Xinshun 1730

Chapter 1246 Diamond Bay Massacre ([-])

It was a quarter to five the next morning.

The mist that always permeates Bengal in winter has not yet completely dispersed, and the scout cavalry of the left column of the Dashun Army have briefly exchanged fire with the Muslim light cavalry.

Dashun's reconnaissance cavalry usually has a team of seven people. Their standard equipment is a navy-style short-barreled flintlock gun, a flintlock pistol, a spear, and a cavalry knife.

These scouts are generally composed of good families, because this requires a certain amount of equestrian skills cultivated since childhood.

Unlike those formal cavalry who were born as regular farmers and trained on horses for two or three years, reconnaissance cavalry required good equestrian skills.

The biggest advantage of being a scout is that you can grab a lot of spoils.

Generally speaking, the scouts on the opposite side have a lot of things on them.Especially Muslim cavalry.

For example, at this time, Dashun's scouting team found the Bengal Qingqi on the opposite side.

A tawa scimitar can be sold for a fortune; a tight-fitting "Chihilicado" cloth armor woven from wool and silk that may be damaged can also be sold for a fortune; gold and silver jewelry on the body will be inlaid Some silver decorated Mongolian style boots with toe hooks that can hook stirrups...or women's scarves that were snatched from the body, etc., can be sold for money.

This reconnaissance cavalry team has served in Nanyang for a long time, and is very familiar with the decorations on the bodies of these small Muslim landlords or nobles.So they are more willing to kill people. If they are lucky, sometimes they can grab an earring, touch a ring or something.

The captain of the reconnaissance cavalry team looked at the six cavalrymen emerging from the faint mist, and spit out the smoke he was chewing, revealing two shiny gold teeth.It was his booty in Nanyang, pulled from the mouth of the dead.

I checked the musket on my body, and my partner who had fought several battles didn't need any verbal orders. He shook his head and whistled, and he had a tacit understanding.

His heel tapped the stirrup, and the group began to canter across.

The Bengal Qingqi on the opposite side also spotted them, and instead of running, they also rushed towards them.

When there were more than two hundred paces on both sides, he suddenly increased the speed of the horse, yelled, shook his shoulders, folded back the navy short-barreled gun hanging on his back, moved his shoulders, and clamped the spear It's under the armpit, but it's not tightly clamped, and it doesn't follow the standard movements that the elbow should be lower than the spear stuck at the waist and the forearm should be tilted according to those weird drills in his opinion.

The Bengal cavalry on the opposite side also had spears in their hands.

At this moment, in the eyes of the captain of the reconnaissance cavalry team, there was no one else but the Bengal cavalry on the opposite side.

The horse started to speed up, and when the distance between the two was about fifty or sixty steps, he raised the spear that was originally under his arm.

The left hand let go of the rein, and as long as the legs controlled the horse, it became a standard posture of holding guns with both hands.

The Bengal cavalry on the opposite side was obviously a little flustered, but after all, he didn't make a gesture of holding a gun with both hands, but bit the bullet, and pointed the spear obliquely at the face of Dashun, the captain of the reconnaissance cavalry squad.

The moment the two horses crossed each other, the squad leader raised his spear, then retracted his arm and stabbed it in the opposite face in an instant.

The body subconsciously leaned to the side, avoiding the opposite spear that was separated by him and deviated from the direction.

The enemy who was already behind fell off his horse. He put away his spear, controlled the reins, and was about to circle around to charge again, when he heard the sound of gunfire not far away.

He also threw the spear on the ground, and pulled out the pistol from the side pouch.

When he drew the pistol, he was in a bad mood.It's not that because of the murder, the gold teeth on his mouth were all pulled out from the mouth of the dead. The murder has no inner turmoil for him.

Just holding the short gun in his hand, lamenting that the era of his group of people has passed.

They may be the last batch of professional warriors in Dashun, or they may be called Liangjiazi small landlord professional soldiers.

Except for the heavy-armored one-handed guns, the reason why most of the cavalry held one-handed guns at this time is actually very simple: because equestrian skills are not qualified, and few people have practiced such things as horse martial arts.

He was born in a typical "Liehou" good family. The Liehou in Dashun is not a noble, similar to an old soldier or an old fifth battalion.He has been riding a horse since he was a child, and has been riding for more than ten years. He can hold a gun in both hands at will, let go of the rein, and control the horse with only his legs and waist.

However, there is no use for eggs.

Few of the cavalry battalions formed by Dashun could hold spears with both hands, and many of them might even be recruited by refugees or farmers.

It is almost impossible to expect them to hold guns with both hands.

It was like the simplest action of thrusting the carbine back diagonally. When he played it, he held the gun with both hands, which was not too simple.

And the group of regular cavalrymen trained by the imperial court did not have the ability to return spurs with both hands.

They can also return to the spurs. According to the training code, they are divided into right stabs and left stabs. Each stab method has a standard decomposition movement.

The first step is the standard armpit gun posture.

In the second step, step on the stirrup with your feet, push your thighs hard, and slightly raise your body.

In the third step, the tip of the gun is down, and the body continues to stand up.

The fourth step is to use the standing height to circle the tip of the spear from the bottom and turn the wrist over.

In the fifth step, the spear body is still under the armpit, the neck is twisted to the right, and the wrist holding the spear is at the same level as the left ear.

The sixth step, tie.

The seventh step is to retract the gun. After the gun is retracted, sit on the stirrup again with the legs relieved, and continue to maintain the posture of holding the gun under the armpit...

