The second battle of the Hejian Fuzhong Tunwei Camp City was not carried out for a long time, and it only took about an hour from the front outside the city to the retreat of the troops. It's just that Zhang Lixin led the team not to leave at night, but used an hour and a half to pass through some small ditch markers that had been prepared long ago and came to a long strip of not too deep a ravine pit led by Zhang Lixin and Wang Wei led by several cronies many days ago. It also avoided spending a lot of time building hidden hiding pits and delaying the march when retreating after the war.

Soon after dawn, the sound of horses' hooves of the cavalry of the Zhongshun battalion in Baoding Prefecture was heard from the south. After seeing the wolf smoke rising from the direction of the camp in the early morning, Ma Shen didn't care much, and gathered the horse team within a radius of dozens of miles as quickly as possible.

When the Ming army's horse team swept past about a mile or two away from where the soldiers of the new battalion were hiding, many people breathed a sigh of relief.

"In one more night, we can retreat for more than fifty miles, and with the opponent's temporary manpower, we should be able to get out of trouble... Wang Wei couldn't help but sigh.

But somehow, Zhang Lixin felt that it was not that simple. Looking back carefully, although the opponent in the night battle was largely led by his own nose, this was also because his tactical arrangement was too unexpected. In all fairness, what if you were a group of mediocre bandits with a larger number of people and ordinary tactics? Then many of the preparations and responses of the people defending the city are quite unique, far stronger than some of the officials and generals who have seen the corpse vegetarian meal before.

"Don't let your guard down, but assume and plan for the worst: what if the enemy doesn't give up before sunset, and we have to fight the opposing team during the day? With these firearms at our disposal, how can we deal with the opposing cavalry? Zhang Lixin couldn't help but ask at this time. Of course, it is just to ask everyone who comes to the school in this way, so that everyone is used to thinking more. At this time, Zhang Lixin was not sure that he would be so unlucky during the day...

Zhang Lixin's questioning was of course aimed at Wang Wei and Li Yi, who were in charge of the artillery team, as well as a few soldiers who had outstanding performance in their previous training and study. Therefore, some of the needless common-sense assumptions are also known to these people.

"This... We exposed a small number of men and lured them to attack again. Then the artillery team lay in ambush in one direction a hundred meters away and opened concentrated fire as before... Wang Wei tried to say. In order to make it as convenient as possible for him to make calculations and not delay the battle, Zhang Lixin began to use the new earthen "metric" standard as the basic measurement unit a month ago.

Of course, Li Yi knew what Zhang Lixin was worried about: "The enemy can use at least a few hundred horsemen, so if they are dispersed, they can spread out an encirclement network within a radius of about 300 meters to one mile, and our ambush tactics are still facing a lot of risks." What's more: we have exposed the fact that we have a lot of artillery, but if it is only one or several, the opponent may not be fooled... ”

After careful discussion, Zhang Lixin finally decided not to divide his troops to lure the enemy, but to gather the team together. At most, a few trebuchets and cannons that the enemy may know about are first exposed, and the other cannons are concealed as close as possible for maximum damage.

However, if faced with the worst-case scenario: not taking some risks, I am afraid that it will not be possible: "Start arranging now!" Arrange the five guns that were captured first... Zhang Lixin finally made up his mind and said.

When preparing for the battle after the first attack on the camp in Hejian, after drawing some lessons from the actual battle, the lead bullet was re-made into a specification of about half a weight and a diameter of about 15 millimeters. On the one hand, this is somewhat of a match for most three-eyed guns, and on the other hand, reducing the muzzle velocity at the same energy is also good for energy storage and will create a better rebound on some drier, harder ground. As for the charge standard, a self-mutilating charge standard has been prepared long ago: according to Zhang Lixin's test experience on different gunpowder phases and powers in the Weiyuan Battalion at the beginning, it was determined that the ammunition should be loaded according to the standard of estimating the power of kilojoules per kilogram of barrel. This was a moderately normal standard for artillery in the Weiyuan battalion. However, actual tests have proved that if this standard that can only be found during the Napoleonic Wars is put into some general guns in the ordinary Ming army, even if the quality is barely acceptable, it will cause serious loss of the life of the entire artillery. Probably after firing five or six shotguns seven or eight times, it will be impossible for this gun to hit a decent accuracy with solid shells in the future.

But the problem at the moment is obvious: what you need is to give full play to this "power of several rounds" to avoid the hidden danger of facing a cavalry siege when your own forces are overstretched...

It seems that the more you are afraid of something, the more something will come. About the afternoon of the 10th day of the first month of February, a horse team of more than 400 troops was seen scattered vertically into a continuous area of more than 10 miles, and they launched a dragnet field search without giving up. In the distance, there were many village brave infantry teams divided into small groups to check the surrounding villages, but the greatest threat to the hidden team at this time were those cavalry. This is not a place with complex terrain and dense vegetation, and if you are forced close by those horse teams during the day, you will definitely not avoid the patrol. And if the formation has not yet been developed at this time, it may bring unforeseen danger to the team.

