As long as his Fourth Army stays outside the city, the grain in Jingzhou City will not be able to be transported, and it will be impossible for the Ming army on the Xingquan Mansion side to obtain a large amount of food supplies, at most it will be from other places to draw grain, but that is a drop in the bucket, and it is far from quenching the thirst.

But now there are not many defenders in Jingzhou City, it is possible to fight, and more importantly, Chen Keqiao knows that there is a large amount of food in the city, which is important for the Ming army, and it is also very important for the Fourth Army.

In these years, no one has too much food.

Even if it was for the food in the city, Chen Keqiao felt that he could fight a dozen!

But it is also a trouble to fight Jingzhou City, in case the attack is blocked, it is easy to lose the army, don't look at the Ming army in the field is not their opponent, but the Ming army relies on the city to defend, there is still a big threat to their own side.

After staying in Jingzhou for so many days, he also learned from some outside intelligence that there were still a lot of Ming troops in the hinterland of Huguang, and it was rumored that Zhang Yue, the governor of the four provinces of the puppet Ming Dynasty, was a ruthless character, not only transferred a large number of guards from Huguang to march into Guizhou as soon as possible, but also recruited young and strong people to form more troops, and at the same time asked for reinforcements in Nanzhili and other areas.

Chen Keqiao didn't know how many troops Zhang Yue still had on hand, but he knew that Zhang Yue would definitely not sit idly by and watch Jingzhou fall.

If too much time and troops are spent on attacking Jingzhou, then it is easy for an accident to occur on the Xingquan Mansion.

Now in the capital city of Xingquan Mansion, there are still thousands of people in the second army surrounded, and they have been cut off from food and grass, if it drags on for a long time, I am afraid that there will be an accident.

Therefore, Chen Keqiao is still a little hesitant about whether to fight Jingzhou City.

That night, the troops of the Fourth Army continued to be stationed outside the city to recuperate, and at the same time, some of the officers of the Ministry of War and the civilian officers of the Privy Council Training Department who had come with the army had already begun to persuade many captured prisoners to surrender to the Tang Dynasty.

By recruiting the Ming army to join the garrison, this is an important means of the large-scale expansion of the Tang Dynasty in the past year to reduce the pressure on the regular army, so every time a large number of prisoners are captured, they will spend a lot of effort to persuade the soldiers to surrender anyway.

When attacking the defenders of Jingzhou two days ago, they captured almost 2,000 prisoners, and this time they attacked the reinforcements of Xingquanfu and captured 5,000 prisoners, and if the two combined, the number of prisoners alone was 7,000.

Chen Keqiao also counted on selecting a part of the prisoners to replenish his own army, for example, selecting a part of the elite to supplement the regular army, after continuing to fight, the regular army troops also lost nearly 200 people before and after, and a considerable part of them were still cavalry.

And the reinforcements in the rear have not yet arrived so quickly, and if there is a replacement of troops anyway, the regular army such as the Third Infantry Brigade can also have more troops.

For example, the 11th Garrison Regiment and the three garrison battalions in the 1st Provisional Regiment are all relatively short.

If one or two thousand men could be selected directly from the prisoners of war to replenish it, then the Fourth Army would be able to greatly restore its full strength.

When Chen Keqiao was thinking about whether to fight Jingzhou that night, the Ming army in Jingzhou City was also extremely panicked, but they watched the tens of thousands of troops out of the city collapse a few days ago, and in the end they only recovered less than 2,000 people, and the rest were either killed or wounded, captured or deserted.

However, during the day today, they saw the Xingquan Mansion reinforcements defeat outside the city, which was an army of 15,000 people, and they were defeated cleanly.

Now, they are the only ones left to hold out in the city!

But will they be able to hold on?

Now there are less than 4,000 regular troops in the defenders of the city, although they have mobilized as much as possible the young men in the city and the people who were originally used to transport military supplies, and they can barely make up 7,000 men.

But even then they don't have much faith!

Especially the senior generals who led the army, they knew that in the Battle of Wuzhou, there were tens of thousands of defenders in Wuzhou City, but they were not broken by the puppet Tang thief army, and the puppet Tang thief army that attacked the city was only tens of thousands.

Therefore, although there are only six or seven thousand puppet Tang thief troops outside the city, who knows if this city can be defended.

But abandon the city and flee, this is even more unfeasible, there is so much food in the city, that is used to supply tens of thousands of troops of food, how can it be easy to give up, if you flee without a fight and abandon Jingzhou, the superintendent Zhang Yue will definitely kill people and kill a river of blood.

From this point of view, it also proves that Zhang Yue's strategy of transferring local officials and generals away and only using officials and generals from other provinces is indeed effective, at least when the situation in the district is not good, no one thinks about escaping or surrendering at the first time, because if they dare to do so, Zhang Yue will dare to directly raid the family and exterminate the clan.

