The artillery battle ended before the sun set. The artillery planted by the British at the head of the city was the first to stop firing, and after the British put out the fire, the people on the east coast naturally would not be stupid enough to provoke them again, and the two sides tacitly ceased fire at the same time.

There was an eerie silence on the battlefield for a moment.

After nightfall, Sun Shengjun gathered all the soldiers of the Eight Banners, and built a simple position with the artillery bunkers scattered around it as the core, and then carefully pulled barbed wire around the position, and blocked it with large carts in important parts. When it was all done, the lights were extinguished throughout the camp, and the sentries led the wolfdogs to patrol the barbed wire fence, all set up like a regular army.

The night of 18 May was in a sense calm, for the British had not come out of the city to attack their positions; But in a sense, it was not peaceful, because the shadow of the longing figure in the wheat field in the distance had been shaking for most of the night, and there was not some noise faintly, and the wolf dogs in the barbed wire fence also barked for most of the night. However, considering that the combat quality of the soldiers of the Eight Banners was not high, Sun Shengjun still decided that no matter what happened outside, it was important to stick to the camp and not move, so as to respond to all changes.

After dawn, Sun Shengjun looked at the wheat field in front of him in the camp and was stunned. I saw that next to the wheat field that the slaves had harvested yesterday, a large area of wheat that had not yet been harvested was suddenly harvested overnight.

Co-authored last night the British tossed for most of the night just to sneak out of the city to cut wheat! Sun Shengjun couldn't help but smile a little, and at the same time felt a little unbelievable. How could the morale of these British Yankees be so low? He didn't dare to confront his own troops. No, there are at least 300 militiamen armed with firearms in the city who can fight. The chances of victory against your own troops are not very high. But it's not like just huddle in the city and be a turtle. Especially when the enemy is still harvesting the grain that he has worked so hard to grow for a year.

But isn't the enemy's low morale and being a shrunken turtle exactly what he wants to see? If they braved the artillery fire to go out of the city and fight to the death with themselves, who would they go to reason with if the Eight Banners collapsed in battle? The fighting qualities of these people are not clear to others, but he, Sun Shengjun, knows too well. To put it mildly, those black banners may still have a little bit of combat power, while those short red banners are very suspicious in combat power, and once they enter a melee state with the enemy, they have a high chance of collapsing.

However, it is "gratifying" that they are brave and unstoppable when fighting against the local natives. It was as if they were all possessed by magic after standing under the banner of the Eight Banners. The East Coast Army, which didn't need to crush its own people, just watched them win from afar.

Today, the scene of how to quickly cut wheat under the accompaniment of rumbling cannons was staged outside the Fort of Good Hope, and as a result, the artillery on both sides of the accompaniment was a little slack, and the time was just after noon, and the sound of the guns stopped after a morning.

The sound of the cannons stopped, but the slaves could not stop cutting the wheat. It was not until evening that Sun Shengjun sounded the horn to return to the camp, and the slaves who were working hard in the wheat fields suddenly poured back to the camp like a tide. After two days of uninterrupted rapid harvesting, most of the 800 acres of wheat that the British had planted outside Fort Good Hope had been harvested. Because the wheat is not yet fully ripe. When the time comes, the harvest may not be too much, but Sun Shengjun roughly estimated. I think that the wheat harvested in these two days will be about 150 tons by then.

This amount is not a small supplement to the existing grain reserves of Fort River. A large amount of grain harvested during the day yesterday has been loaded back in carts overnight, but most of it is still stacked in the camp. Xiao Baitu, who supervised the army in the rear, had already sent people back overnight to report the news, and asked Hezhongbao to send a large number of carts and servants to pull wheat.

On the night of May 19, as the night before, the commander of the British, not knowing what method he had used, again mobilized the demoralized English militia to go out of the city to harvest wheat, and they also tossed in the dark until four or five o'clock in the morning before withdrawing. In response to the actions of the British, the guns were facing the east coast of the artillery, and the artillerymen tacitly did not open fire, allowing the British to harvest wheat back and forth.

When the sun rose on May 20, hundreds of slaves rushed to harvest the last small patch of wheat in the wheat field. Two hours later, with the last bundle of wheat being handed over to the camp, the plan to harvest the British's wheat fields was basically successfully completed.

After receiving the order to end the task, the slaves who had been desperately harvesting wheat for more than two days immediately sat down in the camp with a limp body. Sun Shengjun did not break his promise, and ordered someone to count the amount of grain harvested by each person on the spot, and discharged the top 100, and then immediately announced the pardon of the slavery status of the 100 people and their families, and "carried the flag" into the Shangliu Banner, and became a free citizen from then on.

