Bengal, Siberia and Korea
January 1896
The gang descended on the village just before dawn, as the men were leaving for the fields. The villagers were still shaking off sleep, and there was no thought of resistance, especially once the invaders showed their knives. With practiced skill, they isolated the ones they wanted, all strong men, between sixteen and thirty. Two or three grabbed each victim, and they hustled the struggling men to the small square that lay between the huts.
“You men have the honor of joining the Indian Army!” the leader shouted. “We’ll march you to Calcutta and you’ll take the oath. You’ll get fed and paid, a lot better than you pigs are living here, and you’ll do something for your country.”
There was protest from the men and wailing from the wives and mothers. There always was. The press-gang had learned not to care. The zamindar was paying them well to do this, and
he was getting – who knew? Money? Titles? Land? No doubt the Raj would meet whatever price he wanted; the British needed soldiers badly, and with the Congress off fighting the rajas, recruitment had dried up. Rich men hiring poor men to join in return for the bounty, zamindars sending press-gangs out to their peasants – it was all happening, no matter how loudly the women complained.
The press-gangers had learned so well to ignore the protests, in fact, that it took them just a second too long to realize that the noise had changed, and that they hadn’t been the only ones waiting in ambush outside the village.
Knives flashed in the predawn light, and the leader was cut down before he could say a word. Then the enemies, whoever they were, closed in. It was a brutal fight at close quarters, but it lasted only seconds. The press-gangers were loyal to the zamindar and they liked the pay he gave them, but it wasn’t worth fighting to the death over. One of them, realizing they were outnumbered, turned and fled; the others, seeing him run, followed.
“Tell the zamindar his bullies aren’t welcome here!” the enemy captain called.
The villagers milled around, still stunned by the speed and ferocity with which things had happened. They’d heard of rival press-gangs fighting over recruits, and the women and old men ran to the newly-released prisoners in a futile gesture of protection.
But it wasn’t that. “Go on home,” the captain said. “We’ll sign you up if you’re willing – you can join our regiments and fight in Italy – but we won’t take you if you’re not.”
There were whispered conferences, but the women still clung to their men, not certain if it was a trick. And there was something else…
“The zamindar,” protested the village headman. “He’ll send more men here. He’ll want revenge for this.”
“He will,” the captain answered. “Which is why we brought you guns. And Ahmed here will stay with you and teach you how to use them. He got his arm shot off in the war, so they sent him home, but he still knows how to fight. He’ll make an army of you, and the zamindar’s thieves can go to hell.”
“Ahmed?” one of the villagers asked, looking at the scarred veteran who had stepped forward. “A Muslim?”
“A Congress man. And an Indian.”
Major John O’Malley shivered in his greatcoat. Winter on the steppes made January in Ireland seem like high summer; the cold was worse than anything he’d known in thirty years of soldiering, and he wondered how anything living could stand it. But the fur-clad Kazakhs clearly could; they were as hardy as their ponies, and they looked as unconcerned as if they were out for a morning’s promenade.
“We’re almost there,” he said in his painfully-learned Kazakh. “Careful of patrols.”
“Careful, always careful,” answered one of the nomad officers – Yerbol, his name was. “Do we always have to hide like mice?”
It was a joke, but O’Malley took it dead seriously. “You can go to Yusuf Celer if you want – he’s the one talking about training an army and building a state. But I’ll tell you something. It won’t work.”
“We can’t fight the Russians?” Now Yerbol was also serious, his honor insulted.
“You can fight them. But not army to army – not yet, not until we can get you more cannon and machine guns. You’re better soldiers than they are” – it seemed politic to say that, and it was true often enough – “but a man with a knife can’t fight a man with a gun. You can’t win by opposing strength with weakness – you have to oppose strength with strength, and you’re stronger on razzia than fighting in line.”
Just then, O’Malley saw a glint of metal in the distance. “Like here, and now.”
In a few minutes the eighty men had reached the railroad tracks and begun unloading the explosive charges from the sleigh. There were no Russians in sight, and Yerbol’s feigned pique had turned to very real glee; a couple of the men were singing an impromptu song about how the Russian locomotives would meet their doom, and how their coals would go to stoke the fires that awaited the Russian soldiers in hell.
The major didn’t join in the song; he looked out anxiously to where the sentries were riding, hoping that the enemy hadn’t anticipated them. But no ambush came, and the Kazakhs began riding in from the points where they’d set the charges. There was a sudden thunder, signaling an explosion half a mile to the east; then another the same distance to the west, two more slightly closer, and two more closer yet.
