stubborn thief

Chapter 471 Suppression
When the ancient riverbed of the Zhangye Gobi was run over by the footsteps of the Ming army, the yellow sand was lifted into the sky, covering the sky and blocking out the sun.

The Zhenyi Ranger Battalion with more than 32 soldiers was divided into four divisions and five divisions. The three infantry commanders each formed a four-step-wide column with ten steps apart to form a [-]-step-wide front. The soldiers were divided into two groups, covering the left and right wings.

A row of sergeants buried their heads in the sand and marched southward. The soldiers in the army formation were completely obscured by the yellow sand and could not see anything except the flags fluttering behind the guards.

The Marshal’s army, waiting in full battle, waved its flags, and the artillery ignited the gunpowder, and the granular black powder wrapped in silk burned violently in the copper-cast barrel. The light and shells broke through the smoke, sweeping the battlefield with deafening roar.

Most of the soldiers in the Ming army column had no time to react to what happened. They only heard the sound of cracking wind in their ears. The seven-pound iron bullet had passed through the gap between the columns and fell farther behind them. Then they continued to leap forward and finally fell Five hundred steps away from the front line, embedded in the majestic chest of a brown army horse.

The war horse fell to the ground amidst a mournful cry, thumping its hooves continuously until it lost all its strength.

People have no time to worry, the marshal's army flags are displayed in front of the formation, the gun chambers are cleaned, and the silk ammunition is replaced in one go; The chariot of the invincible general was pushed into the gap.

There were no piles of earth and mountains in the camp, Tang Tong, the head of the Marshal's Mansion, stepped on the saddle and stood on the back of his mount, staring at the column of the Ming army winding through the smoke and dust, and muttering to himself: "Your chosen front where?"

The war situation is changing rapidly, and he can't tell whose reinforcements will come first.

So Tang Tong was prepared with both hands in his heart. Standing firm and waiting for help is naturally a no-brainer. If he can't hold on, he can only run. If he can't run away, he will die. But be more aggressive, this is a battle that belongs to him after all.

Tang Tong didn't have much twitch in his heart.

On the one hand, he has found that he is the most comfortable group of people in the Marshal's Mansion. They are seriously lacking in the central bureaucracy. The whole system is almost a replica of the five generations.

The core of power in the Marshal's Mansion is Liu Chengzong's small circle, and there are almost no civil servants. Liu Xiangyu's attributes of being the emperor are much more important than the heads of civil servants.

The only difference between them and the warriors in power is that Liu Chengzong himself is a scholar, and he admires Confucian generals more than the courage of ordinary people. Even if he is in charge of the team, he cannot do it without literacy.

Liu Chengzong set up a bunch of rural schools and academies in Hehuang, and sent them to study after making meritorious deeds on the battlefield.

Strictly speaking, the Marshal's Mansion only needs one type of person, and there are two conditions, the first is to be educated, and the second is to be able to fight. Tang Tong is this kind of person.

On the other hand, Liu Chengzong is not a man-eating beast, nor a barbarian who has feuded with other races. He is nothing more than a traitor who is not very nice to say. Rebellion needs capital. From Tang Tong's point of view, Liu Chengzong's capital is already sufficient. up.

The field headquarters of the Marshal's Mansion he led far surpassed the treatment he received when he was leading the army in terms of equipment, supplies, supplies, and support from superiors.

The last little bit of awkwardness is nothing more than fighting against the old club under the banner of the Marshal's Mansion, a moral conflict, but at a time when the sea is raging and everything is broken, what is right or wrong?

Li Si Youyun: A man's virtuousness is like a mouse, it depends on where he is.

So at this moment, Tang Tong had only one thought in mind, to fight alone and win.

Tang Tong had a clear view of the formation of the attacking Ming army. The enemy army was obviously composed of four complete general divisions, each with five hundred general divisions.

The forward he is looking for is not a servant. In some places, the servant is called a drafter, but in terms of organization, the servant is a miscellaneous stream. It is on the same level as Tangqi, Jialiang, and Kailu. It is a non-staff support unit.

He was looking for every first division in the regular army.

According to the traditional selection method of the Ming army, the first division of each division is the selection forward, the first round of each division is the selection front, and the first team of each round is the selection front. He also took on the riskiest mission in the war.

Tang Tong believes that in this kind of fortified battle, the enemy general will definitely use the selected front, which is exactly what he wants. After all, directly defeating more than two thousand enemy troops is tantamount to nonsense, but the essence of war is to destroy the enemy. It is not impossible to seize energy and concentrate superior forces to defeat a selection team of 600 or [-] people.

His target was hidden in the five-way parallel column, but the dust covered his eyes, so that he could only clearly see the small horizontal column at the front of each column, and in those small horizontal columns, the soldiers holding shields moving forward Undoubtedly, they are the draft picks of each division.

And the real striker is hidden inside.

