However, the more everyone is like this, the more they feel that they can't and are embarrassed to retreat without a fight, especially Wei Hong, as a person who once boasted about Haikou in front of everyone and was determined to take the military as his lifelong career, now that he encounters the first battle that may appear, his choice is to retreat?

In this regard, the young man could not accept it from the bottom of his heart, and he even felt that if he became a deserter at this critical juncture, he was afraid that he would not be able to forgive himself in this life.

Hou Xianglin's consideration is more realistic, he believes that this is the first land battle of the Australians on Timor Island, not only to show the Portuguese allies, but also to the natives, not to mention that once he retreats without a fight, all the construction achievements in front of him may be destroyed in one fell swoop, you must know how much effort these wooden walls and piers in front of him cost him? Is it really just left to those natives to be ravaged like this? It really hurts to think about it.

Let's fight! The more critical the moment, the more courageous you must face it! The two didn't think about it for long, so they made up their minds to fight at the same time.

So on the morning after receiving the two telegrams, Hou Wei and his wife immediately adjusted the work distribution of the garrison, changing the original four shifts of the garrison to two shifts, so as to ensure that nearly 200 people patrolled the wooden wall every day; in order to save bullets, they also stopped live-fire training, and distributed 85 Type 57 rifles to the 85 soldiers with the best training results, and about half of them were the soldiers of the training class with the best results.

Wei Hong also announced that in extraordinary times, the teaching class and musketeers would no longer have to participate in shift labor, and their daily task was to patrol along the wooden wall under the leadership of Wei Hong.

Obviously, less than 200 soldiers want to patrol and guard the two-kilometer-long wooden wall, and the strength is relatively thin, so Wei Hong also asked the Luoka tribe to send more than 250 men, this number is almost all the strength of the Luoka tribe, but these so-called tribal men are not true, because only half of them are adults, and the rest are some half-grown children who can barely hold wooden spears, obviously the only role of these half-grown children is to warn and stand inside the wooden wall to defend, Some of them were scattered on watchtowers on wooden walls, and whenever there was a situation, they sounded wooden drums to warn the people inside the wooden walls.

The wooden drum is a percussion instrument commonly used in the jungle tribes, most of which are made of hollowed-out thick tree trunks, and the sound of the sound is low and hoarse, and the frequency of its sound waves is low, but it is extremely penetrating, and can be heard over a long distance after being struck.

Obviously, once the war started, it was full of battles, and there were only 392 armed soldiers and more than 200 men from the indigenous tribes in Xin'an City, and in terms of weapons, there were a total of eighty-five 57-type rifles, because of the lack of bullets, these 57-style rifles could only be used as spearmen in the end - fortunately, Boss Luo equipped each gun with a bayonet sixty centimeters long, this kind of flat and wide-bladed bayonet was drawn out clearly, compared with the iron-tipped wooden spear in the hands of the natives, this thing can scare the opponent very much.

Of course, the garrison also has other cold weapons, including 100 Spanish arquebuses, 30 three-eyed muskets used by the Ming army, and the rest are spears, Japanese knives, horse light bows and hard bows from Europe and other cold weapons.

In addition, a third of the soldiers had various types of iron armor, fifty rattan and wooden shields.

As for the men of the more than 200 Loka tribes, they had only one wooden spear, five rattan shields, and ten soft bows, and they were all half-naked and without any armor except for the animal skins or cloth on the lower half of their bodies.

That's it for the defense of Sin'anseong.

Of course, the equipment of Hou Xianglin and Wei Hong is not counted here.

Each of them had an AK47 and two Colt Python****, and the two guns combined had 1,600 rounds of ammunition.

From this day on, the two took turns to patrol the wooden wall day and night with their soldiers, and in order to be able to command in time, the two did not return to the stilt house at night, and they lived in a makeshift grass hut under the wooden wall.

As the days passed, there was finally some restlessness in the apparently calm city of Sinan, and from the end of March, from time to time, some women, children and men from the jungle fled into the wooden walls of the city, many of them with wounds, and these natives were soon taken over by the Loka tribe.

The news that these refugees from the jungle brought to the people of Sin'an City is also becoming more and more disturbing.

One of the news is that the alliance of the southern tribes of the mountains and the pro-Portuguese Chagan tribe are at war, and the two sides may have tens of thousands of warriors combined, and it is said that the melee has been going on in the jungle for more than ten days, and there is no winner yet, and the vast majority of the tribes in the eastern and southern jungles are more or less involved in this war, including the tribes of the mountains in the upper reaches of the Komoka River.

Obviously, these battles had spread from the Chagan Basin in the east to the mountains of the upper reaches of the Xin'an River, and Hou and Wei spread out the map and saw that it was less than 20 kilometers away from Xin'an City.

There is also inconclusive information that all but a few of the dozen jungle tribes in the mountains of the upper Komoka River have joined the tribal alliance in Shannan, that is, all of these tribes have become rebels.

On 5 April, another group of tribal women and children who had fled into the wooden wall brought the resting news that just a few days earlier, a thousand warriors from the southern part of the mountain, led by a well-known tribal warrior, had crossed the sacred hill of Tata Merrow, conquered the small tribes that had disobeyed, and had allied themselves with the rebels who had migrated from the Chagan Basin, and that the two forces had now merged and were raiding the pro-Portuguese tribes along the Komoka River all the way north, which meant that the number of people attacking Sin'an might exceed 1,500.

The women and children confirmed that the warriors were indeed planning a raid on Sin'an, because everyone knew that the people of the city were allies of the Portuguese, but of course, the most important thing was that it seemed to be weak, the so-called city had only a low wooden wall, and there were no bronze cannons, and it was clear that in the eyes of the natives, the wooden walls were certainly not as defensive as the masonry walls with cannons.

Two days ago, in the morning, Pimont had sent someone to contact Hou Xianglin, who had told him that if Sin'an was attacked, the Governor of Timor-Leste would send an army of 100 musketeers and 300 long-term players to support Sin'an at any time, and that since the draft of the two medium-sized galleons could not enter the Sin'an River, the Duchess and the Governor decided that if the Dawn and the Red Bay returned from Ambon in the next few days, they would be sent to Sin'an at once, and the draft of the two small sailing ships would be allowed to penetrate deep into the Sin'an River. At that time, it is hoped that artillery will be used from the water to support the defense of Sin'an Fortress.

All in all, the situation is getting more and more tense.

In these days, more and more natives do not return to the jungle at all after working during the day, and it is obvious that in the eyes of these natives, the jungle not far away is already a dangerous place.

In order to avoid the plague, Hou Xianglin had to move some of the people under the wooden walls, and built several temporary wooden huts with ventilation on three sides to house these people.