My Experiences at Nan Shan and Port Arthur with the Fifth East Siberian Rifles
9781465628817
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The Staff of the 5th East Siberian Rifles, with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Companies, arrived at Chin-chou on April 1, 1903. The regiment, for the past three years, had been stationed at various points on the Yellow Sea, engaged in guarding from the attacks of the Hunhutzes the railways rebuilt by our railway battalion in conjunction with the 1st East Siberian Sappers, the unit which I commanded during the Boxer campaign. The regiment began to settle down at Chin-chou and to transfer its baggage there from Novokievsk, after which, the men having first been housed, some large buildings were run up for the accommodation of the horses and transport vehicles, both of which were in a splendid condition, notwithstanding the wear and tear of the campaign just gone through. Our two-wheeled carts were all in good repair; the horses I had bought from the Germans at Tientsin, when they offered for sale a magnificent lot of animals, brought at enormous cost from Austria and America, and, though costing us only about 80 roubles per head, one could not speak too highly of them. I handed over our former small horses to our mounted scout detachment, which, owing to some misunderstanding, was without any. Thus, the best-equipped unit of all our forces in China, we spent the whole of the summer of 1903 at Chin-chou. Throughout that summer we were worried by the Hunhutzes, and not only were the scouts constantly engaged in encounters with these brigands, but we were also obliged to send out strong detachments, as the police and scouts combined proved insufficient to deal with them. The authorities at home knew very little about all this, since the local commanders refrained from sending in reports about the Hunhutze bands. Seeing that the police could not cope with them, I personally took all measures in my power against them; but when I spoke to the commandant about taking further steps, saying that I could not understand why he did not call in the help of the regular troops, the answer was always the same: “My dear Colonel, the authorities think that we do nothing at all, or else suspect us of pusillanimity; there has already been some unpleasantness about it, and the civil governor has flatly refused to make any report to the Viceroy.” So the people had to pay more and more tribute per head, and the Hunhutzes threatened our military posts as well as those of the Chinese police. In the end we had regular pitched battles with them, and the scouts and various regiments in the Kuan-tung Peninsula, as well as the 5th Regiment, lost a considerable number in killed and wounded.
