JEAN PFIRMANN’S COMBAT SERVICE came to an end less than a week after his previous action. On 3 September 1889 his company were sent to search the village of Thuong Lam, surrounded by marshland and approachable only in single file along a dyke. It had the usual high bamboo hedge and substantial earth walls (Manington said that in the Yen The these were often doubled or even tripled), completely masking the interior until the vanguard actually reached the barricaded gate. As soon as Lieutenant Chavy’s leading Skirmishers began to break it down, a strong party of rebels inside suddenly jumped up and opened heavy fire from the walls on the exposed soldiers.
Chavy and his corporal were killed at once; Pfirmann’s admired Lieutenant Ollivier had his horse shot under him and his orderly killed beside him, before falling himself with a bullet in the stomach. The fighting was intense and prolonged; nearby, Captain Le Nourichel of III/2nd RE heard the firing and brought his company to help, but he, too, was mortally wounded. By the time the surviving defenders fled the French had suffered 11 killed and 20 wounded; 18 of the casualties were légionnaires, 2 of their 7 dead were company commanders and one was old Private Olbrecht, who wore the Mexico Medal. The medical officer was fetched to the scene, but Lieutenant Ollivier was past all help; he had a perforated intestine and a smashed spine, and by the time his men had reached him in the swamp he was covered with leeches. Corporal Pfirmann was promoted sergeant on the spot and was cited for the Médaille, but his right arm had been smashed by bullets in two places, and his time with the company was over. He endured eleven agonizing hours in the saddle of a nervous horse before reaching Phu Lang Thuong, and then a river trip back to the hospital at Haiphong.30
THE BRITISH ARMY VETERAN Corporal Frederic Martyn arrived in the late spring of 1890, and at Phu Lang Thuong he was assigned to Captain Plessier’s 1st Company of Major Berard’s II/1st RE; Martyn admired Plessier greatly, for his calm courage and his thoughtfulness towards his men.31 De Tam’s bands reduced the Yen The lowlands to anarchy that summer, and when the rainy season ended General Godin determined to clean out one of his reported strongholds at Cao Thuong. He assembled about 1,200 men in three columns, to rendezvous on 6 November 1890 a couple of hours’ march south of the bandit fort.
Marching with full packs in stifling weather – ‘loaded up like pedlars’ asses’ – Martyn’s company and one of Skirmishers reached a strongly palisaded village in a clearing in thick forest, but found it empty. They dumped packs to rest, but then came under fire from a ‘deserted village’ visible on a nearby hilltop surrounded by dense jungle, which turned out to be the actual fort. The pair of mountain guns opened up, but it took the infantry hours to chop approach paths through the bush. Eventually they got men around a flank and close to the loopholed stockade, only to come under heavy fire from repeating rifles; an exchange of mostly blind firing through the thick bush cost French casualties and achieved nothing. When they advanced again the following morning the rebels had already withdrawn, handling an optimistic French stop-line roughly as they went. From the overnight bivouac Martyn recalled an excellent supper of fried suckling-pig, but also the pitiful exhaustion of a company of young Naval Infantrymen from the other column. Manington had a very similar memory of a camp during the advance on a rebel fort in March 1892. Around the campfires the légionnaires smoked and sang; the Skirmishers let their long hair down over their shoulders and chatted quietly, automatically waving away the mosquitoes with their paper fans; but the young French marsouins talked longingly of home.32
DESPITE THEIR CONSTANT WEARINESS, soldiers whose nerves were not twanging in expectation of imminent action were sometimes struck by the wild magnificence of the mountain scenery. There was something undeniably magical about emerging from the bamboo on to some rocky outcrop above a cloud-filled valley, gilded by sunlight and loud with the roar of unseen waterfalls. Corporal Martyn was a tough-minded man, but he recalled the jungle in rhapsodic terms:Try to fancy geraniums, fuchsias, and such like flowers, thirty feet high and with trunks twice the thickness of a man’s body. Imagine, multiplied a hundred thousand times, the scent of an old-fashioned flower garden thickly planted with stocks, wallflowers, pinks, mignonette, carnations, and any other sweet-smelling flowers that come into your mind. Picture giant flower-trees whose blossoms start the day a pure white and then change from this successively to the palest of pale pinks, and every other shade in the gradations of red until at sunset the flowers are a deep rich crimson. Palms, bananas, frangi-pannis, shaddocks, and every other tropical tree that you can call to mind . . . covered with ivy and climbing plants of all descriptions until the whole was one glorious tangle of scent and colour. And the inhabitants of these virgin forests! Gorgeous peacocks, pleasing silver pheasants, flocks of screaming parrots and parakeets, deer, wild pig, bears, panthers, tigers – were all to be found there in plenty, practically unmolested.33