“Ride, ride!” Yerbol shouted as his men lit the closest fuse. The Kazakhs vaulted onto their ponies and rode south for their very lives as the explosions continued; it seemed only seconds later that the largest blast of all blew the water tower to kingdom come. The nomads were cheering and yelling, “Yerbol
batyr ! O’Malley
batyr!”
Batyr – hero. So they were heroes now, all for blowing up some tracks.
O’Malley looked back in the saddle; darkness hid the scene, and what little he could see was screened by dust, but he knew that a mile of the Trans-Siberian Railroad lay in ruins.
“They’ll have to guard every foot of track now!” Yerbol called.
“That, or move things across this part of Siberia by sled.” Either way, it would slow the Russians down, and buy time for the men in the grand tents to the south to build their republic.
“If they do, O’Malley
batyr, we’ll be there.”
“We will. But there’s a supply train we need to catch first.”
There must be a reason they are here, Seong Il Pae reflected. Surely there was a story behind the column of troops advancing up the road toward him: maybe the militarists had won out in the struggle to control the Japanese court, maybe Britain had finally made Tokyo an offer that was too good to refuse, maybe there had simply been one anti-Japanese riot too many. No doubt it was all the subject of learned discussion in Paris or New York, or in the chanceries of Seoul.
None of that mattered to him now, though. Why the Japanese were here mattered less than
that they were here, and that
he was here to face them.
Beside him, Ivan Teterin watched the column impassively – something else for which the reason mattered less than the fact. Teterin had been a military officer in the past, and a high-ranking one; Seong was sure of that. But he’d also been other things, and Seong wasn’t quite certain what they were. And now – now, he held no rank in the Korean army, but if he gave orders, the soldiers would follow them. Even Seong would follow them. He’d been to the Russian military academy, like most of the new generation of Korean officers, and he’d learned to respect the Russians’ voice of experience.
“Soon,” said Teterin quietly. Seong wasn’t sure if he was talking to himself or to the Korean officers, but he could see the same thing. The Japanese column was almost within rifle range, and they were unlimbering their field guns. The few pieces of mountain artillery the Koreans had managed to drag through the snowbound roads were firing already, but Seong’s force seemed pitifully small next to the enemy.
“Now,
daeryeong,” Teterin said. That was Seong’s rank; it wasn’t one his father would have recognized, but the army had completely redone its system of rank and command in the past decade. Teterin spoke as one offering a respectful suggestion, but Seong recognized the words as the order they were, and called out orders to his own men.
Machine-gun and rifle fire burst from the Korean positions, and the first rank of the Japanese column went down as if scythed. But the Japanese kept coming. Koreans began falling, and the air was full of the noise of battle: the crack of bullets, shouted orders, screams of pain.
By now it was clear that Seong’s force wouldn’t be able to stop the Japanese; the enemy artillery was pounding his makeshift barricades to pieces, and the advancing column would soon be in a position to get around his flank and pour machine-gun fire into his troops. He hoped that was as obvious to the Japanese as it was to him, and it seemed to be; sensing victory within their grasp, the Japanese officers urged their men into a run.
And as they did, the Righteous Army descended from the hillsides.
One more thing not to wonder too much about, Seong thought as they charged. The peasants hated the Japanese, and they were loyal to the queen who’d given them the land she confiscated from the rebellious gentry. For that, they were willing to accept a great deal – even that the loyal gentry still had their land – and they were willing to fight. And as long as that was so, who was Seong to question the strange rites they held over Russian icons or their commanders’ claim of prophecy?
The peasants were poorly armed; they had no artillery or machine guns, and some lacked even rifles. The Japanese gunfire took a fearful toll. But there were so
many of them – they outnumbered the Japanese column as the column did Seong’s regulars – and when they got to close quarters, they had no mercy. Slowly, the Japanese began pulling back; they retreated in good order and worked a slaughter on any peasants foolish enough to pursue them, but they retreated.
“And now
we pull back,” Teterin said.
“We don’t stay here? We can do this to them again.”
“They’ll have more men when they come back, and they’ll have a cavalry screen. We’ll find another ambush point further north, and slow them down again.”
Slow them down. Seong hoped he could slow them down enough to let the main army and the Russian auxiliaries finish their defensive line, and that the troops on that line would be able to do more than that. If they couldn’t, then all his Russian training and all the Righteous Army’s fanaticism wouldn’t matter.
But that could wait for tomorrow. He’d survived today.
