At this point mention must be made of the victories of Gen. Chöng Mun-bu in Ham-gyŭng Province. In three successive fights he had defeated a large, though not the main, body of Japanese and seems to have entirely cut it off from forming a junction with Gen. Kato as he retreated toward Seoul with his dwindling though still formidable army. After the departure of the Japanese, Gen. Chöng went to the far north, even to the far Tu-man River and inflicted severe punishment on all those who had aided the Japanese or had sided with them in the betrayal of the two princes. This done, he pacified the disturbed province as much as he could and then disbanded the militia and sent them to their homes.
Kwŭn Ryŭl, the governor of Chŭl-la, of whom we have heard before, took 4000 men and marched on Seoul, not by the main road but by way of Yang-ch’ŭn. Crossing the Han at that point he went into camp at Hăng-ju and surrounded it with a paling of heavy logs. The Japanese in Seoul ridiculed it but sent a strong body of troops to attack it. A long fierce fight ensued and the result was doubtful. At last the Japanese succeeded in setting fire to the wooden paling and had it not been for the most strenuous efforts on the part of the Koreans they would have been burned out. But they succeeded in quenching the flames. When their arrows were gone their outlook was again apparently hopeless, but in the very nick of time Admiral Yi Pin of Chŭl-la Province came up the river by boat with 20,000 arrows and as the camp was immediately on the river bank the Koreans were saved, and soon the Japanese were driven back. Kwŭn[Kwŭn] Ryŭl took the bodies of the Japanese who had fallen, cut them in pieces and impaled the fragments on the top of the stockade. The next day the Chinese general Sa Tă-su arrived and, seeing these trophies of victory, praised Gen. Kwŭn highly and sent him to P’a-ju to guard against any possible northward movement of the Japanese. At the same time small companies were sent in all directions to cut off foraging expeditions of the enemy. In this way the Japanese in Seoul were cut off from all supply of fuel. The Japanese general who had suffered defeat at Hăng-ju thirsted for revenge, and he led many a fierce sally from Seoul, but always with great loss.
In the third month confidence was so far restored in the north that the king began to think of returning toward the capital. The first stage of this journey was as far as Yong-yu. At this same time the Japanese sent a letter to the Korean general Yu Sŭng-nyong saying that they wished to conclude a treaty of peace. Gen. Yu as in duty bound sent this message on to the Chinese Gen. Yi in P’yŭng-yang. He in turn despatched Sim Yu-gyŭng, who had before acted as an emissary of peace between the Japanese and the Emperor, to take charge of the negotiations and with instructions more or less definite. When this commissioner arrived in the vicinity of Seoul a meeting took place between him and the two Japanese leaders, Konishi and Kato, in mid-stream off the village of Yong-san. Gen Sim opened the conference by saying, “If you had listened to my advice in P’yŭng-yang you would have saved yourselves all this trouble. The Chinese, 40,000 strong, are all about you. They have gone south to fortify the Cho-ryŭng Pass and thus cut off your retreat. The Han River is guarded so thoroughly that you cannot cross; Gen. Yi Yŭ-song is returning from the north with 300,000 fresh troops (an unblushing lie) and I am prepared to offer you the only possible way of escape. You must give up the two princes; you must leave the capital and move south to the coast of Kyŭng-sang Province. Then and not till then will we conclude peace and the Emperor will recognize your king as his vassal.” The vanquished invaders saw that there was nothing to do but comply, and so in the name of the thirty-seven Japanese generals they engaged to evacuate Seoul on the nineteenth day of the fourth moon. It was further agreed that they should leave untouched 20,000 bags of rice which were stored in the government granaries. The two princes were to accompany the Japanese as far as Fusan and were to be handed over to the Korean authorities there.
In accordance with their promise, the Japanese evacuated the city on the very day appointed, and Gen. Yi Yŭ-song, who seems to have recovered his health rapidly after he found that the Japanese did not mean fight, entered the city the following day. The condition in which he found things is almost indescribable. The Ancestral Temple and three palaces had been burned. Only the Nam-pyŭl-gung, which the invaders had used as headquarters, was standing. The country all about was lying fallow and a great famine stared the Koreans in the face. A thousand bags of rice were hastily brought and made up into soup or gruel, mixed with pine leaves, and a few of the starving thousands were fed. As Gen. Sa Tă-su was passing along the street he saw a young child trying to suck milk from the breast of its dead mother. The sight aroused his compassion and he carried the child to his quarters and ordered it to be cared for. Rice was so scarce that a whole piece of cotton cloth could be purchased with about three quarts of it. A horse cost but three pecks of rice. Famishing men fought and killed each other, the victors eating the vanquished, sucking the marrow from the bones and then dying themselves of surfeit. It is even said that when a drunken Chinese soldier vomited, half starved men would crawl to the place and fight over the possession of this horrible substitute for food. This state of things naturally brought on an epidemic of the native fever, a species of typhus, and the dead bodies of its victims lay all along the road, the head of one being pillowed on the breast of another. The dead bodies in and immediately around Seoul were gathered and piled in a heap outside the Water Mouth Gate and it is affirmed that the pile was ten feet higher than the wall.