A month later the local command once again demonstrated their tendency to underestimate the enemy. On 9 December 1890 patrols were sent out to find another reported stronghold at Hue Thué. After groping their way through thick bush, Martyn’s company found a hidden trail and followed it to a palisade in a clearing, where they came under fire. In the dense forest it was extremely difficult to make out what they were up against, but when they climbed higher ground and could peer down through the treetops a whole defensive complex was revealed, on two hillocks above a stream. The first palisade was simply a flanking outwork, though strong enough; from there a communication trench led down to the stream, beyond which rose a Chinese-style fort with buildings big enough for a battalion, and 10-foot brick ramparts protected by three successive outer belts of palisades, panji-fields, ‘wolf-pits’ and ditches. The only two possible approaches through the forest were narrow, and were both covered from the outwork and the fort, whose loopholed walls and protruding corner bastions allowed fire in all directions. After sketching this remarkable fortification, Captain Plessier withdrew his men (taking six casualties from snipers in treetop platforms), and reported what he had seen.34
Despite his warning, on 11 December a Major Fane led his Naval Infantry in an ill-planned attack and was forced to retreat with heavy casualties; on the same day, Martyn’s company discovered a village transformed into a nightmare butcher’s-shop on the unjust suspicion of having betrayed the site of the bandit stronghold. On 22 December yet another assault was made on Hue Thué, by about 1,000 mostly Naval Infantry and Skirmishers under Lieutenant-Colonel Winckelmeyer. Although they dragged five guns through the jungle, the infantry came under such heavy fire from Spencer repeaters that all impetus was lost before an assault could be attempted. In barely an hour they suffered were more than 100 casualties, and when Winckelmeyer fell back, many of his dead – and their weapons – had to be left behind. Only half of Captain Plessier’s Legion company were involved, initially as artillery guards, but they were later scooped up to join an attack on the palisaded northern outwork. This cost them 9 killed and 24 wounded; only a couple of légionnaires got through even the outer stockade, and one of those was soon struggling to free the other from the panji-pit where he lay impaled through the thigh.
The renegade mandarin De Nam had apparently joined his lieutenant De Tam in person, but his men were finally forced to give up Hue Thué on 11 January 1891, after a twelve-day operation by a brigade under Colonel Frey which employed full-scale siege tactics. His shells finally set the fort buildings ablaze; after keeping up a steady fire from the ramparts until nightfall the defenders buried their dead, picked up their wounded, and slipped away through the darkness, to establish a new fortress a few miles to the north. Frey dynamited Hue Thué, and the high command immediately broke up his brigade in the apparent belief that the region was now pacified.35
DURING JANUARY 1891, Captain Plessier’s company were ordered to build and hold a new post at Nha Nam about 3 miles south-west of Hue Thué. Martyn missed the final operation; he had come down with blackwater fever, and was lucky to survive a month in the rudimentary fie
ld hospital at Phu Lang Thuong. In February he was enjoying the care of the Sisters of Mercy in the general hospital at Quang Yen on the coast, and in March he was repatriated to Algeria. He thus missed the arrival at Nha Nam in April 1891 of his countryman George Manington, posted to the same company. Manington, too, liked Captain Plessier immediately, for his tireless energy and dry wit; he was a strict disciplinarian but very just, and the men were clearly devoted to him. Manington was assigned to a brick-making gang, which had to be guarded at all times by a corporal’s squad. Inside a precautionary stockade Nha Nam post was still only partly built, and the hilltop was entrenched. It did, however, incorporate two abandoned pagodas, in one of which Manington had his bed-space, and he thus had solid walls round him during his first night-time harassing attack on 5 April.
