Chapter Ninety-Two: Troops Besiege Yumen County
92. The Siege of Yumen County
After the wounded had been sent to the rear for treatment, and the dead returned to their native places for burial, Li Wenyuan led his troops onward toward Yumen County. They marched by day and camped by night, eating when they were hungry and drinking when they were thirsty, and at last they arrived before Li Gui’s reinforcements could reach the place, surrounding Yumen County on all sides.
In truth, the Yumen spoken of here was not the pass of the Great Wall’s Nine Gates, nor was it the famed Yumen Pass that guarded Dunhuang. It was merely a county seat standing astride a vital military route.
After all, when a great army marched, it was unavoidable that a long train of supply carts and pack animals must follow in its wake. The limits of transport made ancient armies fight bitterly over these strongholds set along the lines of march. In ages past, a fortress garrisoned by only a few thousand men could easily bar the road to a host numbering tens of thousands. That was why, before the advent of airplanes, automobiles, and trains, all armies approached the tactic of infiltration and encirclement with caution. Such maneuvers could often bring victory by surprise, but they also carried the danger of being encircled in turn. On a battlefield, fortunes changed in the blink of an eye; between being trapped to death and suddenly breaking through to success, there was only the narrowest of lines. Thus, except when a war had entered a deadlock, very few commanders were willing to choose so perilous a course.
After ordering his men to surround the county seat before him, Li Wenyuan became intensely curious about this place, which was no mountain pass but simply a county town no different from those in the interior. It was only after the army’s scouts brought back reports that he finally understood: this Yumen was Yumen County, the first barrier facing the interior from Dunhuang Commandery, and not the grand Yumen Pass that had stood for centuries against the steppe nomads.
Because it did not bear the same military burden as Yumen Pass, serving instead only as a resting place for merchants and troops passing through, the county seat before him had no especially formidable fortifications. In several places, the bricks of the wall had already flaked away under years of wind and rain, exposing the packed-earth core and the timber framework within.
At that moment, the gates of Yumen County were shut tight, and the broad banners bearing the Sui emblem that had once been common across the Central Plains were nowhere to be seen. In their place flew only banners marked with the character for Li. After studying the county carefully, Li Wenyuan had some ideas about how to take it. Still, because the soldiers defending the walls were all Chinese men, he chose, at least for the moment, to try persuasion first.
Once he gave the order, more than a hundred men with thunderous voices stepped out from the ranks. They moved beyond the range of the defenders’ arrows, lifted iron megaphones to their mouths, and shouted the surrender proclamation that had long been prepared. The proclamation had been drafted personally by Zhang Juntai, and Li Wenyuan had read it as well. In essence, it said that Li Wenyuan had come by imperial command to suppress Li Gui’s rebellion, and that the rebellion had been Li Gui’s own doing alone. Men like them, soldiers and low-ranking officers, had merely been deceived by Li Gui and temporarily clouded in mind, and had thus committed this act of grave treason. The emperor’s grace was vast: if they now repented, opened the gates, and surrendered, their former offenses would be forgiven. Their pay would be restored according to their rank, and their posts would be assigned anew. But if they persisted in resistance until the end, then after the city was taken they would all be held to account. The families of everyone involved in the rebellion would be punished: the men executed, the women enslaved as government servants. It was the familiar blend of mercy and menace.
Li Wenyuan had little confidence in the effect of this proclamation. After all, the soldiers in Li Gui’s army had all been drawn from the four commanderies and prefectures under his control. Their families would surely be there as well, and perhaps already under Li Gui’s sway. If they surrendered now, their kin would almost certainly perish. But if they held out to the end, perhaps they could at least preserve the safety of their families.
And so it proved. The hundred-odd men shouted for an entire morning, yet they could not move the defenders to open the gates and surrender. When Li Wenyuan saw that the troops prepared for assault in the camp were already ready, he ceased wasting words with the garrison. He sent the persuaders back, then directly ordered Zhang Juntai to begin the assault.
From the rear camp, Li Wenyuan watched as Zhang Juntai directed the troops in their attack on Yumen County. Infantrymen, shields raised against the rain of arrows from the battlements, hauled ladders to the foot of the walls, then leaned them slowly against the masonry and began to climb, ready to fight their way onto the ramparts.
The defenders within the city began to use pole-beams to shove the ladders back down, while in places where no such devices were available, they hurled logs, stones, and other heavy missiles from above. When the first three assaults were beaten back in succession, Zhang Juntai’s eyes went red with fury, and he even wanted to strip off his shirt and charge forward himself. Li Wenyuan seized him and pulled him back.
“Stop holding back,” Li Wenyuan told him. “Use Yumen as a place to train the men. Send in the Second Division.”
With no other choice, Zhang Juntai nodded and ordered the Second Division to begin the assault.
They had already seen clearly that the walls of Yumen County were built of packed earth reinforced with timber beams and then faced with brick. Because the county lay in the dry northwest, where water was always scarce, and because it bore no major military responsibility, it did not even have a moat. Under the cover of the First Division’s musket fire rattling against the walls above, the soldiers of the Second Division began digging tunnels straight toward the base of the ramparts.
After digging for a long time, they finally brought their passage to the foot of Yumen County’s wall. There they found the timber pilings of the foundation, but after long burial underground, the supports had rotted badly and would snap at the slightest touch. The men of the Second Division quickly set many new posts in the places where the old foundations had stood, preventing the wall from collapsing at once, and then widened the hollow beneath it a little more.
Of course, not every tunneling team went smoothly. In all, twenty teams had been sent out to drive tunnels toward Yumen County from different directions, but one detachment after another suffered cave-ins along the way because they had hurried the work too much. Others managed, after great difficulty, to dig beneath the city, only to be detected by the defenders through listening methods. The garrison then broke into the tunnels and poured poison smoke, boiling water, and fire through the openings, inflicting heavy losses on the Second Division as well.
Fortunately, most of the teams still succeeded in driving their tunnels beneath the walls. They then smeared the foundation posts with flammable substances, used gunpowder to carry the blaze outward through the passage, and at last ignited the powder with flint. One stream of fire after another bored slowly into the depths beneath the wall, setting the rotten supports alight. Even the auxiliary posts burned through, leaving great cavities in the earth. At last the combined weight of the wall above and the packed earth within could no longer be borne. One section after another collapsed. The once-sturdy ramparts were suddenly broken by several gaping breaches. At that point, the First Division’s saber infantry set out from the camp, armored in thick mail and braving the remnant rain of arrows from the battlements. They charged through the openings made by the collapsing wall and began their fight to storm the city.
The End.