The left stabbing is about seven or eight decomposing movements.

Those cavalry who may have never ridden a horse before do not need the ability to let go of their hands. They can also achieve the effect of returning to the spurs if they train day by day according to this decomposition step.

The key to the problem is cheapness. To train such a cavalry, one horse and three years of military pay and food are needed to complete formation combat, and the effect is very good.

They may not be suitable for this kind of team confrontation, such as reconnaissance, harassment, sneak attack, and arson.

But when queuing up to charge, the combat effectiveness of the 1000 cavalry who could only hold a spear with one hand due to horsemanship, and the 1000 warrior landlords like him who had been trained since childhood, was basically the same.

This is not his problem alone, or it is not a problem unique to Dashun, but a problem of the desolation of the warrior class that is common all over the world.

Including these Bengal cavalry, once the elite professional horse warriors of the Mughal era, have withdrawn from the stage of history.Most of the current cavalry are third-rate cavalry at the peak of the Mughals, the level of cavalry subordinate to local nobles.

His father also participated in the war in the Northwest back then. At that time, the horse martial arts of the Junggars and other Mongols were no longer good.There are a lot of musketeers, many of them are musketeers who ride horses and move down to the ground to fight; the remaining ones have also returned to the level of the Mongols in the middle and late periods of the previous dynasty. Bows are used, and some spearmen also use short hooks and sickle guns.

Even... after the founding of Dashun, even the martial arts of the previous dynasty, which specially selected those who were skilled in bow and horse, were abolished.

It's just that his father is old-fashioned, and the ancestors of the family were born in martial arts on horseback, so it has been passed down from generation to generation.In his generation, he still received strict education in horse martial arts.

Then, he had to think about his son—not learning at all.It's not that I don't want to learn how to ride a horse, but that I don't want to work hard at all to learn those exquisite martial arts on horseback, and instead ask him: Dad, you are so good at martial arts, why do you only have military ranks and honors but no real job?I can't even be a battalion commander, so what's the use of me learning this?If you go back a few hundred years, you might be a captain, a cavalry, a trilogy, or even a general, but now you are just a soldier with honors but no real job...

The trend of the times is mighty and mighty, those who follow it will prosper, and those who go against it will perish.

This is an era in which traditional middle classes such as artisans and handicraftsmen are gradually destroyed and replaced by workers and machines.It was also an era when murderous "craftsmen" like them were gradually replaced by cheap, mass-produced cavalry trained by peasants who would not let their hands loose, and mass-charged.

In the charge just now, he just felt that even the martial arts of these Muslim warriors had been reduced to this level.Cavalrymen who don't even know sword shields, dual wielding, or two-handed spears can become elite scouts...

It cannot be said that the death of the rabbit and the fox is sad, but it can only be said that this is a very sad sigh of the times.

He thought, perhaps, our generation is the last group of people in the Celestial Dynasty who can still play horseback riding, archery, left and right bows, and spears in both hands... This world is really changing too fast.

Feeling so emotional in my heart, I skillfully pressed the pistol that only needed to be held in one hand on my left wrist that was holding the rein, and quickly went around to the side of a Bengali cavalryman who was about to escape and fired a shot. Riding and shooting Feiyu shot him off the horse.

Then skillfully inserted the pistol back, drew out the saber, and bent over the head of the fallen Bengal cavalryman.

All six Bengali cavalrymen were hacked or shot to death, and they did not survive. This is not a strategic investigation, and there is no need to survive.

He named the names of the two uninjured people in the team, and asked them to continue to look across the woods ahead, and they would have a share of the spoils according to the rules.

Then he jumped off the horse and rummaged through the belongings of these Bengal cavalrymen with his men, looking for things like earrings, silver, gems, or scarves.

After searching for the spoils and gathering the horses on the opposite side, these people lit a cigarette and prepared to go to the front to meet them.

However, after only two steps, he heard several gunshots from the distant woods.Then the two cavalry who had gone to the front appeared from the woods, and quickly waved the flag in their hands while galloping their horses.

"Cavalry! The main force of their cavalry!"

The team members of the small team saw the meaning of the flag, but they didn't run away immediately. Instead, after gathering people together, they went to see it for themselves, and then they slipped away.

…………

It was a quarter past six.

The left wing of the Dashun Army began to prepare for the battle, but they were not in a hurry.

The private soldiers of the Fubing line just adjusted the position of the column to ensure that they can easily form a phalanx.

And those skirmishers with rifled guns, cavalry guns and the following 6-pound howitzers, as well as the professional recruits from the Java military town, relied on their daily high-intensity training and actual combat in some small countries in Southeast Asia to conduct a battle in The European battlefield 20 years ago seemed incredible maneuvering.

Rifled skirmishers spread out in a semicircular arc formation. In front of the artillery, there is no need to form a whole team at all, and the arc formation is very loose to cover the artillery behind.With a speed far better than that of the formation of soldiers, 18 cavalry guns and 6 catties howitzers were deployed in the side direction where the Bengals might attack within the visible range.

Behind is the recruitment of Nanyang Army Town marching in column.

The Bengal cavalry has already begun to move.

The rifled skirmishers were ordered to shoot freely at four hundred paces.

The artillery, covered by skirmishers, was ordered to fire shotguns at close range.

The infantry company in Junzhen formed a horizontal formation and continued to shoot, forcing the Bengali cavalry to turn and circle into the gap on the side.

Behind that, there are Ding Ding's line soldiers and artillery positions deployed step by step in the battalion and company positions.

(End of this chapter)