After capturing the port, the naval fleet rested here, repaired the batteries, and began to move supplies to the transport ships. The army, led by Chang Kaisheng, headed all the way to the northwest and began to attack the main city of Buenos Aires, focusing on the various Spanish ruling institutions in the area.

More than 220 cavalrymen from two cavalry companies walked in front, and the Spanish farms and pastures they passed along the way were full of panicked Spanish residents. Especially those women and children, when they saw the cavalry brothers wearing dark blue military uniforms and holding snow-bright sabers, they were all so frightened that they didn't dare to come out.

These farms were generally developed by the peninsulars who had moved to the area during the decade, i.e., white Spaniards, who often employed several Italians, Hungarians, and, of course, many more Indian slaves from central and southern Europe. Strangely, there were very few men among these slaves, most of them were women, and perhaps the local Indian men were killed?

The man of the farm stood on the side of the road, took off his hat, and humbly bent his waist very low to pay his respects to the new conquerors. Their wives, wearing turbans and holding their children's hands, hid behind the man and prayed in fear. Well, maybe in prayer to God, they were met with a better disciplined army.

In fact, they were lucky. Because before this war, Lieutenant Colonel Lu Ming, who served as the commander-in-chief, repeatedly emphasized the importance of military discipline. In particular, he admonished the militiamen who had poor military discipline and asked them not to loot and kill people at will, so as not to provoke the local people to revolt and increase their own casualties. Now the forces on the east coast are valuable. He didn't want to put his limited forces in an infinite law and order war.

Lu Ming's worries were justified. Because in the battle against the Guarani people on the mainland. The militia members who went with the army often had poor military discipline. Most of these people were bandits from the eastern part of the Ming Dynasty. A small number of them are the low-level people who can't get along in the old continent, they have unshaven beards, they have suffered from the wind and frost in society, they are greedy for money, lustful, and afraid of power. Unlike those soldiers who open their mouths and close their mouths to the ideal, they only value immediate interests, so military discipline is often very poor. Everywhere you go, it's hard to have a living young Guarani man or a chaste woman.

Some civilian ecumenists have complained to the Executive Committee demanding that the military department punish the militia for violating military discipline. But after an investigation by the military department. It was embarrassing to find that among the militiamen who went to war with the army, those who did not violate military discipline were the few who belonged to the rare ones, and most of them had violated military discipline to a greater or lesser extent. A gendarmerie member who participated in the investigation at the time confessed: "If you really want to be serious, these people are probably robbers, murderers or rapists." These men received no military pay, and only a small portion of the spoils of war were to be shared, and if they were to be punished for some military discipline, their morale would be greatly damaged. ”

And certain officers also exonerated them, and they found according to their own records in battle that they were often the most obscene scumbags, villains. When he arrives on the battlefield, he will be the best soldier to fulfill the officer's intentions. They were quite brave, which made the officers very fond of them. Therefore. In the end, these things often have to go undone.

But this time is obviously different, the Guarani people are tribes, they don't have much strength, and they are bullied. However, the Spaniards had a unified national concept and a unified government structure, and if these obedient peasants were forced to rebel because of poor military discipline, it would be more than worth the loss for the under-armed East Coasters. And this is also the reason why Lu Ming warned these militiamen before the war, and also specially arranged military police to supervise their every move.

The Spaniards in the villages on the outskirts of Buenos Aires did not resist violently, and when the East Coasters imposed a "security tax" (one peso per adult and half a peso for children) "according to custom", they also obediently paid the tax, much to the satisfaction of Captain Chang Kaisheng, who led the group. Under such circumstances, one or two thousand men of the Changkai Shengbu arrived on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires on the afternoon of September 18, and then began to set up temporary camps and artillery emplacements in preparation for the next day's attack.

Along the way, they progressed quite smoothly, and the Spanish gaucho volunteers who were expected to appear were nowhere to be seen. These people are not fools after all, and maybe they don't mind going up and getting a handful of them when they have the upper hand. But now that the peninsulars or the native-born whites were clearly at a disadvantage, it would be fanciful to expect them, the impoverished and discriminated gauchos, to join the Spanish side in the fight, and that they would in fact be pretty good. Only the stupid, brainless few Guarani who had come from the north down the Paraná would have joined the Spaniards at this time to fight the well-armed army on the east coast.