It was on the twentieth of the fourth moon that Gen. Yi entered Seoul. He took up his quarters in the Nam-pyŭl-gung. He seemed to be in no haste to pursue the Japanese, so Gen. Yu Sŭng-nyong hinted that as the Japanese were in full flight it might be well to hurry after them and cut them down as occasion offered. The Chinese general had no intention of leaving his comfortable quarters that soon, but he gave consent to the project of pursuit and detailed 10,000 men under the lead of Gen Yi Yŭ-băk. A day or so later this doughty warrior returned saying that he had a pain in the leg. So ended the first attempt at pursuit. Then the Korean Gen. Kwŭn Ryŭl came in from P’a-ju and urged that there be immediate pursuit, but for some unexplained reason the Chinese commander forbade it, and the native accounts even add that he sent secretly and had the boats on the Han destroyed so as to render pursuit of the Japanese impossible.
After crossing the Han River, the retreating Japanese seem to have been in very ill humor, for they did not confine their exhibitions of temper to the living alone but even attacked the dead. They dug open the royal tomb at Chung-neung a short distance the other side of the river. Digging fifteen measures deep they found some rags and a few bones. These they scattered about on the ground. They then filled in the hole with rubble. Another royal tomb was opened and the casket and remains were burned.
In the beginning of the fifth moon a letter arrived from the Military Commissioner, Song Eung-ch’ang, in P’yŭng-yang, ordering a general pursuit of the Japanese. The Koreans believe this to have been a mere blind, for the Japanese had twenty days the start of them and pursuit was of course out of the question. At this point again the Koreans make a serious charge against the Chinese, asserting that the Japanese, before leaving Seoul, sent large sums of money toward P’yŭng-yang for Gen. Yi Yŭ-song and Song Eung-ch‘ang, and that by this means they secured immunity from pursuit. The delay was a cause of great wonderment to the Koreans and it is not unlikely that this theory of a bribe explained for them most fully the actions of the Chinese. And it must be confessed that there is little in the temperament or antecedents of the Chinese on which to base a refutation of the charge. An instance is cited to bring home the charge. A Korean who had come upon a Japanese straggler and killed him was severely beaten by order of the Chinese general in charge.
Finally, when all too late, Gen. Yi made a pretense of pursuit, but after crossing Cho-ryŭng Pass and still finding himself no nearer the enemy than before, he turned back and resumed his comfortable quarters in Seoul. If he thought the Japanese would hasten to take boat and return to their native land, he was much mistaken. It may be that they wished to do so, but the terrible punishment that Admiral Yi Sun-sin had inflicted upon the army of reinforcement made them wary of approaching the coast, and so the Japanese forces in the south found themselves practically entrapped. Had the Korean land forces been led at this time by a man of the skill and bravery of old admiral Yi the country would have been spared long years of war.
The Japanese in their flight south were brought face to face with this stern fact, and like the soldiers that they were they set themselves to solve the problem. They wanted to be near the sea, perhaps with a view to taking advantage of any opportunity that might present itself of slipping across to Japan, and yet they were so numerous that, living as they must on forage, it would be impossible for them all to encamp at the same place. So they adopted the plan of fortifying a long strip of the southern coast, reaching from the harbor of So-sang in the district of Ul-san in Kyŭng-sang Province to Sun-ch‘ŭn in Ch‘ŭl-la Province, a distance of over two hundred and seventy miles. There were in all between twenty and thirty camps. Being thus about ten miles apart they had room for forage and still were near enough each other to render assistance in case the Koreans or their allies the Chinese should besiege them at any point. These fortified camps were all of the same general kind, overlooking the sea from a bluff and on the land side surrounded by a moat and earthworks. These preparations were made with the utmost care, for there was no hope of immediate succor and the Japanese foresaw stirring times.
In course of time the Chinese court was informed of these events and the success of their generals in the north seems to have given them some enthusiasm for prosecuting the war; so additional troops were sent to the front under the command of Generals Yu Chung and Hŭ Kuk-ch‘ŭng. These troops numbered 5,000 and were from southern China. Among them there are said to have been many “ocean imps,” or savages from the southern islands. These men could enter the water, it is said, and scuttle the enemy’s ships from beneath. We are told that there were also in this army some men of immense stature who came in carts rather than on foot. These forces went into camp at Sŭng-ju in Kyŭng-sang Province. At this place there was also a large Korean army under Generals Kim Ch‘ŭn-il, Kim Sang-gön, Ch‘oé Kyŭng-whé, Ko Chong-hu, Yang San-do and Yi Chong-in. Under them were large numbers of militia and raw recruits, and this accounts in part for the speedy fall of the town and the terrible slaughter that ensued. The Japanese laid siege to the place and after nine days, during which time the Japanese made a hundred separate assaults, the latter were reinforced and the defenders, exhausted by the long struggle, were finally driven from the wall and the Japanese effected an entrance. But even after they got in, the Koreans fought desperately and sold their lives as dearly as possible. Of this most sanguinary battle only one incident is preserved in the Korean accounts. When the Japanese entered the city and had advanced to a point on the wall which overlooks the waters of the Nam-gang (river), a desperate encounter took place, in the midst of which the Korean general, Yi Chong-in, seized two of the Japanese about the waist and, dragging them to the brink of the precipice, threw himself and them into the water below. Korean accounts say that in this battle the almost incredible number of 70,000 Koreans were killed and that an equal number of the Japanese perished. This latter must be an exaggeration, for the loss of that number must have swept well-nigh the entire Japanese army from the country. We must remember that the Japanese army had received practically no reinforcements from the time it first landed on Korean soil, and it is safe to say that what with the losses by sickness and accident, together with the thousands who had fallen at the hands of the Koreans and Chinese, the original force must have dwindled to 150,000 or less; in which case the loss of 70,000 men must have put them hors de combat at once. This battle is called the greatest in the whole war, by the Koreans, though it is not considered the most important.