The Bloody White Baron (26 page)

The God of War, meanwhile, was planning his next move. By the New Year there were enough soldiers to make another attack on Urga viable. Ungern had kept up reconnaissance and skirmishing throughout the winter; the American representative of the Mongolian Trading Company reported that the edge of town was harassed by ‘strange patrols of Cossacks and Mongols' who cut the telegraph lines. Ungern's men had been setting night-fires on top of Bogd Uhl, Holy Mountain, for two months. Blazing high in the darkness, they looked unearthly, and the Mongolians whispered that Ungern was making sacrifices to the mountain spirits, the
savdag
, to curse those who had brought evil upon the Bogd. The Chinese soldiers were nervous of the wrath of the mountain gods
³¹
- also common in Daoism and Chinese Buddhism - and refused to aim their artillery at the mountain. The Mongolians
delighted in telling the Chinese tall stories about the extent of the Baron's army, his supernatural powers, and the fierceness of his soldiers.

Frightened of spies, the Chinese tried to seal off the town as best they could, but Ungern remained in communication with the Bogd Khan, and also with spies in the city. On 18 January, 1921 he moved his army to a site on the Tula river, only twenty-six miles from the city. He sent a large group of men to engage a Chinese detachment to the north, resulting in a short battle and convincing the Chinese that the main attack would come from that direction of the Tula. In truth, Ungern planned to attack from the south and east, this time decisively, but he still faced some formidable obstacles.

Urga was not a naturally defensible site. Before the coming of foreigners it had been more or less unwalled. Respect for its holy status had dissuaded most would-be attackers and there were no fortifications around the Mongol section. Traditionally, the Mongolians had regarded city walls and strong defences as anathema to their way of life and of warfare. Although during their campaigns they had rapidly developed great skill at siege warfare, adopting the methods of the Chinese artillery and sappers, they still thought of hiding behind walls as somehow cowardly. They had no respect for cowards and most of their worst atrocities were committed after taking fortified cities.

In contrast, the Chinese have something of a reputation for walls, both national and domestic. The Great Wall itself functioned more as customs border and cultural marker than fortification, but nevertheless represented the fundamental Chinese attitude towards the northern barbarians. Chinese city walls were used as major defensive points during the war against Japan, many of them blasted into rubble by Japanese artillery - and the surviving masonry torn down by the communists as a symbol of the feudal past. In Beijing today, middle-class apartment blocks are insulated from the slums around them by two or three layers of wall topped with glass and a platoon of guards and barbed wire in the bushes.

Unsurprisingly, then, almost the first thing the Chinese forces in Urga did was build some walls. The Mongolian centre of the city was composed of gers surrounded by fences, with the occasional temple, and so was entirely unprotected. As before, the Chinese were forced to concentrate their troops in the Chinese suburbs, Upper and Lower
Maimaichen. They formed a kind of crescent around the southern part of Urga, with the old Russian consulate area sandwiched between them. From Upper Maimaichen ran

Matters weren't helped by Urga's topography, nestled in a valley with hills overlooking each side and having no natural barriers to deter an attack. In summer the Tula river (then a fierce current; nowadays, thanks to drainage, a slow stream) would have provided some natural protection, but this was winter and it was solidly frozen; a slippery inconvenience rather than a major obstacle. The outer defences of Upper Maimaichen had been poor when Ungern had first attacked, but now the Chinese were better prepared, and had enclosed Upper Maimaichen in a network of trenches, fences, barricades and wire. Beyond this outer layer of defence lay an inner fortress, the solid stone buildings of the Russian consulate and gold-mining company. The Russians had fortified these a decade earlier during the revolution of 1911, and the Chinese repaired and reinforced them.

The quality of the defences may have been sound, but the quality of the soldiers was not. The Chinese soldiers were typical of their time; they had been recruited from the displaced peasantry or the urban poor by one warlord or another, given a modicum of training and, if they were lucky, a working rifle, and sent off to fight in one of China's seemingly endless civil struggles. They were used to changing sides when defeat threatened, and, with no co-ordinated system of supply, lived off the land like locusts, robbing and bullying the local villages. The difference between a soldier and a bandit was no more than a uniform, and sometimes the ‘soldiers' lacked even that. They had no expectation of victory. Twenty hard years later the war correspondent Theodore White remarked, looking at Chinese troops, how ‘the men walked quietly, with the curious bitterness of Chinese soldiers who expected nothing but disaster at the end of the trip. They were wiry and brown but thin; their guns were old; their yellow-and-brown uniforms threadbare.'
³³

Fortunately for the Chinese, the balance of firepower was massively in their favour. They had heavy artillery, thousands of rifles and numerous machine-guns, which they positioned around their new defences. However, they didn't have much of an idea how to use them. To us, familiar with the machine-gun as the deadly reaper of the Western Front, the position of the Chinese forces might seem virtually unassailable, covered as it was by heavy machine-gun points on all sides. Chinese soldiers, however, were notoriously inept at the use of such weaponry. As its name implies, the machine-gun is not a weapon that can be used in isolation, but the lethal outcrop of an entire industrial society. Chinese troops, dragooned from a peasantry still living a medieval lifestyle and with no proper military training, had no idea how to set the bullets on their intended course, nor how to clear a jam efficiently, nor how to keep a barrel from rusting. The extreme cold must have contributed to frequent mechanical failure.

