Two rows of trumpets exploded in the sky, and the ground shook. In the Zhao camp camp with the banner in the west of Fanhecheng, in the big tent of the Chinese army, Zhao Dangshi strode to a chair of several people wide and sat down steadily. He wore a bright golden mountain armor and sat facing east, and the dazzling armor was matched with seven or eight Taishi chairs draped in colorful tiger skins, which was dignified and respectable, showing his majesty as the lord of an army to the fullest.

The tent door was wide open, and the curtain moved slightly in the wind. The people who were separated from Zhao Dangshi's Taishi chair on the left and right were layered on top of each other, extending hundreds of steps outside the tent. The top two, the one on the left is wearing a silver mountain armor, standing tall as a pine, this person is the actual commander of today's battle of Fanhecheng, Xu Hui, the commander of the Xiaojie battalion; The person on the right is sitting on a sandalwood chair with his eyes slightly closed, which is Qin Qigong who joined the army with the military strategist in this battle. Behind them, there were some military clerks scattered around. Along with these curtain documents, there are still many people wearing green clothes, wearing flags and tang soldiers, all of them are wearing waist-length armor, simple and capable.

Xu and Qin went down, and there were two rows of neatly dressed generals standing on each side, and the queue stopped at the tent gate. The generals wore fish scale armor or cloth face armor with colorful colors and different shapes. Out of the big tent, along the gentle slope straight down the gate, Yang Yang Su Liqing held a long knife in the white armor of the officer, these officials are from the pro-support department, for Zhao Dangshi ladder own personal guard. Their commander is Zhou Wenhe, the commander of the purple flower armor, who is constantly patrolling back and forth up and down the slope to ensure the stability of the situation in the core area of the formation.

"Xu Tong, are all the arrays arranged in place?" After sitting down, Zhao Dangshi Hongsheng asked, and the aftermath lingered.

Xu Hui took a step across and arched his hand: "Return to the lord." Qin Jinxiao, Mao Andong, Fan Jiwei, Wu Mingfeng, and Xiong Wanjian are all in their places. Qin, Mao, and Fan are the main forces, and Wu and Xiong are the reserves. "Hou Dagui, the commander of the Wu battalion, led the two outposts out of the camp, leaving Wu and Xiong two outposts in Lutoudian, which were temporarily deployed by Zhao Dangshi and Xu Hui, and the five outposts totaled 2,500 people, which is all the combat power of the Zhao camp in Fanhecheng at present. At present, the five sentry officers, including Yang Kexin, an officer in the Xiaojie battalion, are not in the main formation, but are all preparing for battle on the front line.

"Where's the thief?" Zhao Dangshi continued to ask. Yesterday, it was reported that the horse army returning to the camp went to Hexi Village to gather, and with horsepower for a day and a night, Ma Guangchun's 3,000 horsemen must have been closed.

Pang Jinming, the next leader, stepped out of the queue and said: "A quarter of an hour ago, I arrived at Longtou Bridge, and now it must be not far from Wugang!" He added, "After counting again, it is consistent with the previous investigations, and the total number is about three thousand!" ”

Because of the fear that the city wall of Fanhe City itself has not been erected, the fort has not been built, and there are no real defense facilities that can be relied on, so Zhao Ying set up a formation to the west in Wugang, which is only five miles away from Fanhe City, this is a wilderness, only the area where everyone is currently located has a slight terrain undulation, with 2,500 foot soldiers to meet the 3,000 horse army, Zhao Ying from Zhao Dangshi down all the generals, all with the courage and belief to break the cauldron and sink the boat.

Returning to the camp originated in the northwest, especially the horse army, Ma Shouying worked hard for nearly ten years, and saved up Ma Guangchun, an elite horse army. Its subordinates have three to four horses, complete armor, extremely strong mobility, and extremely fierce combat style. Based on this, returning to the camp can always be among the best in the starry sky. Ma Guangchun was born in the border army, has been in the army for nearly 20 years, and has particularly rich combat experience.

Zhao Ying has encountered many strong enemies dominated by the horse army, such as Cao Wenzhao, Zu Dale, etc., are enough to be called elite, Zhao Dangshi and Xu Hui do not think that the strength of Ma Guangchun's horse army can surpass them, but for the current Zhao Ying, the challenge is still huge. There is no other reason, the previous battles can be won, most of them rely on the mountains and rivers, although the enemy cavalry is brave, but more or less due to the terrain obstruction, the power is greatly reduced. Today is different from the past, the west of Fanhe City is hundreds of miles of fertile plains, there is no danger to be feared, and the horse army gallops on it, just like a fish in water. On the other hand, the Zhao camp has no soldiers to rely on, and the difficulty of defeating the enemy has risen sharply.

For a long time, in response to the fact that Zhao Ying lacked horses, Zhao Dangshi racked his brains to think of various ways to make up for this shortcoming. But war horses, as one of the most important strategic materials, can't be obtained by talking and laughing after all. Therefore, on the one hand, Zhao Dangshi continued to open up channels and search for Roman horses, and on the other hand, he also set his sights on the strategy of "riding by foot".