The men slept in their fatigues and kept a small shaded lamp burning, so when the alarm sounded it was the work of a moment to pull on boots and grab rifle and ammunition belt. The Englishman and two comrades manned one of the windows while the corporal blew out the lamp. Under bright starlight the forest about 400 yards north was speckled with muzzle-flashes across a front of a quarter of a mile; Manington could make out the rat . . . tat . . . tat of Winchesters being fired as fast as the lever could be worked, punctuated by the deeper, slower boom of Gras or Sniders. Bullets whirred and droned overhead, thudded into the stockade and the pagoda wall and broke tiles on the roof; one passed close by his head and thunked into the plastered wall behind. The rifle-flashes spread around to the left and came closer, some only 100 yards away; in Manington’s room a water-pot leapt from a shelf in fragments, and a drilled tin mug clattered to the floor. He ached to return fire, but still the fort lay silent.
After half an hour Lieutenant Meyer appeared with his bugler, making the rounds of his platoon, to prepare them to give six rounds’ independent fire at 100 yards’ range. When the bugler at the door sounded the call, everyone happily let fly at the muzzle-flashes, though the powder-smoke quickly blinded them; when the ceasefire was blown the room was fogged with it, thickly enough to make men cough. The enemy fire had become much more scattered, and soon only one or two shots were heard receding into the distance; there was a final tinkle from a smashed roof-tile, then silence. Captain Plessier made his rounds with the surgeon, but the only casualty was the sergeant-major’s dog (which recovered).36
DURING THE HOT, DRY SPRING spies reported twice-weekly convoys of food heading north into the hills, usually during the middle of the day when the sun kept the légionnaires inside. Patrols were sent out to lie up in deserted villages, and during one of these Manington had his first face-to-face fight. A nervous Skirmisher spoiled an ambush on some 60 green-clad bandits escorting a large column of coolies, but Manington brought down their point man and captured a Winchester. Short local patrols were made morning and evening, but otherwise the men had little to do. Bored post commanders tended to indulge their own enthusiasms; Plessier, typically, took the opportunity to give his légionnaires extra time on the rifle range, while up at Lang Son the captain of 3rd Company, II/1st RE set his men to dyeing their khakis green, with such mixed results that they were nicknamed ‘the parakeet brigade’. The food was plentiful and varied, with village markets supplementing the commissariat rations; the 2nd Brigade commander at Bac Ninh, now General Voyron, insisted on providing the men with fresh vegetables, and woe betide the post commander who could not show him a flourishing kitchen garden when he made his tours of inspection.37
Plessier sent hand-picked Skirmisher volunteers disguised as pedlars or musicians out around the villages in search of intelligence, and early in the 1891 monsoon season one of them brought word of bandits holed up in a nearby village, collecting taxes. The captain led Manington’s platoon and two of Skirmishers on a surprise night march; for two hours, under heavy rain that covered their noise, they filed along paddy-dykes in pitch darkness, each soldier holding the belt of the man ahead. After a chilled wait in cover just outside the village, sunrise brought a child out of the gate with three buffaloes, and as soon as the gate-bars slid open Plessier blew his whistle. Slipping, cursing légionnaires and startled buffaloes collided in the gateway; there was brief pandemonium in the narrow, twisting alleys beyond, a flurry of shots, and the headman’s door was smashed down to reveal a richly dressed rebel too woozy with opium to put up a fight. At the cost of 2 slightly wounded, the result was 5 bandits killed, 6 prisoners and 9 rifles taken.38
The rebel chief was subseqently ‘turned’ when he learned that the displeased De Nam had had his aged parents executed, and he proved a valuable guide during several long reconnaissances in September. After being tried by mandarins who came up from Bac Ninh, the other prisoners were executed outside the fort; Manington’s eyewitness description matches several others in every respect. Marched to the place of execution by the mandarins’ guards, the condemned knelt down with remarkable calm, and their blouses were pulled down from their necks. The executioner wetted a finger in his mouth and drew a line of red-brown betel juice across the bent neck as an aiming-mark; he then struck the head off with a single blow of his heavy sword – and the others awaiting their turn smiled, and expressed relieved pleasure at his skill. Their bodies were released to their families, but their heads adorned poles as a warning to others.39
MANINGTON’S SHARPEST FIGHT came on 12 September 1891, when Plessier led a patrol of 30 légionnaires and 30 Skirmishers to investigate a rumour that a formerly abandoned village had been reoccupied. No trouble was anticipated, and for the sake of lightness the légionnaires were only carrying 36 rounds per man, though the Skirmishers had the full 120 cartridges in their pouches (they carried shorter cavalry rifles, but the ammunition was common to both types). Women were seen working in the fields, but they fled at the sight of the soldiers. Plessier sent most of his men forward towards the village in an extended line, leaving Lieutenant Bennet on the path with a small reserve. About 200 yards from the huts they came under heavy fire, and four men fell; when the soldiers took cover behind dykes, another group opened up on them from the left flank, and the sound of orders being shouted through brass speaking-trumpets suggested that these were semi-regulars from De Nam’s main force. Bennet’s reserve ran up to extend the front into an L-shape on the left, but soon the rebels could be seen advancing in a disciplined skirmish line, pausing to fire between rushes, and with so little ammunition the platoon was in real danger.
