Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/78

 unwilling to break the peace if the state of her own household had been more tranquil.

The war itself was a succession of triumphs for Japan. Four days after the first naval encounter, she sent from Söul a column of troops who attacked the Chinese entrenched at Ya-shan and routed them without difficulty. Many of the fugitives effected their escape to Pyöng-yang, a town on the Tadong River, offering excellent facilities for defence, and historically interesting as the place where a Japanese army of invasion had been defeated by Chinese and Korean troops at the close of the sixteenth century. There the Chinese assembled a force of seventeen thousand men and made full preparations for a decisive contest. They had ample leisure. A period of forty days elapsed before the Japanese columns, one moving due north from Söul, the other striking west from Yuen-san, converged upon Pyöng-yang, and that interval was utilised by the Chinese to throw up parapets, mount Krupp guns, and otherwise strengthen their position. Moreover, they were armed with repeating rifles, whereas the Japanese had only single-shooters, and the ground offered little cover for an attacking force. Under such circumstances, the advantages possessed by the defence ought to have been wellnigh insuperable; yet a day's fighting sufficed to carry all the positions, the assailants' casualties amounting to less than seven hundred and the defenders losing six thousand in killed and