The alarm finally shrieked through Nagasaki not with the boom of cannons, but with the frantic, panicked ringing of temple bells. A fisherman, having fled the initial bombardment on the southern beaches, had stumbled into the city, his tale of a vast fleet and soldiers pouring onto the shore so fantastic that he was initially dismissed as a madman. But soon, more refugees followed, and the impossible truth began to dawn. The city was being invaded.
Chaos erupted. The small Japanese army garrison, a force of barely three thousand men, was caught completely unprepared. Their commander, a portly and politically appointed general named Hayashi, had spent the morning preparing for a formal inspection. Now, he frantically tried to organize a defense, his orders contradictory and confused.
"Hold the line at the Urakami River!" he screamed at his harried officers, pointing a shaky finger at a map of the city. "It's our only natural defensive barrier! We must delay them! Delay them until reinforcements can arrive from the main garrison at Kumamoto! This is impossible… an army this size… how could they have crossed the sea undetected?"
His men, supplemented by hastily armed police and a few dozen local samurai who had grabbed their ancestral swords, rushed to form a ragged defensive line along the riverbank. They were brave, but they were disorganized, outnumbered, and had no clear strategy beyond standing their ground.
They did not have to wait long. The vanguard of the Qing army appeared on the far side of the river, not as a single, glittering mass, but as a scattering of small, fast-moving units. The Japanese defenders braced themselves for a glorious, head-on charge, a clash of steel and spirit.
The Qing army had no intention of obliging them.
From the hills behind the advancing infantry, the newly landed Chinese artillery opened fire. It was not a random bombardment. It was a terrifyingly precise and methodical deconstruction of the Japanese defenses. Shells screamed in, bracketing the bridge that served as the main chokepoint. Others targeted the houses and warehouses where Japanese officers were attempting to set up command posts. The Japanese, who had no artillery of their own in this position, could do nothing but huddle behind their meager cover and endure the storm.
Under the cover of this barrage, the Qing infantry began its advance. They moved exactly as they had been brutally drilled to do. Small squads used the smoke and confusion to their advantage, providing suppressing fire for each other as they moved from one piece of cover to the next.
At the head of the assault was the penal vanguard, the disgraced soldiers of the Gongzi Army fighting with the desperate, suicidal bravery of men who knew that death was their only alternative to victory. Colonel Feng, his officer's tunic long since discarded for the simple garb of a common soldier, was at their very tip. He led a charge not with a wild, screaming cry, but with a series of curt, tactical commands.
"First squad, suppressing fire on that teahouse on the far bank!" he roared, his voice hoarse. "They have a rifleman there! Second squad, with me! We cross the bridge now! Go! Go! Go!"
He ran, hunched low, across the stone bridge as bullets from the far side whizzed past his head. His men followed, their fear forged into a fearsome, focused aggression. They were no longer fighting for glory or for honor; they were fighting to erase their shame, a far more powerful motivator. Feng slid into cover behind a stone lantern, raised his rifle, and put a bullet through a Japanese officer who was trying to rally his men. He fought like a man possessed, his every action a desperate attempt to atone for his failure at Pyongyang. The soldiers of the Second Army, watching the penal vanguard fight, felt their own fear being replaced by a grim resolve. If these disgraced men could fight like this, then so could they.
The Japanese line along the river, hammered by artillery and overwhelmed by the ferocity of the infantry assault, broke. The defenders fell back, streaming into the narrow, winding streets of Nagasaki itself. The battle for the city had begun.
It was a brutal, chaotic affair. The fighting devolved into a hundred vicious little engagements fought over every house, every alleyway, every intersection. The Japanese, fighting now on their home soil, were ferocious. Samurai armed with katanas charged machine gun nests, only to be cut down in swathes. Policemen fired their revolvers from behind barricades of furniture until they were overwhelmed.
But the Qing soldiers were relentless. Their fear had been replaced by a cold, merciless efficiency. They had been told this was a punitive expedition, and they acted accordingly.
"They're in that teahouse on the corner!" a Qing sergeant yelled to his squad. "Grenades! Blow it to pieces!"
An explosion tore the front of the building off. The squad rushed in, their bayonets finishing the job. There was no quarter asked, and none was given.
While the main army bogged down in the bloody work of clearing the city street by street, Meng Tian and his two hundred Imperial Guards executed their own, far more direct plan. Their target was the administrative center of the city, the governor's mansion where General Hayashi had established his command post. They did not bother with the streets. They moved along the rooftops, leaping from building to building with the silent grace of great cats, bypassing the barricades and ambushes below.
They reached the high wall surrounding the mansion. Meng Tian did not order his men to scale it. He simply pointed to the main gate. An engineer from his unit placed a heavy satchel charge at its base.
The resulting explosion blew the massive wooden gates off their hinges, sending a shower of splinters and dust into the courtyard. Before the stunned Japanese guards inside could react, the Imperial Guard stormed through the breach, their repeating rifles firing in disciplined, three-round bursts. The fight for the mansion was over in less than five minutes.
Meng Tian himself kicked down the door to the General's office. He found General Hayashi and his staff frantically trying to burn documents. They looked up, their faces a mixture of shock and terror. They drew their swords, but it was a futile gesture. A single, coordinated volley from the guards cut them all down.
By midday, it was over. The last pockets of resistance were being mopped up. The dragon flag of the Great Qing, a massive banner of imperial yellow, was hoisted over the governor's mansion, its form stark against the smoke rising from a dozen fires across the city.
From a command post established on a hill overlooking the captured port, QSH watched the flag rise. Meng Tian approached and gave his report, his face grim but satisfied.
"Your Majesty, the city is taken. All organized resistance has collapsed. The port facilities, the warehouses, and the telegraph office are secure."
"Excellent," QSH replied, his eyes sweeping over the conquered city below. He felt no triumph, only the cold satisfaction of a plan perfectly executed. The first phase was complete. He turned to Meng Tian. "Send out the patrols. I want every surviving city official, every prominent merchant, every head priest from the local shrines and temples rounded up. Have them brought to the main square before the sun sets."
His gaze was fixed on the largest and most sacred Shinto shrine in Nagasaki, the Suwa Shrine, which sat on a nearby hill, its ancient timbers gleaming in the afternoon sun.
"The battle for the city of Nagasaki is over," QSH said quietly, a chilling new purpose in his voice. "The battle for the soul of Japan is about to begin."