Manington recalled the confidence they drew from the example of Captain Plessier – who was wearing whites that day – walking up and down behind the kneeling firing-line with his helmet at a jaunty angle, giving calm orders, smoking a cigarette and absent-mindedly slapping his gaiters with his cane. The Skirmishers were ignoring their sergeants and firing wildly, so some of their cartridges were collected and distributed to the légionnaires. The wounded were picked up and Plessier ordered a leap-frogging retreat by squads, each pausing to give covering fire for the others’ movement. They were pursued to within a mile of Nha Nam, and at one point Lieutenant Bennet thought it best to pick up a fallen man’s rifle and join in the rearguard’s firing – one can imagine him steadying their mood with jokes about his marksmanship.40
THE GREATEST KILLER OF LÉGIONNAIRES – blackwater fever – got its claws into George Manington’s liver when his platoon were detached (without a Legion officer) to a notoriously unhealthy post at Cho Trang. Within three weeks more than half of the 30 men were down with a fever far worse than the usual malaria, the victims lapsing into delirium within a couple of hours of the first shivering fits. The garrison was so weakened that it was hard to find men to go out to meet the weekly supply party, and a soldier might have to stand guard three nights in a week. Manington, like Pfirmann, described the patient kindness shown by légionnaires to their sick comrades, but they could do little more than sponge them and pile on blankets as the hot and cold fits alternated. The post commander (a Naval Infantry lieutenant, who did not impress Manington) dished out medicine according
to a symptom recognition manual, but to little effect – blackwater fever responded to no medicine. When Captain Plessier and the battalion surgeon paid a visit of inspection, Manington was evacuated on the captain’s spare pony, and spent two months amid the sea breezes of Quang Yen.41 His eventual return to Bo Ha in January 1892, on a supply sampan up the Thuong river, brought out the same lyrical streak that occasionally softens Corporal Martyn’s memoir:The evening was a beautiful one . . . I lay for several hours, my loaded rifle beside me, enjoying the varied spectacle . . . [The] water was very clear, and ran over a sandy bottom, studded here and there with large rocks, and between steep banks . . . Along either side ran groves of tall bamboos, which seemed to salute us with a graceful nod as we glided by. Sometimes there was a break, and an old pagoda, with a quaintly curved roof of red-brown tiles, came into view. Now the river would run through a few miles of forest and jungle, offering no sign of occupation by man. Enormous trees rose superbly from the banks . . . and their massive branches extended for many feet over its waters, on which their foliage threw a pleasant and picturesque shadow. From these great limbs hung numerous flexible creepers, some of them starred with orchid-like blooms of white and yellow . . .
Our journey between these walls of verdure, the forms and tints of which were ever changing, was one of the most delightful of experiences . . . When night came down and blotted out all colour and outline, I turned on to my back and watched the stars as they came out one by one. For an hour or so I lay open-eyed, yet dreaming, till the monotonous chant of our boatman . . . finally lulled me into a profound slumber.42
Our Friends Beneath the Sands Page 29