Hong Linquan is a typical example.

The Ming army in the city was nervous, but this had nothing to do with Chen Keqiao, and after thinking about it for a night, the next day Chen Keqiao decided to fight a dozen first, and then talk about it, to see how the defense of Jingzhou City was, and whether there was a chance to fight it in a short period of time without paying a major price.

However, the siege of Chen Keqiao is not ideal, there is not too much heavy artillery to help, and the musketeers in the siege war cannot exert too much power, and the line tactics that the Tang Dynasty is proud of are also useless, and can only be attacked by traditional methods.

As a result, after two days of fighting, the 11th Garrison Regiment, which served as the main force to test the attack, lost almost 200 people, and after paying such a price, even the moat could not be filled.

This result made him quite helpless!

His Fourth Army was a good hand at frontal battles in the field, but it was not so good at siege warfare.

Just when he was distressed about attacking Jingzhou City, Fang Xitong of the Second Army was also angry, because he got a report from the reconnaissance cavalry, saying that there was something wrong with the Ming army on the opposite side, and there was no Ming army at all where there should have been a large number of Ming troops stationed, but the tents of the Ming army camps that stretched for miles were empty, and there were only a few troops stationed in them.

Then the reconnaissance cavalry reported that most of the Ming troops outside the city of Xingquanfu had disappeared.

At the same time, news of the transit of a large number of soldiers and horses was found in the north of Xingquan Province!

When Fang Xitong got the news, he didn't know what was going on, which showed that the Ming army in Xingquan Mansion had already given up besieging Xingquan Mansion City, leaving only a few troops to break off, and then the main force fled north, and looking like this, it seemed that it had been fleeing for several days.

Fang Xitong immediately said: "Then what are you waiting for, launch an attack immediately!" ”

The attack of the second army was extremely smooth, and the Ming army, which had blocked them for a long time, had already disappeared, and there were thousands of people left, young and old, and when the Tang Dynasty Wang Division was killed, they immediately surrendered, and they didn't even resist!

Immediately, Fang Xitong sent all the main forces to the north, and as for the Xingquan Mansion City, he only sent one battalion over, and then there were a large number of baggage troops.

As the Ming army retreated, the encirclement of Xingquan Mansion naturally did not exist, what did his second army still do, just send some people to pick up one or two, and send food over!

When the reinforcements of the Second Army arrived at Xingquanfu City with a large amount of food, the sight they saw made these soldiers unbearable, not because the city was ruined, but because the defenders they saw were all hungry and blue.

Even a high-ranking general like Wang Danxu has become much thinner.

The soldiers in this army are better, at most they are dizzy from hunger, and their faces don't look very good, but the ordinary civilians in the city are even worse, and there are not a few people who starve to death, and the survivors are also skinny.

When Wang Danxu saw the reinforcements arriving with a large amount of food, an old man in his thirties couldn't help but shed tears, it has not been easy for him in the past few months.

If he waits for a few more days, I'm afraid that more than half of the soldiers under his command will starve to death, not to mention the ordinary people in the city.

The soldiers and civilians of Xingquan Fucheng, who were under siege, had already run out of food in the city three days ago, and Wang Danxu only had the last bit of food left on hand, and this grain was used by him as the last life-saving food, and each soldier could only drink a bowl of porridge water that was so thin that there were no grains of rice at all to make a living.

Even this did not last a few days, yesterday was the last grain of food was eaten, if the reinforcements did not send food today, they would starve to death.

The soldiers were dying of starvation, the common people were even more miserable, and even some of the old and young were starved to death, and most of them were skinned and devoid of human appearance.

So after the reinforcements entered the city, the first thing was to give porridge!

Even because many people were so hungry that they didn't have the strength to come and receive the porridge on their own, the reinforcements carried the porridge from door to door.

However, although he was hungry, he was able to relieve the siege of Xingquan Mansion and did not starve to death on a large scale, which can be regarded as a blessing in misfortune.

When there was a cry on the side of Xingquan Mansion, Fang Xitong had already set his eyes to the north.

The more than 30,000 Hu Guangming troops must not let them escape easily, they must catch up, otherwise, these more than 30,000 Ming troops will still cause them great trouble in the future.

Especially now that there are more than 10,000 Ming troops on the Zhenyuan Mansion, if Tan Rong's more than 30,000 Ming troops are allowed to merge with this more than 10,000 Ming army, it will be more troublesome to fight in the future.

But although Fang Xitong led the army to pursue, Tan Rong ran faster!

When he heard that Hong Lin on the Jingzhou side was defeated and died, he was even more glad that he ran fast, otherwise none of the 30,000 troops wanted to escape!