He originally thought that the enemy's front line would carry heavy artillery, but he never expected that the officers and soldiers would just advance overlappingly amidst the clamor of drums and horns. He could vaguely see the soldiers on the outside of the infantry column on the left and right wings all carrying repelling horses, and then he saw the two wings pushing out A heavy cannon.

Two invincible generals appeared a hundred steps away. This scene made Tang Tong so desperate that he didn't care about letting the flag bearer unleash the flag. He jumped off his horse and shouted: "The enemy's cannons are fired three times quickly. Dodge the guns!"

He is very familiar with the application of the Invincible General in field battles. This is Qi Jiguang's improvement of the old front-mounted General when Qi Jiguang was prime minister in Jizhen, and it is a special version for Mongolia.

In the past, the biggest advantage of the structure of the Franc machine was its fast rate of fire. The biggest disadvantage was not air leakage, but its small size.

Even the Western cannon itself has about one-fifteenth of the play. Most artillery in this era will leak air. Even as long as the air leakage is within the controllable range, it is not all bad at the level of material science and technology in this era. It can effectively reduce the internal pressure of the gun bore and increase the speed of filling ammunition.

There is no play in the artillery, and the soldiers' standing equipment must have a hammer to smash the shells into the barrel.

The reason why the Francois machine is not big is because its structure does not use the barrel to bear the pressure of the barrel, but uses the sub-gun as the barrel, which is why it has a fast rate of fire.

In the past, the General Cannon required several or even a dozen soldiers to tilt the cannon body to reload because of lack of strength. The Invincible General’s gun is much lighter than the whole cannon, but the problem is that it requires manpower. Lift it up to reload.

The larger the caliber, the more charge, and the greater the pressure on the sub-gun, the bigger it needs to be. Even the largest sub-gun can only weigh two hundred catties, and it is difficult to lift it up. , the advantage of fast rate of fire will no longer exist.

So Ye Mengxiong was not satisfied with this cannon, and further improved the sub-gun, which inspired future generations to use materials that can withstand high chamber pressure to make sub-guns under the condition that the total weight is fixed. Obviously, copper is better than pig iron , wrought iron or even steel is better than copper.

Therefore, the invincible generals in the late Ming Dynasty were basically forged. As a field cannon, it was light, durable and powerful. Therefore, under the condition of the popularity of Hongyi cannon, it was still active in various battlefields.

And because this kind of gun is specially supplied by Mongolia, its basic usage is to fire solid bullets. It is a female gun with three sub-guns. Each sub-gun is loaded with [-] loose guns, and three rounds of rapid fire can be completed within [-] breaths.

Amidst Tang Tong's shouts, the flag bearers and drums around him hurriedly beat the flag, beat the drum, and more people shouted together, and the sound was directly transmitted to the front of the formation.

But in fact, the soldiers in front of the battle were protected by earth barriers and did not panic at all. Before the battle, Zong Liangzi's crooked eyes looked deep under the shadow of Bo Zhou's eyebrows.

The five commanders at the front line commanded eight lion guns to shoot at the heavy artillery of the Ming army; at the same time, the rest of the soldiers quickly crouched under the protection of the earth barrier, and the soldiers in the back row put their chest-length shields on top.

Then amidst the roaring cannons, the management teams at all levels and the hundred chiefs squatted down one by one. Wai Liangzi squatted down on one knee after all his subordinates had done their defenses, but he still raised his neck to try to observe the enemy's movements.

Eight one-jin artillery shells blasted at the gunners of the Ming army. Several shells grazed the barrel of the Invincible General's gun and knocked several Ming army artillerymen to the ground. Only one shell hit the artillery carriage on the right. However, it failed to destroy the cannon carriage, it was just embedded in it.

Accurate shooting of artillery is itself an act of having a chance to hit the target. Its structure is no different from that of a bird's gun. It is a tube, but its multiplier-to-diameter ratio is much lower and it is more difficult to aim.

Even for the most experienced blunderbuss, it is difficult to accurately hit a cannon with a bird blunderbuss at a distance of a hundred paces, let alone artillery.

The suppressed shooting of the Ming army was only slightly delayed. Although the wounded artillerymen fell to the ground and groaned violently, they were quickly suppressed by the roaring artillery.

The first bombardment was the invincible general on the left wing, who was unaffected by the gunpowder smoke. Hundreds of scattered particles shot out like graupel under the agitation of gunpowder smoke. There was a popping sound on the mound.

There were more projectiles flying backwards over the half-person-high earth barrier, like hundreds of blunderbusses firing in volley, hitting the long shields set up by the soldiers behind, some were embedded in the shields, and some pierced through the shields. However, it hurts the soldiers behind it.

The muffled groans of being shot rang out one after another in the formation, and Crooked Liangzi didn't look back, and he could also hear the sound of wounded soldiers being dragged away from the front line.