In this way, when the enemy cavalry line that had been patrolling from the northwest to the southeast in the distance approached less than a mile from the hidden place of the team, Zhang Lixin gave the order to prepare for battle, and the first thing that was exposed was two trebuchets and about 20 soldiers of the Zhongshun battalion, including Cheng Hai, and four light cannons that could rotate relatively lightly and adjust the direction up and down.

The enemy cavalry not far away did not dare to rush over when they saw it, but first retreated into the distance, and gradually gathered at a distance of a mile. Obviously: in last night's battle, many people knew how extraordinary this gang of "thieves" was.

"Be careful, those thieves' gunnery is not trivial. And it seems to be good at luring the enemy to ambush, don't attack easily after the team is assembled, and carefully surround the most extensive horizontal team from all directions! "General Ma Shen is obviously not an inexperienced general, after hearing about some of the previous encounters in the city, even if it is in the plain of Pingchuan where there is no grass and trees, and there are few thieves exposed, he does not dare to act rashly.

In this way, the cavalry of the Zhongshun battalion, which had assembled two quarters of an hour later, kept a "safe distance" of about 200 paces from the position of the team led by Zhang Lixin, and the other four hundred cavalry teams were divided into two ways and spread out the flanks and flanks to outflank them, gradually closing and slowly approaching in a scattered formation of almost one zhang or so. From time to time, someone still uses a barrel of spears to see if there will be any ambush...

Before the group of men and horses attacked, there were a few or so cavalrymen divided into stragglers a few feet away and approached to lure Zhang Lixin and the others to open fire. Seeing that Zhang Lixin and the others were unmoved, they approached a distance of about thirty paces and opened fire with the cavalry's three-eyed gun. In the Zhongshun battalion, there were many Mongols who surrendered that year, and the combat style of the cavalry horse team also had the style of steppe cavalry to a certain extent.

In this case, Zhang Lixin and the other four shot at the cavalry with covered lunges. The four people, who had been trained together in the Liaodong battlefield and even in Fuzhou for a long time, were able to tacitly judge Zhang Lixin's "chiming arrows" with a whistle as the basis for their judgment, and shoot at the positions slightly to the left or to the right, forming a "row of arrows" that are not easy to rely on maneuver to dodge, and almost every two to three rows of arrows must have horses hit arrows.

After the scattered scattered cavalry was shot back, the enemy cavalry gradually reinforced, and when it was obviously more than twenty cavalry, it was not something that Zhang Lixin and the others could deal with through the infantry of only four people. At this time, Zhang Lixin ordered four groups of traveling gunners to open fire under the command of Cheng Hai. In the past, when filling gunpowder, a large bag of half two lead bullets and a thousand and a half lead bullets had been mixed in paper; Gunpowder is also a mixture of new medicine and old medicine, silk medicine packets. In this way, when firing, the projectile can spread out a little more at a distance that is not too far.

Four cannon shots rang out in succession, and although the enemy cavalry scattered very much during the attack, six horses were still hit by projectiles, and three were thrown off their horses. The increasingly intensive offensive stalled. A moment later, hundreds of enemy horsemen, who had long been gathered in the rear, swept over with an unignorable momentum. Although the cavalry was small and scattered, it was fatal to the few soldiers under his command.

At this time, nearly forty spearmen armed with crutch spears who were lying in ambush under the pressure of Li Yi, Chen Ying and others suddenly emerged from the hidden trench and dispersed. One crouched with a shield, and the other with a gun lowered, forming a very thin array of two columns. Due to the small number of people, it seemed that they were not vulnerable to the onslaught of the cavalry, and at most they could only cope with the approach of some stragglers.

Therefore, the horse team composed of hundreds of enemy horsemen after seeing these ambushes did not hesitate and continued to approach. Especially at a distance of dozens of meters, many people could see from the panicked eyes and shaking heads of these spearmen that this was simply someone who had not experienced battle formations or even rigorous training. Basically, there is no need to make contact, and when you get close to a certain distance, these people will be completely collapsed.

General Ma's heart was completely relaxed: "Haha, it turns out that there are really such a few people, what kind of formation do I have!" Rush! ”

Under the suppression of the soft arrows and bullets that continued to attack from all directions, the formation of the already panicked people became even more scattered. During the Tang and Song dynasties of the Five Dynasties, some soldiers who could fight sometimes needed to be tied to the ground in the front row.

At this time, Zhang Lixin realized that he obviously underestimated the vulnerability of too weak recruits to face the real horse team, I am afraid that if it weren't for the previous preparations in the Zhengzi Gun that gave these people the most basic bit of self-confidence. At this time, there must have been many people who were still far away from the horse team, and they had just abandoned their weapons and fled when they had just put on a posture of attack.