In the Song and Ming dynasties, the lack of horses was a chronic disease, and the government and opposition people proposed and even tried a variety of tactics to replace it, which is the experience of the predecessors There is no lack of reference.

The army went out of Sichuan to Chu, and the long-term Zhao Dangshi began to consider the way to fight in the plains of Huguang and other places in the future. Chang Zeyu, Mu Gongchun, Qin Qigong, etc. are well-read people of insight, Xu Hui, Guo Ruke is also a general who has experienced actual combat and broadened his horizons, Zhao Dangshi has convened them several times, mainly in the Song Dynasty and this dynasty, specifically discussed the example of restraining cavalry, and expects to find the most suitable method for Zhao Ying's reuse. And this battle of Fan Hecheng has also become a test field for Zhao Ying's long-term research on the tactics of "riding by foot".

Dozens of fast horses swept by like a wind, Zhao Ying's array fired hundreds of guns, the horses were shot, lying on the ground and wailing, Fan Jiwei snorted and said: "Dog's thief, there are many mules and horses!" "Weapons and armor are easy to obtain, and war horses and even mules and donkeys are rare. So far, Fan Jiwei has been accustomed to seeing the heads of the battalions love the war horses as his own, and now he can't help but be amazed when he sees the unfought pioneer horses rushing back to the camp.

It is true that the horses that were blindfolded, unsaddled, and galloped towards Zhao Ying's array were generally inferior horses, but compared to Zhao Ying's thirst and cherishment of horses, it shows that the horses returning to the camp are not in vain.

In the past, when hundreds of crazy horses suddenly attacked on this plain, the soldiers of the Zhao battalion may have rioted, but at this moment, Fan Jiwei was surprised and surprised, but he did not panic. He raised his sword and raised the flag, and more than ten Tang soldiers went to all parts of the array to deliver military orders. A camp gate is opened on each side of the quadrangle, and each camp gate has three or four side vans as a barrier guard. These partial vans are not large, each car is operated by seven people, and the single-wheel propulsion action is quite fast, and one car is equipped with a wrought iron franc machine, a meteor cannon, three bird guns and a number of gunpowder leads. Except for the soldiers who controlled the antler carts and the side vans, the remaining soldiers in Fan Jiwei's outpost were all lined up in a hollow formation surrounded by the cars, one-third of them were bird-bearers of the unified system, one-third were crossbowmen with heavy crossbows and strong bows, and the other one-third were strong men with long swords and axes.

From one dynasty to the next, the infantry was used to defend against cavalry.

In the Later Han Dynasty, Dongqiang was troubled, and the Qiang general Duan Cheng "ordered the army to use a sharp blade, a spear triple, a strong crossbow, and a column of light cavalry as the left and right wings", and used spears to stack arrays with strong crossbow and light cavalry, and finally defeated Dongqiang.

Su Dingfang, a famous general in the Tang Dynasty, "ordered the foot soldiers to be high, to accumulate extroverts, and to personally lead the strength to ride in the Northern Plains." The thieves were unable to enter the three sudden infantry formations", and the use of spear arrays against the Turkic cavalry was also very effective.

In the face of the Jin Dynasty, a strong enemy who was good at using heavy cavalry, the Song general Wu Lan used his long-term experience in dealing with the cavalry of the Jin Dynasty to put forward the idea of "controlling its heavy armor, then the strong bow and strong crossbow", and further advocated that the bow and crossbow should be based on the enemy. His brother Wu Jue also adhered to this point of view, "ordered the generals to choose strong bows and crossbows, shoot them repeatedly, and call the 'garrison arrow', which is endless, and it is as complex as rain", "Jin Sheng's soldiers are coming, people are heavily armored, connected by iron hooks, and the fish runs up." The arrows were shot by the garrison, the arrows rained down like rain, and the dead were accumulated", which completely carried forward the benefits of the bow and crossbow.

In the Ming Dynasty, because the bow and crossbow skills of the Song Dynasty were lost, and the firearms gradually showed their prominence, it was to generally promote the three-eyed guns, bird guns, Franc machines and other guns in the army. However, the rate of fire of firearms was too slow, and they were susceptible to cavalry melee assaults, so there was a boom in the development and use of "chariots". For example, during the Zhengde period, Qiu Yue used chariots to relieve the siege of Ninghua Village, and in the thirteenth year of Jiajing, the Ming army defeated the Mongol tribes with chariots in the Yuwu camp. Once entrenched, the chariot can be used as a small fortress to deter the onslaught of mounted horses and provide shelter for ranged troops.

In Jiajing, Liu Tianhe, the left squire of the military department and the general system of trilateral military affairs, reformed the chariot military system on the basis of their predecessors. He used the Hongzhi Dynasty's Quansheng car as a model, transformed the Quansheng war light car, replaced the two-wheeled with a single wheel, abandoned the big car for the small car, and redefined the firearms system on the chariot, which greatly improved the mobility of the chariot and the reliability of field operations. Actual combat has shown that these vehicles are extremely effective against cavalry, when used correctly.