Unlike the masonry fortresses that dotted the territory of the Eastern Republic, there were few cities in the Spanish colonies that were surrounded by thick walls. Especially in the bustling big cities, there are basically no city walls, and only small strongholds on the main transportation routes or by the sea can be strong fortresses made of stone, clay, and brick.

Buenos Aires is no exception, most of the city's neighborhoods are unwalled, they just open up to the farms and woods on the outskirts. In the center of the city, there are some walls that connect some of the castle-like buildings to form a miniature city within Buenos Aires. These buildings are either city councils, churches, generals' palaces, prisons, warehouses, or the headquarters of the local chamber of commerce, all of which are the core of Putrajaya.

The 200 Spanish defenders of Buenos Aires were stuck inside these sturdy masonry buildings, and for most of the neighborhoods outside, they seemed to have given up completely. Of course, a lot of important supplies must have been collected into the castle before giving up, and some young white men should have been requisitioned to help defend it.

Thus, when the East Bank Army began to advance cautiously into the streets of the outer city of Putrajaya in the early morning of 19 September, they encountered considerable trouble. There were only a few places where there were heavy firefights, but the Guarani stragglers from the Paraguayan region did not cause much trouble for the East Coasters. They gathered in groups and houses in some of the streets and fired outwards with arquebuses or bows and arrows.

The way the people on the east coast dealt with them was simple: they brought in artillery, bombarded the houses with shells, and buried the fanatical Guarani Catholics and the Spanish inhabitants who had sheltered them under the rubble. If you dare to shoot at our officers and soldiers on the Great East Coast, then don't blame us for using artillery to teach you how to behave!

After clearing the block, Xu Gang's division, the fastest moving army 101st Company, took the lead in advancing to the outer side of the inner city of the Spaniards' core. After trying to bombard these walls with field artillery, Xu Gang found that these walls were not very thick, and a 12-pounder field cannon could cause some damage to them, not to mention those terrifying 24-pounder siege guns. As long as those two heavy cannons arrive at the scene, they will definitely break the turtle shell in front of them in less than half a day.

Under the escort of two battleships, four flute-type transport ships carrying more than 300 cadets of the 4th Company of the Army, the 3rd Company of Independent Field Artillery, the 3rd Company of the Cavalry, and the 35th Regiment of the Guards Cadet Corps, as well as more than 300 militiamen and a large amount of supplies to provide them with logistical support, began to march to the open sea northeast of the city of Buenos Aires, and at this time the army Chang Kaisheng detachment arrived at the outskirts of Buenos Aires City.

After landing in two days and advancing to the northeastern outskirts of Buenos Aires, at noon on September 20, when there was a loud bang just south of the inner city of Putrajaya, the 1,100-strong detachment under the command of Army Captain Chia Han San also launched an attack from the north of Putrajaya. The Spaniards on the top of the wall were being overwhelmed by the explosive shells fired by the eight guns of the 3rd Company of the Independent Field Artillery, while the few small guns they had were now engaged in an exchange of fire with the East Coast in the other direction, so the resistance was extremely difficult.

The thin iron fence gate could not withstand the blazing shells fired by the 12-pounder field cannon, and the hastily constructed civil and engineering fortifications behind the gate could not withstand the ravages of the artillery, and a large number of Spanish soldiers were buried alive in the collapsed fortifications. And they have never encountered an army with such fierce artillery fire, such as the Chang Kaisheng detachment, which is only 13,400 people, and is equipped with 16 field artillery, and the caliber and diameter are generally not small, which is really unacceptable.

Not to mention the two 24-pounder siege guns that had just arrived, the power was really God's blocking and killing of God, and the Buddha was blocking and killing Buddha, and any Spanish army fortifications in front of it were turned into ruins, which made people extremely chilled to watch. The loud bang just now was because a red-hot 24-pounder shell directly penetrated the misplaced powder keg of the Spaniards, and the high-temperature shell quickly ignited the gunpowder inside while penetrating the powder keg, and then triggered a series of explosions, making the two nearby Spanish bronze guns and more than 30 soldiers either dead or wounded, and extremely miserable.

After this accident, the Spaniards had already suffered more than 100 casualties, their morale was also greatly damaged, and they completely lost confidence in whether they could hold the inner city. If it weren't for the insistence of the officials, they would have surrendered long ago, lest they stay here and die in vain. (To be continued......)