The Rise of Ming Dynasty 1646

Chapter 144
Tong Peng was startled, "These rebels have cannons?!"

But he calmed down immediately, it was just a chaotic army, but a mob, probably only a few cannons.

Immediately, the violent artillery roar sounded again.A large part of the Qing army fell down in response. Although it was not clear how many people were shot in the middle of the night, hearing the dense screams, the casualties were at least a hundred or more.

Tong Peng looked around and finally saw many torches flickering a mile away, the cannons of the rebel army should be there.How could he still not understand at this moment, this range is definitely not a bowl mouth cannon, it must be the red cannon!

Without allowing him to think about it, the cannons of the "Rebellious Army" fired another round of salvo, and the cannon fire shone neatly in the dark night. Roughly speaking, there were at least a dozen of them.

Tong Peng just felt bored for a while, these rebels are quite capable, and they have brought so many cannons.

He immediately issued an order that his cousin Tong Guangji would lead [-] cavalry to destroy the artillery of the rebellion army at high speed, and the rest of the troops were not allowed to stop and continued to chase the fleeing rebel army.

As soon as Tong Guangji took the order and left, the cannon in the distance spewed out raging flames again.Tong Peng suddenly felt a faint uneasiness in his heart, could it be his own illusion?The rate of fire of these guns seems to be a bit too fast.

On the artillery position in the distance, Chen Xiongfei looked extremely excited.

He has participated in several battles, and he has never had such a blast like tonight.

The process of finding the target can be skipped directly, where the torches are densest, the guns will be fired.The results of the battle are even more clear at a glance. A row of cannons passed by, and by seeing how many torches were extinguished, it was almost possible to estimate how many Jianlu were killed.The whole process is simply easier than daily shooting training.

Zhang Jiayu saw a piece of flames separating from the Qing army brigade from a distance, and quickly approached the artillery position, hurriedly pointed there and said to Zhu Linming: "My lord, it should be cavalry."

Zhu Linming nodded calmly and said, "Follow the plan."

"Yes!"

For the cover of artillery, the Dragon Guard has established a complete set of plans.

After the order was issued, the heavy cavalry of the dragoon battalion and two companies immediately lit torches and rushed to the artillery position.The dragoons built a line of defense in front of the position, and the heavy cavalry formed formations on the flanks of the artillery. Once the enemy cavalry was slowed down by the dragoons, they would attack and strangle them from the side.

Tong Peng suddenly saw hundreds of torches appearing in the night, rushing towards the artillery at a very fast speed.His eyeballs almost popped out, where did this person come from?Can't see the flag clearly, is it an enemy or a friend?
The artillery roared in a very regular way, which made Tong Peng a little numb. He was thinking about the weird battle situation tonight, but he didn't notice that nearly [-]% of the torches held by Tong Guangji's cavalry had been extinguished.

In the age without radio, commanding an army in the dark was extremely difficult.

Although Tong Guangji kept ordering his cavalry to disperse, his order was never effectively implemented. On such a dim moonlight night, galloping horses would be good if they could keep up with the team without losing track. distance?

Under the shooting of twenty cannons, the densely formed cavalry suffered heavy casualties. After only two rounds of artillery fire, nearly two hundred cavalry were killed by the howling iron ball.

Especially the terrifying lethality of the nine-pound cannon. At a distance of only about [-] steps, a single iron ball can easily penetrate seven people!

When the Jianlu cavalry attacked to about a hundred paces, Chen Xiongfei ordered the artillery to shoot the last round of shotguns at them, and then ignored the cavalry, and turned to look at the place where the torches were most dense in the distance.

"The elevation angle is three points, the direction is one point east of true north, and the maximum charge."

As he reported the shooting parameters, the twenty cannons of the entire artillery battalion turned their muzzles and aimed at the Jianlu infantry.

Tong Guangji's cavalry was bombarded head-on by shotguns at close range, and six or seventy of them turned over and fell off their horses immediately.The corpses of men and horses rolled on the ground, and there were dozens of riders who could not escape and tripped by them in the dark, and the momentum of the impact of the whole team was stopped.

Tong Guangji's eyes were fixed on the cannons less than a hundred paces away, as long as he added a horsewhip, he would be able to rush into the defenseless gunners and kill them wantonly.

However, the next moment, right in front of him, there was a sudden burst of firecrackers.With the fleeting fire from the gun muzzle, he saw hundreds of people lined up neatly in the night, standing between him and the artillery!
The Jianlu cavalry, who were briefly confused after being bombarded by cannon shots, became even more confused now.Some planned to bypass the group of gunners, some continued to rush forward, and some wanted to turn around and run away in panic.

Zhu Jiadi, who had been waiting on the flank for a long time, straightened his helmet, and ordered loudly to the heavy cavalry behind him in a neat formation: "Sword out of its sheath!"

……

Although the main force of the infantry of the Qing army was a little dazed by the bombardment, they continued to chase south under Tong Peng's strict order.

Under the pitch-black night, it was difficult to distinguish the flags, and the thousands of horses and horses had already lost their uniform pace.Some were fast enough to protrude two or three hundred steps away from the brigade, and some were cowed by the cannon and fell far behind most of the troops.

The formation of the entire Qing army has become a violent undulating wave.

It was exactly the same as Tong Guangji's cavalry. It wasn't until they were only sixty or seventy steps away from the infantry line of the Dragon Guards that these infantry vaguely saw a figure in front of them.

"aim!"

The huge shouts in unison are like a giant dragon roaring in the night.

"put!"

The explosion of the firecrackers instantly resounded through the night sky.

In the pitch-black night, thousands of flintlocks shot out flames almost at the same time, forming a huge fire net in a range of more than two miles wide, horizontally in front of the Qing army.

The astonishing momentum made the captive soldiers stunned, and they stopped in unison.

The fire net disappeared in a flash, and it became pitch black in front of them again. The people who fired the guns just now disappeared in the dark night again, disappearing like ghosts.

Many people in the Qing army even thought that they had hallucinated in the scene just now, but the next moment, the people around them who were hit by lead bullets wailed horribly, making them immediately understand that all this was real.

"Squat down in the front row!" Those "ghosts" broke out into shouts again.

Due to the uneven formation of the Qing army, the infantry of the Dragon Guards adopted the method of platoon shooting, that is, only one row of the three rows of soldiers forming a line array shot each time, and then squatted down to load the ammunition, and then the other soldiers Shoot in the back row, crouch to reload, and so on.

This shooting method can maintain continuous firepower output, and at the same time avoid the waste of firepower caused by salvo when the distance is not easy to control.

The rate of fire of flintlock guns using fixed ammunition is already very high. Using the method of platoon firing, almost every ten seconds or so, a row of infantry will raise their guns and fire.

As the second row of flintlock guns fired, the Qing army on the opposite side could barely see dense figures on the opposite side under the firelight from the muzzle, standing like a wall in the night.

(End of this chapter)