He bravely looked up again, and just saw the outline of the Ming army's third column moving forward, and from the corner of his vision, he saw the same flash of light from the position of the heavy artillery on the right wing, and quickly lowered his head. At this moment, hundreds of scattered Sub spray to.

Under the alternate suppression and firing of the two general cannons, the frontline soldiers of the Marshal's Mansion could only hide in the soil barrier and listen to the continuous sound of lead piercing the air above their heads, and they were so suppressed that they did not dare to look up.

The three infantry columns of the Ming army took advantage of this opportunity to march forward overlappingly. The whole army was like a big crab. The infantry pressed forward, and the Chinese army marched forward quickly between the firing of the two cannons.

Amidst the continuous shooting, Tang Tong saw from a relatively safe rear that the cavalry on the outside of the third infantry of the Ming army were not idle. Guard the cavalry on the left flank.

As for the cavalry on the right, Tang Tong wasn't worried. The right side of the camp was the river, and the cavalry couldn't rush over there. They just waited there to prevent them from escaping after being defeated.

This couldn't help but make him smile in his nervousness: the enemy general seemed sure of winning, so much so that he was a bit overwhelmed-why did he think that he would win by rushing forward?
Crooked Liangzi was infuriated by the endless shelling, and the most important thing was that it was still difficult for him to fight back. The only heavy artillery in the thousand headquarters was beside him, but the artillerymen next to him couldn't reload it.

The problem that the Ming army’s heavy artillery was difficult to lift did not exist for them, because the ammunition in the Marshal’s Mansion was a silk-fixed ammunition bag, and the ammunition could be stuffed even if the muzzle was facing down.

The problem of their inability to reload is also due to the ammunition package. If they are hit by scatter while charging, the tightly packed gunpowder is likely to explode. The [-] scatter there is likely to beat the soldiers within ten steps around them into pieces. sieve.

Seeing that the two general guns continuously ejected deadly projectiles, smashing the car boards that fixed the wet sand on the outside of the earth barrier, and even the inner wooden boards were pierced many times, injuring the frontline soldiers, which made Crooked Liangzi very angry.

In Qiufang, Ningxia, I didn't feel much watching the friendly army use this thing to bombard the Mongols. It would rain bullets on his head, and he would curse out of anger.

The two Alternately Fired General Cannons are too capable of suppressing at close range. Even with the protection of the earth barrier, the soldiers still press forward to avoid the cannons. The crowd is so crowded that the formation is broken. Why carry the gun heavy? The guns huddled together, unable to fight back at all.

If things go on like this, when the enemy troops come up to fight, even though they don't have many casualties, they will be defeated in a fight.

Because the casualties in war are not the most terrible thing, the most terrible thing is not being able to fight back and being beaten while standing.

At this moment, Crooked Liangzi obviously heard that after the general on the left wing finished firing, the cannon on the right wing quickly followed suit. The shooting gap between the two cannons was a bit short, which made him very happy, and he stood up and shouted a few times to boost morale. : "Fill the lion cannon with powder, and make those two cannons dumb!"

During the six rounds of deadly shelling, Crooked Liangzi was the first person to stand up, and the bewildered generals also came to their senses when they heard the words. They all stood up to boost their morale, and shouted to the soldiers not to rely on them. Too close, maintain formation.

Soon, the [-]-jin Lion Cannon with a shorter barrel was poured into the loose bag by the soldiers to adjust the angle, but before they could shoot, there was another muffled sound. After the loading was completed, pieces of powder were sprayed on the front of the formation again, and an artillery chief and several soldiers fell to the ground in an instant.

But they finally got their hands on it, and a lion cannon on the right wing blasted out at the enemy formation, but it seemed that the artillery did not hear the military order clearly because of nervousness, and fired a cannon towards the advancing army formation.

There was no shock of crushing the bloody road, the two sides were only forty steps apart, and the first dozen or so soldiers holding shields and placing the captive cannons in the front of the enemy line fell silently.

Immediately afterwards, several loaded Lion Cannons were fired at the same time. Accompanied by the muffled sound of the cannons, there was the sound of scattered guns piercing the smoke everywhere. The lead pellets drew dense lines on the battlefield between the two armies with the smoke. , and finally meet at the left and right of the two invincible general cannons.

Like a violent storm, the two artillery teams were overturned.

The artillery that suppressed them no longer existed. Taking advantage of this opportunity, every hundred generals at the front of the position issued orders almost at the same time. On the side, the infantry line composed of spears and waist knives is also ready to defend against the impact.

Banners that symbolized shooting were held by Mr. Bai in his hands and raised above his head. Crooked Liangzi did not speak, he just raised his arms and slowly lowered them. A high-pitched suona sounded behind him, and he was immediately fired by a large-caliber musket. muffled.

　Good morning!

　　
　
(End of this chapter)