Foreign observers also noted how untrained Chinese officers positioned the weapons poorly, narrowing their scope of fire. Most importantly, their soldiers made no adjustment for the inevitable upward rise of their weapons, jerked up by the sheer force of their fire, and tended to aim high - for power, as with a bow. As a result, the machine-gun fire was usually directed well above the heads of the assaulting soldiers, so that spent casings dropped like hailstones around the edges of the city, and only the unfortunate or the foolish were caught in the Chinese soldier's ‘unsystematic and mad shooting'.

The garrison in Urga had received no pay from Peking for months, although they had been promised settlement in full after their initial success in repulsing Ungern, and were surviving as best they could. Mongolia was almost as exotic a location to them as to the Europeans, perhaps more so since they considered themselves the superiors of the Mongolians and very rarely made any effort to learn their language or conform to local customs. The Chinese soldiers disrupted the Buddhist festivals, bullying pilgrims into handing over their sacrifices. After Ungern's first attack, they began to close down the ceremonies altogether, fearing that the lamas would take the opportunity to invoke malignant spirits against them. Sometimes they would burst into temples and begin shooting randomly into the air to clear out the lamas. The Bogd Khan complained how they ‘caused devastation until the end, some of them used all manner of tricks, and others viciously threatened us'.
³⁴

The Chinese soldiers were scared, undisciplined and untrained. On the other hand, the Baron's soldiers were outnumbered, attacking fortified positions and fighting in winter conditions with only the barest of shelter, unlike their well-billeted opponents. The temperature that February was around minus 20 °C; the sustained effort required for combat in such conditions could rapidly exhaust even the fittest and best-insulated soldier. All they had on their side was military training, desperation and the manic inspiration of their leader. The promise of food and housing if they did capture Urga was also a spur; this was a last-chance attack.

This time they had reconnoitred Urga's defences well, making use of information given to them by refugees fleeing a lawless city. Ungern was rumoured to have made a survey of Urga himself, in disguise and accompanied by only one man, presumably drawing upon his experience of sorties behind enemy lines a few years earlier. For good measure, he was supposed to have killed three Chinese soldiers, including an officer, on his way back - using only his bamboo stick.

Dmitri Pershin, the local bank director, heard an even more incredible account. Ungern had gone in to scout the town at night, for some reason choosing to ride his white horse and wearing a favourite cherry-red jacket. Riding back to his troops, he saw a Chinese sentry asleep on duty by the prison. This slacking, even by an enemy, so disgusted him that he dismounted and began to smack the unfortunate man with his cane, yelling at him in pidgin Chinese that he had neglected his duties as a soldier, and that he, Baron Ungern, was taking the time to punish him personally. The soldier was so disconcerted that he failed to raise the alarm immediately, and Ungern galloped off. Pershin recognised the improbability of the story, and took pains to emphasise that the whole thing had been seen by Mongolian prisoners through a gap in the prison fence, and that he had personally tracked them down to confirm that the story was true.

Seeking to give the impression of an attacking horde, Ungern ordered fires to be lit in the hills all around Urga, three for every soldier. The Chinese, who consistently overestimated Ungern's force, were fooled, and became even more nervous. Meanwhile a loose plan was formed; one party would block off the caravan road, preventing the Chinese from receiving reinforcements, and cover it with machine-guns. A main group would attempt to steal up on the Chinese
trenches from the east, ready for an attack in the morning. A third group would cross the mountain and rescue the Bogd Khan. Four Mongolian regiments were kept in reserve, but many of them, seeing the odds and having experienced Ungern's notion of discipline, deserted overnight.

The main party of soldiers, around five hundred men in all, quietly closed in on the Chinese positions around Maimaichen. The hills were gentler here, allowing them a relatively easy passage, save for the freezing cold and the bitter wind, blowing from the north and pinning them against the hillside. The first Chinese barricade was along the embankment of the frozen river, which curved up to the north and marked the boundary of the suburb. By eleven at night they had reached positions on the nearby hills, and were waiting for their few artillery pieces to come up. While they were waiting they were discovered by the Chinese, and came under heavy, though inaccurate, fire. They had no choice but to attack, advancing like a swinging chain. One group would stay behind and hold their position while another moved forward to attack. Once their new position was secured, the forward group would stay put while the others went ahead to seize another position. In this way, they eventually penetrated Maimaichen.

Here the attacking soldiers found themselves under attack from the Chinese trenches. The noise was terrible; the constant racket of machine-gun fire interspersed with Chinese and Mongolian war cries and the shouts of wounded men in a dozen different languages. Both sides possessed rockets, still inaccurate and on the whole useless weapons that were little more than glorified fireworks, and occasionally one would explode high in the sky, providing a pyrotechnic element. The terrified animals of the Bogd Khan's zoo added their yelps and howls to the cacophony. His elephant was so frightened it broke free from its cage and charged trumpeting through the lines of battle. It was discovered a week later nearly a hundred miles away, grazing peacefully among a herd of camels.