In the fifteenth year of Jiajing, 30,000 households of the Mongolian right wing Jinongji entered Kouningxia, and the Ming army sent chariots to ambush the mountain pass and was defeated. Later, Ji Nang led his troops to commit Ganzhou Shandanwei, and Jiang Zheng, the commander of the Shandan battalion, led the car battalion to expel but fell into a heavy siege, he covered with a hundred chariots, and the Mongolian soldiers were slammed with guns and crossbows, so that they charged several times without success. In the first month of the spring of the sixteenth year of Jiajing, Ji Nang made a comeback, commanding tens of thousands of troops to enter Ningxia again, and the general soldier Wang Xiao was defeated by chariots. After recovering Yansui, he was defeated by the general soldier Ren Jie. In August, 500 Ming troops in Ningxia went out of the fortress and were surrounded by Ji Nang, the Ming army hurriedly distributed chariots to defend itself, and 8,000 Mongolian soldiers repeatedly attacked and lost their generals, and they cried bitterly. In the four years from his appointment as the chief of the trilateral system of Shaanxi to his departure, Liu Tianhe fought 27 battles with the Mongolian tribes, and won thousands of first-class victories, which can be described as a great achievement.

Although in the future, Wang Xiangqian, the right capital of the Wanli Dynasty, the governor of Jiliao, Baoding, etc., organized a large array of car camps, but it was like a pavilion in the air, which was unattainable. It needs hundreds of antler carts to surround the Quartet, dozens of partial vans to protect the camp gate, lion and tiger cars, baggage vehicles, wheelbarrows, etc. to protect the internal and external Chinese army, and there are more general cannons, two general cannons, and exterminating artillery are twenty or thirty guns, and there are no plans for a hundred guns, rocket boxes, nail plates, and horse rejection guns, and the rest of the wind chasing guns, bird guns, three-eyed guns, baskets, hook sickles, adze axes, palladium, lifting hammers, and even thistles and so on are countless, totaling more than 10,000 soldiers who are guarding up and down, and the cost is so large that the household department at that time directly refused on the grounds of lack of money, which is quite overkill.

Zhao Dangshi joined the camp of Chinese martial arts, studied for a long time, and finally decided on the most suitable tactics for the current situation of Zhao Ying. That is, the chariot is the base of the city, accompanied by bird guns, small artillery and some strong bows and heavy crossbows, forming a chariot formation that is mainly defended. Confined to Zhao Ying's family, the power of this car array is naturally difficult to compare with Liu Tianhe and Wang Xiangqian's car array, but Zhao Dangshi believes that it is enough to use it to deal with the rogue.

In addition to this, it is possible to deal with the penetration of cavalry. In addition to the gunners and crossbowmen, Zhao Ying was also equipped with a certain proportion of long knives and big axes. In the tenth year of Shaoxing in the Southern Song Dynasty, in the Battle of Yuncheng, the Yuejia army, which was dominated by infantry, defeated the Jin soldiers and Tiefutu of "especially heavy iron armor" with weapons such as "hemp knives, knives, and axes"; In the eleventh year of Shaoxing, in the battle of Zhegao, the Song general Wang De "ordered ten thousand soldiers to hold long axes and march like a wall", and defeated the iron cavalry under Yan Zongbi; In the battle of Xiangji Temple in the Tang Dynasty, the Tang general Li Siye "blocked the 2,000 foot soldiers with Mo knives and long Ke axes, and he was invincible" and defeated the Anqingxu rebels. The above and other combat examples made Zhao Dangshi, Xu Hui and others make up their minds to form a long-term melee force as the last shelter for the car formation.

For several months, Xu Hui has been working hard for the car formation, and it is not good to directly intervene in the camp without the camp and the camp, and he has completed the assembly and basic drills of the car formation at the front, left and right posts of the camp himself. Among the three sentinels Qin Jinxiao, Mao Andong, and Fan Jiwei, Qin Jinxiao was particularly resistant to the car formation at first, thinking that the "Wang Ba Shrinking Shell Formation" was completely unworthy of the honor of field fighting, and he was disdainful. It wasn't until later, when the armament was replenished and the soldiers became more and more proficient in drills, that he changed his appearance and even became a staunch supporter of the car formation. Therefore, the three outposts of the Xiaojie Battalion with the car formation as the core are well-deserved main forces in this battle. Wu Yingying, Wu Mingfeng, and Xiong Wanjian were therefore placed in the back column and prepared to listen.

The horses in the wild gallop are no matter how fierce they are, when they hit the antler cart to form a dense sharp horn thorn on the periphery of the formation, they collapsed like scattered sand, and the soldiers in the formation then released the arrows to surprise or kill the remaining horses, Ma Guangchun thought that he had a plan to get off the horse, and it became in vain in a blink of an eye.