After everything was dealt with here, Sun Shengjun sent someone to ask Xiao Baitu and others who were supervising the formation in the rear. After receiving approval, he began to organize the soldiers and slaves of the Eight Banners to retreat slowly. Retreating in front of the enemy is an extremely complicated and delicate job, especially if you still have a lot of baggage and food to carry, this is even more difficult work, and the slightest lack of ability of the organizers may cause a terrible chaos.

But now that the British were demoralized to the point where they were unwilling to go out of the city to fight, things were much easier. Except for the artillerymen and some of the Eight Banner spearmen, who were still watching the British, hundreds of slaves, under the supervision of some of the Eight Banner spearmen, began to load wagons of wheat and pull it back.

The whole operation lasted longer than the wheat was harvested, and the slaves and servants carried it back and forth for four days, until the afternoon of May 24, when the wheat and baggage of the camp were finally emptied with the departure of the last cart.

On May 25, the East Bank Artillery, under the cover of the spearmen of the Eight Banners and the cavalry units in the distance, pulled up the ten cannons one by one and set out on the way back to Fort River. At this point, the whole wheat harvest operation finally came to an end.

In this battle, except for the loss of more than a dozen spearmen of the Eight Banners, the East Coasters almost had no other losses (the reduction of slaves was not counted), but the gains were very huge. The first was the harvest of more than 100 tons of wheat that the British had worked so hard to grow, and the second was to test the low morale of the British in the Cape Town area. The second one, in particular, gave the Fort Riverside a new understanding of the current situation of its British neighbors to the south, and made it more targeted when formulating countermeasures in the future.

After harvesting the wheat of the British, the southern hemisphere has begun to gradually enter winter. At this time, not only did the temperature begin to gradually drop, but even the weather became worse, and this area in the southwest corner of South Africa began to become cloudy and rainy.

Thanks to the relatively well-developed infrastructure in the Fort River, these winter rains and snow have not caused much disaster to the local area, but on the contrary, they have injected valuable rainwater resources into the land. In winter, when the weather is fine, all the residents and some slaves of Hezhong Fort have to go out to clean up the mud from the river pond wharf, renovate the farmland and water conservancy facilities, and build house and fort facilities.

Of course, one of the most important tasks for the residents is the winter militia training exercises. During this rare period of intensive training, the militia on the east coast had to train military skills such as discipline, platoon, saber splitting, platoon shooting, and bomb throwing almost every day; In addition, subjects such as intelligence reconnaissance, field training, trap setting, mapping, and interrogation skills are what non-commissioned officers need to master. It can be said that the annual winter training exercise is an important stage for the East Coast militia to make a leap forward in their military skills and military literacy.

Some time ago, the Executive Committee and the Ministry of Military Affairs promulgated a new outline for the establishment and training of local militia reserves. In the outline, in addition to detailing the details of the training of the local militia, reference was made to the formation of a reserve force of four companies. As the name suggests, the reserve forces are all peasants and workers in peacetime, and they regularly train intensively and carry out ideological and political education. Compared with the militia, they are trained more frequently, more standardized, and meticulous, and of course, they usually receive one-third of the regular army's salary.

At present, there are four regular army companies nationwide, namely the 1st Company stationed in the capital barracks, the 2nd Company stationed in the Zhengang Fort Fortress, the 3rd Company stationed in Coal River Township, and the 4th Company stationed in Hezhong Fort. This time, with the approval of the Executive Committee, the Military Department was allowed to form the 101st Company of the Reserve in Dongfang County, the 102nd Company of the Reserve in Zhenhaigang, the 103rd Company of the Reserve in Coal River Township, and the 104th Company of the Reserve in Fort Hezhong.

The officers and enlisted men of these four reserve companies only exist on the roster on weekdays, and are only grouped together during regular training, which can be regarded as an important supplement to the regular army. As soon as the situation changed, they were quickly mobilized as regular troops and put into combat.

After all, the situation in Europe is quite volatile today. France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria and other major countries are at war, and even Britain is now in danger of a full-scale civil war. Although the Eastern Coast Republic is thousands of miles away in the New World, and it stands to reason that it will not be affected by any war, many things in this world are really difficult to say. Especially in the case of war, there are many times things that you can't avoid if you want to, so it's not wrong to plan ahead and prepare more in advance. (To be continued......)