After having had enough of the suffering of the puppet Tang thief army's firearms, now the Ming army, especially the Ming army on the front line, has great respect for firearms, believing that the reason why the puppet Tang thief army was able to capture the three provinces so quickly and the officers and troops that fought were unable to form an army was because they occupied the advantage of firearms.

And once he has firearms, he will definitely be able to double the combat effectiveness of the official army, and the background of the Ming Dynasty can not be compared with the puppet Tang Dynasty, the puppet Tang thief army can make a musket, then the Ming Dynasty can make ten or even a hundred muskets.

So now many generals of the Ming army have set off a trend of learning from the Tang Dynasty!

For example, Wang Yue was full of confidence after urgently purchasing a batch of firearms from foreigners, and then urgently copying a small number of firearms by himself, and making up hundreds of muskets and more than a dozen artillery pieces.

With this batch of firearms as the foundation, he will be able to build a firearms army, plus tens of thousands of other cold weapons troops in the city of Guangzhou, Wang Yue has great confidence to hold the city of Guangzhou, until the Ming army in Huguang or Jiangxi, Fujian and other places to kill in Guangdong.

At that time, he Wang Yue will not only be able to get rid of the negative political impression caused by several consecutive defeats before, but also maybe he will be rewarded for his meritorious service in sticking to Guangzhou.

Even if he can't get a reward, as long as he can live in the same position, he will be very satisfied.

If you can't hold Guangzhou, then the trouble will be big, and then the imperial court will definitely be a new account and an old account together, and your fate will definitely not be too wonderful, the possibility of demotion and exile is not great, and it is very likely that you will be directly beheaded by the angry Emperor Zhengde and the cabinet bosses.

Maybe it will affect the family!

This kind of result is naturally unbearable for him, so he will work hard to strengthen Guangzhou's defensive strength!

These firearms and artillery were all placed on the head of the city, and the original bowl guns of the Ming army, and a number of franc machine guns drawn from the naval division served as the main firepower for the defense of the city.

As for the hundreds of arquebuses that he copied himself or purchased directly from foreigners, he organized them into a firearms battalion.

This battalion is not the same as the battalion in the Tang Dynasty's division, it is a specific formation, but the number of an independent unit, which is generally similar to a certain army.

This firearms battalion, which he personally commanded, had a total of 1,200 men, and in addition to about 200 auxiliary troops, the main force was about 500 musketeers with muskets and 500 spearmen with spears, and even the spearmen in the front row of these spearmen were equipped with the armor and shields that he had so hard to gather from the various armies.

It can also be seen from this that the firearms battalion built by Wang Yue is not only equipped with a regular army that imitates the Tang Dynasty's division, but even the establishment is similar.

This firearms battalion has four musket teams, and the size of each musket team is the same as that of the musket team in the regular army of the Tang Dynasty, one no more and one no less.

Even the four spear teams were organized according to the size of a team of 100 people.

Not to mention these formations, even the titles are imitated, such as the musket team and the spear team, which are also imitated, if Li Xuan knows about it, he will definitely scold a stinky shameless sentence!

Of course, the title and rank of the officer will naturally not be learned, and the Ming Dynasty will still have a face, and not all things will be imitated, but it is very interesting that the Ming army officers in this firearms battalion are definitely highly matched, and the commander of the battalion is Yu Dayou, the deputy chief soldier of Guangdong, who personally serves as the commander-in-chief, and the battalion commander is also a general.

And then the captain of each team is also a thousand households, this is a thousand households, not a cabbage, if this is placed in the Ming Army Guard, it is a middle and senior officer who commands a thousand households, but in this firearms battalion, he can only serve as the leader of a team.

The soldiers of the battalion were drawn from various guards and recruits, and at the same time they were given relatively high treatment, and the lowest-level auxiliaries, that is, non-war soldiers such as men, all had a monthly salary of one or two or eight pieces of silver, while the soldiers of musketeers and spearmen had a monthly salary of two or five dollars of silver.

And this is just the basic salary, because in order to improve morale, Wang Yue offered a high bounty for killing the pseudo-Tang thief army, the head of a pseudo-Tang thief army is worth five taels of silver, if the pseudo-Tang thief army is still a musketeer or a heavy armored soldier, then the bounty is ten taels of silver.

At the same time, because it is difficult for combat units such as firearms battalions to distinguish the detailed results of individual battles, these bounties are distributed among the soldiers who fight.

If in a big battle, the battalion can kill and wound a thousand thieves, then they can share at least five thousand taels or more, as much as ten thousand taels of silver, and if they win a few more battles, then even ordinary soldiers can get dozens of taels or even hundreds of taels of silver in a year.

