troops had to disembark on the west bank and march in Indian file through the thick forest from Hoa Moc, to cut across a big eastwards loop of the river (see Map 5a). On the morning of the 19th they ran into about 200 entrenched Chinese; during a brisk three- hour fight a Legion platoon became lost while moving through the forest, but by pure chance came out on the Chinese flank and drove them off. About 60 Chinese bodies were found; 8 marsouins and a légionnaire were hastily buried, and the column pressed on, carrying their 22 wounded. Late that afternoon they arrived at Tuyen Quang, where the gunboats joined them on the 20th.32

  For three days, while the garrisons changed over, Duchesne sent out strong fighting patrols, but on 23 November he headed downriver to install the Naval Infantry companies at Phu Doan. Tuyen Quang was provisioned for four months, and entrusted to just over 600 soldiers – two-thirds of them légionnaires – led by the 36-year-old Major Marc Edmond Dominé, and supported by the small gunboat Mitrailleuse anchored opposite the fort. The infantry had 500 rounds per man; the gunners had two little 40mm and two 80mm mountain guns, all rather weary, and the sailors two light Hotchkiss pieces (with only 2,500 rounds – not a generous supply for quick-firers). Dominé was an intelligent but rather dour man, a St Cyrien from a modest background, who had been heard to boast that his grandfather and seven great-uncles had all been sergeants at Waterloo. He had been wounded with the 2nd Zouaves in the Sud-Oranais, and a second bad wound during the Franco-Prussian War had left him with a permanently disabled right arm, but he had transferred to the unlovely 2nd Bat d’Af in order to get out to Tonkin. The légionnaires at first regarded him with blank-faced reserve, but that would change.33

  The fort itself was a square enclosure of dry-laid masonry walls about 9 feet high and 3 feet thick; it measured 300 yards on each side, with half-moon bastions in the centre of each – that on the south-east was within a few yards of the riverbank (see Map 5b). Roughly 30 yards inside the curtain wall the yellow earth rose in a steep bank, then sloped up to a hilltop about 120 feet above river level in the northern part of the enclosure. The four guns were emplaced on this ‘mamelon’, which was crowned with a number of brick pagodas used as the headquarters, stores, hospital and officers’ quarters. Over the next few weeks the garrison worked hard to improve the neglected defences, under the keen eyes of the sapper Sergeant Jules Bobillot (a 25-year-old former Parisian journalist), though hampered by the fact that there were only 27 picks and 40 shovels in the fort. Many shelters and internal trenches were dug, to allow free movement under cover and to seal off, if necessary, parts of the enclosure. Outside, a ditch and palisade fronted the walls all around, and the fringe of the jungle was cleared back where possible. There were a number of pagodas here and there on the riverside flats, and the nearest, between the southern corner of the fort and rocky outcrops on the riverbank, was fortified and tied into the perimeter; this salient commanding the southern approaches was christened ‘Little Gibraltar’, and would be held by Captain Dia’s Tonkinese company. A blockhouse was also built on a wooded spur that overlooked the walls from only 200 yards to the west. But however Dominé improved his fields of fire, the enemy’s would be better, and he had just 550 infantry to cover a perimeter of 1,200 yards.

  Native scouts and French patrols reported sightings and contacts, and intelligence suggested that there were at least 5,000 Yunnan regulars and Black Flags within 10 miles to the west and south. The fort had no signal lamp, and all communication with Phu Doan and Viet Tri was by native couriers on foot or in light, fast ‘basket-boats’. On 7 December campfires were seen to the north-west, and a company sortie ran into a reported 500 Chinese. On the 17th the last supply convoy reached the fort; when the sampans left they took back about 30 sick men from the garrison (Dominé had worked to improve the sanitation, but the damp hollow of Tuyen Quang was still something of a cesspit). On 21 December, Captain Cattelin’s légionnaires fought a successful patrol action, and there was firing at the walls on the night of the 22nd. (The next day the wives of the Tonkinese Skirmishers appeared; forbidden to accompany their men, they had slipped away from Phu Doan into the forest, braving tigers and Black Flags to join them at the fort.)

  On 31 December the blockhouse reported that about 500 men, screened by skirmishers, had approached within 1,500 yards and then withdrawn. This sounded ominously like regular troops practising. The night of 10 January 1885 was the first of several in succession when Black Flags tested the alertness of the garrison, shooting blind at the parapets to draw fire. Growing numbers of campfires were seen in the hills every night; and as the cold fog lifted at mid-morning on 16 January, lookouts spotted men digging, perhaps 600 yards to the south. The work continued steadily, and the shape of a classic ‘first parallel’ emerged – a continuous line of trenches facing the south of the fort.34 Assembled by morning drum signals, gangs of men could be seen carrying timber and fascines (brushwood bundles) to shore up the earth being shifted in baskets; this was not the work of Black Flags but real engineering, by Yunnan troops who had learned their art from the Muslim ore-miners of their province. A few shells from the fort dispersed them briefly, but Lieutenant Derappe did not have the ammunition for a continuous bombardment. Soon another trench was snaking forwards from the parallel, around the southern face of the blockhouse spur west of the fort.

  THE FIRST MAJOR ATTACK struck the post at 5.30am on 26 January. Rifle fire was heard from the south, and villagers came fleeing from the glow of flames through the fog to huddle in the ditches outside the walls. Under cover of the morning murk three columns each of about 700 attackers approached Little Gibraltar, the northern wall, and Sergeant Weber’s 18 légionnaires in the blockhouse. Flanking fire from the fort and the gunboat repulsed all these attempts, which left about 50 dead on the field for the reward o
f only two French wounded; but in the south the Chinese fell back only a few hundred yards to a dyke well ahead of their first trench line, and they continued to fire from its cover.35

  After the failure of these direct assaults, for several days both sides concentrated on digging. The Chinese extended their sideways trenches and pushed saps (zigzagging approach trenches) forwards, under constant covering fire from four rampart guns that swept the parapets from high ground. The garrison deepened their internal trenches and shelters, and completed a short covered trench from the east gate to the riverbank for water parties. A Legion platoon of picked snipers harassed the siege work; on 27 January a bugler would blow a call each time they made a hit, but that stopped when Private Taube was killed by a Chinese sniper.

  It was clear that the blockhouse garrison would soon be cut off and doomed to fall to a night rush, when the fort guns would not be able to support them; but by day Derappe could still ensure a clear path for Sergeant Weber, who brought his men in without loss on 30 January. The Chinese immediately occupied the spur and began work on a gun battery; there was already scattered shelling from hills to the south-west, and the next day guns also opened fire from a height on the east bank. By 1 February, Sergeant Bobillot had reported that a second parallel was being developed from a sap-head 160 yards from the south-west wall, and by the night of 5/6 February saps had reached the fort ditch on both west and north corners; the palisade was gapped, and trenches sprouted sideways to clutch the base of the walls. When the inevitable infantry assaults did come, it was clear that their main objectives would be the north-west wall and the west corner, thus limiting the amount of useful flanking fire that Little Gibraltar in the south could deliver. The textbook response would have been infantry sorties with powder charges to kill engineers and wreck the works, but any such attempt by daylight would have been suicidal under the continuous short-range firing at the parapets. Some 6,000 incoming rounds of all calibres were counted during a single day, and the garrison were suffering a steady drain of dead and wounded.