The deputy marshal of the Qing army, the lord of the blue flag, Prince Zheng Jierharang, looked at Jialazhangjing Zha Yan with a gloomy face and said, "Zha Yan, why did you come back with such a few people?" What about the Toktos? ”

It was Zilharang who was responsible for harassing and luring the enemy to fight, and this time he sent two Jiala and 3,000 cavalry, and now only a few dozen people have returned, and Zilharang is of course very angry.

Jialazhang Jingzhanyan cried: "Prince Zheng, Tuoketuo has sacrificed his life for the country. The Tiance army suddenly made a big move, the offensive was fierce, we were caught off guard, if we hadn't dispersed and broke through, we escaped after drilling the mountains and forests, and the minions and others would not have been able to rush back to report the news. ”

Dolgon on the side sighed, waved his hand, and said, "Zayan, go down." ”

Zha Yan thanked again and again: "Thank you Dashuai, thank you Dashuai!" Then he withdrew.

Since the Qing army and the Ming army fought the war, it is a great thing to lose a thousand people. But since the battle with the Tiance Army, the loss of tens of thousands of people is commonplace, and Dolgon seems to be a little numb.

Dolgon's personal guard Goshha said: "Hurry back to Shengjing to report to the emperor, just say that Lushun's Tiance army has moved and is about to reach my Gaizhou defense line." ”

"Cover!" A group of Goshha horses went out of the city and galloped in the direction of Shengjing.

"Report, report to Prince Rui, the Tiance army is less than thirty miles away from my Gaizhou defense line, and the visual strength is about 10,000 people." Just then, a scout hurriedly arrived.

"It's coming so fast!" Dolgon's heart sank, and he said to Zilharang: "Prince Zheng, we have to rush to the front line to watch the battle as soon as possible. ”

The distance from the area controlled by the Fuzhou Tiance Army to Gaizhou is about 80 kilometers, that is, 160 kilometers.

With the marching speed of other armies of this era, even a rapid march would take a day and a night, and the speed of the cavalry was slightly faster, but it would take half a day to maintain the horsepower to meet the battle at any time, and the Tiance army took less than six hours.

……。

The marching speed of about fifteen kilometers per hour is already the distance of a day's regular infantry march, but it is already very slow for the Tiance army.

The Third Division dispatched a large number of motor vehicles to Gaizhou, including buses, sediment dump trucks, bulldozers, excavators, and other engineering and civilian vehicles.

In addition, there are 64 armoured vehicles, 50 tankers, 32 self-propelled howitzers and 4 Type 99 tanks.

The 3rd Division was considered a purely mechanized force, so the more than 9,000 troops did not need to march on foot. In addition to civilian and engineering vehicles, all types of military vehicles can carry infantry on the outside, so the speed of the march is of course much faster.

Due to the road conditions, it is also necessary to maintain the best condition of the vehicles, and the march speed of the 3rd Division is actually not fast.

There is no road between Fuzhou and Gaizhou, which is a strategic buffer zone.

Tiance Army only rested and widened the original road along the official road and compacted it with a road roller, but this section of the official road is still a dirt road and is inconvenient for high-speed driving.

After all, there are quite a few soldiers who sit on top of armored vehicles and tanks, and with violent bumps, they may fall off.

The total strength of the Third Division was actually 9,000 people, and because of the large number of vehicles, the Qing army mistakenly believed that there were more than 10,000 people.

On 18 May, at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, the 3rd Division of the Tiance Army successively arrived outside the Gaizhou defense line of the Qing army.

The armored command vehicle of the 3rd Division Headquarters stopped close to the defensive line, and Li Zixuan, Wu Zhengchun, and Sun Shengjie got out of the car one after another and used binoculars to observe the opposite side.

Li Zixuan and others are no strangers to the Qing army's Gaizhou defense line, because this defense line has long served as an artillery training ground for the Tiance Army. Air Force reconnaissance and drone reconnaissance are also the daily work of the Tiance Army, and all kinds of pictures and video materials are archived by the Third Division Headquarters and the Tiance Army Headquarters.

However, after on-site observation, Li Zixuan and others still couldn't help but admire the indomitable construction perseverance of the Qing army, after all, this defense line was built under the artillery fire of the Tiance Army, and people were dying every day.

This line of defense was also ridiculed by Wang Yue as the Maginot Line of the 17th century, because the fortress line was dead, and once it was breached at one point, the fortifications of other sections would become decorations.

Huang Taiji also had no choice but to learn the Guanning Defense Line of the Ming Dynasty and engaged in such a big project. The advantage of the Qing army against the Ming army has always been the ability to maneuver, but the battle against the Tiance army is reversed, and the plain battle is more conducive to the firepower of the Tiance army.

The Liaodong Peninsula as a whole is a plain terrain, there are no tall mountains, and the only mountain range is the Qianshan Mountains.

The Qianshan Mountain Range is connected to the Changbai Mountain on the border between China and North Korea in the northeast, the Laotie Mountain in Dalian City in the southwest, and the elevation in the northeast is about 1,000 meters, and it gradually drops to below 200 meters in the southwest.

Therefore, there is no higher mountainous area near Gaizhou, which is used to construct a complex defense line, and Gaizhou does not have dangerous places such as Songshan and Tashan to shield like the Guanning defense line of the Ming army.

It was also a helpless choice for the Qing army to set up a defensive line in Gaizhou, and the hilly and mountainous areas near Gaizhou were fully utilized by the Qing army.

From west to east in the direction of Gaizhou, after nearly two years of construction, the Qing army invested hundreds of thousands of manpower, and successively relied on the hilly and mountainous areas such as Banshi Mountain, Chimney Mountain, Wutai Mountain (not the big Wutai Mountain in Shanxi), Phoenix Mountain, Dustpan Mountain and Tangwang Mountain, and built a ring fortification three or four kilometers wide and more than 60 kilometers long.

The Qing army followed the example of the Ming army and cut down or uprooted all the trees and grass above and below the mountain. This move is to enhance the vision of the defenders on the mountain, which is conducive to the defense of the army, and the second is to prevent the Ming army from setting fire to the mountain and burning the Qing army into roast ducks.

In addition to the bare mountains, along the terrain of the mountains and hills, the Qing army dug countless shallow ditches and deep trenches, and built countless earthen walls, stone walls and earthen forts.

These earthen walls and ditches are distributed in steep and gentle places at each ridge, and they are generally two ditches and three walls. It is two ditches in front of a wall, and several earthen forts. Each wall is less than 200 paces away to support each other.

Many stone walls and earth walls are made of local materials, and various walls are built with stones and clay, and some stone walls even spread for more than ten miles. Under the painstaking management of the Qing army, it surrounded the city of Gaizhou and formed a war fortress.

Gaizhou City is in the core position, the periphery is surrounded by the Daqing River, there are many pontoon bridges built on the river, and the area between the Daqing River and the periphery of the Gaizhou defense line is the entire defense line fortification.

Among them, the chimney mountain city built in the 11th year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty on Chimney Mountain became the headquarters of the Qing army's Gaizhou defense line. Chimney Mountain City is built on the flat place of the halfway mountain under the single peak on the west side of the chimney mountain, and there are three levels of earth city in the outer city, the inner city and the central city.

"Her grandmother's, Jiannu didn't want to break the defense line and wanted to block our army?" Li Zixuan put down the binoculars and said, "Order the artillery to prepare to open fire." ”