The newly organized firearms battalion and more than a dozen heavy artillery pieces and dozens of large and small bowl cannons on the city gave Wang Yue unprecedented confidence, and even he felt that if he had such sharp firearms in Wuzhou, it would be impossible for the puppet Tang thief army to conquer Wuzhou.

It's a pity that there are no ifs!

Wang Yue in Guangzhou is close to the coast, and he can get a batch of firearms from the foreigners, but it does not mean that the Huguang Ming army can also do this, although Zhang Yue also asked the craftsmen to start copying the muskets of the pseudo-Tang thief army, but there will not be much imitation for a while, and it is even more impossible to imitate the artillery quickly.

The only thing that is comforting is that Zhang Yue used his connections to get some Franc cannons from the sailors in the Jiangnan region, and now Tan Rong has eight of them, this Franc cannon is not the kind of small Franc cannon of 100 catties used by the military in the northern border, but a cannon used by the sailors, the lightest of which are 150 catties, and more than half of them are 300 catties of Franc cannons.

Although the firing range of this rear-loading shotgun is not good, the firepower at a distance of 100 meters is still quite fierce, no worse than the 150-pound shotgun equipped in batches by the Tang Dynasty.

However, these Franco cannons in Tan Rong's hands are also the same as those bowl guns, because the range is too close, they can only be used to hit the enemy's infantry, and cannot be used as a fake long-distance suppressive firepower.

Among the 15,000 people sent out to rescue Jingzhou, they took away fully half of the Franc machine guns, which made Tan Rong a little relieved, thinking that even if the main force of the puppet Tang thief army was intercepted on the road and could not get the cooperation of the defenders of Jingzhou, these 15,000 people would have the strength to fight.

As for winning the war, well, Tan Rong is not so arrogant, he doesn't think that this fifteen thousand people alone can completely defeat the seven thousand main force of the puppet Tang thief army.

However, he didn't need to defeat the main force of the 7,000 pseudo-Tang thief army, he only needed to slightly force back the pseudo-Tang thief army and maintain the supply line.

After waiting for another ten days and half a month, the thief army in Xingquan Mansion will definitely starve to death, even if they don't starve to death, I am afraid that they will reach the end of the crossbow, and then they will wave their troops to attack and seize Xingquan Mansion City.

Then he will be able to use nearly 20,000 more mobile troops on hand, and he will not need to use them to advance westward to Liping Mansion or return to Jingzhou.

When that time comes, the trend of the entire battlefield will be up to you.

Tan Rong has his own strategic plan, and Fang Xitong and Chen Keqiao also have their own strategic plan!

When Fang Xitong received the military intelligence report from the Fourth Army, he also looked at the map for a long time, and then sighed: "This Chen Keqiao's courage is not small, he is going to treat himself as a stubborn rock in the flood!" ”

He could see at a glance that Chen Keqiao's strategic plan was very simple and crude, that is, to cut off the logistical supply line of the Ming army from Jingzhou to Xingquanfu, and even had the idea of blocking and annihilating the Ming army's return reinforcements.

But it is very risky to do so, and if you are not careful, you will fall into the Ming army's two-sided attack and even encirclement.

After all, the Ming army in Jingzhou and Xingquanfu combined, but there are more than 60,000 people, even if Tan Rong divides 10,000 troops to help, plus the defenders in Jingzhou also have 30,000, if it fights like this, the Fourth Army, which only has 7,000 people, will be more dangerous.

However, since Chen Keqiao had already made such a risky plan, no matter what the final outcome of the Fourth Army was, he had already successfully created an opportunity for the Second Army to understand the siege of Xingquanfu City.

And the time that this opportunity lasted was probably only a short ten days, and if you took into account the time delayed on the road by the military intelligence briefing, then there was not much time left for the Second Army, so Fang Xitong was not prepared to waste a day.

After all, when Fang Xitong received the information from the Fourth Army, it had been four days since the Fourth Army had actually cut off the supply line of the Ming Army, and Tan Rong even knew about it two days earlier than Fang Xitong, and now the reinforcements sent by Tan Rong had already rushed towards Jingzhou.

In this way, there is not much time left for Fang Xitong!

Therefore, after receiving the news, he immediately issued a mobilization order for the whole army, and issued an order for the whole army to be mobilized early tomorrow morning, and the target: Xingquan Mansion.

After this period of rest and replenishment, although the troops under Fang Xitong's command still failed to return to their peak state, they were much better than when they returned from a big defeat before, and now the core troops under his command, that is, the Third Infantry Regiment, although there are a bit more recruits, but they have finally recovered to full strength, and the number of ordnance has also been urgently replenished and restored to full strength.

That is to say, now Fang Xitong already has a fully equipped Third Infantry Regiment under his command, well, there are a little more recruits in it, and at least a quarter of the soldiers are just replenished from the recruit camp, which looks a little unreliable, but the other troops are even more unreliable!