at the entrance to the harbour, and who sighted the approach
of the hostile flotilla. On the 25th, Konishi's troops carried the
castle of Fusan by storm, after a brave resistance by the garrison,
and, on the 27th, the same fate befell another and stronger fortress
lying three miles inland and garrisoned by twenty thousand picked
soldiers. Four days after the landing of Konishi's army, the second
corps (20,800 strong), under Kato Kiyomasa, reached Fusan, and
immediately took the east-coast road, according to the programme of
campaign.

Thenceforth, however, it was really a race between the two armies as
to which should form the van. At the pass of Cho-ryung a reunion was
effected. This position offered exceptional facilities for defence,
but owing to some unexplained reason no attempt was made by the
Koreans to hold it. A few miles further north stood a castle reckoned
the strongest fortress in the peninsula. Konishi and Kato continued
the combination of their forces as they approached this position,
but, contrary to expectation, the Koreans fought in the open and the
castle fell without difficulty. Thereafter, the two corps separated,
Kato taking the westerly road and Konishi the direct route to Seoul.
In short, although the two generals have been accused of crippling
themselves by jealous competition, the facts indicate that they
co-operated effectively as far as the river Imjin, where a strenuous
effort to check them was expected to be made by the Koreans.

From the landing place at Fusan to the gates of Seoul the distance is
267 miles. Konishi's corps covered that interval in nineteen days,
storming two forts, carrying two positions, and fighting one pitched
battle on the way. Kato's corps, travelling by a circuitous and more
arduous road but not meeting with so much resistance, traversed the
distance between Fusan and the capital in four days less. At Seoul,
with its thirty thousand battlements and three times as many
embrasures, requiring a garrison ninety thousand strong, only seven
thousand were available, and nothing offered except flight, a course
which the Royal Court adopted without hesitation, leaving the city to
be looted and partially destroyed, not by the Japanese invaders but
by the Korean inhabitants themselves.

The King did not halt until he had placed the Imjin River between
himself and the enemy. Moreover, as soon as he there received news of
the sack of the city, he renewed his flight northward