July 12, 1884

This is the third month that I have been ordered to come to Vietnam as a military observer, and everything is terrible here. After the Qing declared war, the Qing troops who had come to the aid of Vietnam began to take the initiative, but they did not achieve much success. I can easily guess who the enemy on the opposite side is, the Dian army and the Gui army are poorly equipped, the Cui army and the Hunan army are limited, and the French army is still on the offensive in the overall situation.

But there is also a Qing army that has fought well, not only with successive results, but also has invaded the French occupation zone, and this magical army is the Le army in the Qing army. The French had captured several prisoners of this army, and according to the prisoners of war, their commander was called He Huan, a bandit who had surrendered. The French elder despised this poor-born general very much, and did not even make any special arrangements for him. I always feel a little uneasy, because this music army always makes me feel a sense of déjà vu.

I hadn't been on the battlefield much, and although I had experienced a big war, it was twenty-five years ago. In this era of rapid development of science and technology, the updating of weapons and tactics is almost ever-changing, and the experience of 25 years ago is too far away. Looking back at the army I led back then, I will definitely laugh off my big teeth, we were still very backward at that time. But it's really strange, the Lejun's all-Manchurian equipment is very advanced, and their tactics and playing styles are also very modern, but I feel like I've met them somewhere.

July 21, 1884

I think I've regained my memory, and I finally know why I feel so familiar to the enemy. In the evening, Francis, the commander of the French brigade, received frustrating information that more than 500 heavy troops in the rear of the French army had been attacked. The French army lost almost all of its baggage and supplies, and lost more than 300 soldiers. Francis sent reinforcements, he wanted to pursue the enemy, but the reinforcements planted an ambush, and the thousand reinforcements did not even see the shadow of the enemy, so they were severely beaten and lost more than 200 men.

I'm all too familiar with this kind of thing, and twenty-five years ago our great Red Shirts went through almost exactly the same thing. The French were with us at the time, and they were attacked no less often than we did. It's a pity that Major General Francis is too young, and after graduating from a good military academy, he doesn't know how cruel the war was twenty-five years ago. Although I gave him a very reasonable opinion and gave a detailed account of what we had encountered, Francis didn't care, and went his own way, and then the French went step by step into the trap of the Orientals.

The road from Guanyin Bridge to Lang Son is only more than 100 kilometers, which is the only thing worth being happy about. If it is more than 200 kilometers from Tianjin to Tongzhou, it will be a complete nightmare. But the stupidity of the French still makes me helpless, they are attacked again and again, and then make the same mistake again and again, which is really stupid to be incomprehensible. By the time I was able to see Langshan from afar, the French had already been attacked twelve times.

August 1, 1884

It was destined to be a painful journey, and as a military observer, although there was not much danger, I still felt very painful. It was as if I had gone back twenty-five years, and the ghost troops had come to me again, and they were everywhere, but they could never be found. Every time I dream back in the middle of the night, I can hear the wails of my comrades, as if ghostly bullets are flying over my head again.

I went to bed at eight o'clock tonight, because Francis was preparing to launch an attack with the main force Lang Son early tomorrow morning, and the troops who had been tormented by the ghost for a month needed a good rest. When the terrible scene reappeared in my dreams, my dreams overlapped as reality. The ghosts of Vietnam, too, launched a surprise attack on the French army in the dark of night, as they did twenty-five years ago. Powerful shells exploded in the barracks, and the dense bullets swept through the camp like a torrential rain, and the sound of the huge guns almost deafened my ears.

The fierce battle continued until four o'clock in the morning, and the French lost more than 100 casualties, but the enemy did not have a hair left. According to the French staff officers who inspected the scene, the enemy launched a surprise attack at 0:00 a.m. with three light rifles and five machine guns, and then withdrew from the battlefield at 0:15 a.m. In the chaotic darkness of the night, the French army fought fiercely with itself for three and a half and forty-five minutes, and more than half of the casualties were caused by the French army's own accidental wounds.

August 3, 1884

Francis's mission was to test the reality of the Qing army in the Langshan area, and I thought that such an ordinary operation would not be a surprise, but I did not think that this damned Frenchman almost killed me. After being attacked by the elusive enemy many times, this ignorant French stupid donkey still insisted on marching to Lang Son, and then ran head-on into the 20,000 Qing troops who had just entered Vietnam. The French stupid donkey whimsically wanted to fight a decisive battle with nearly eight times the enemy, did he regard the Qing army as the indigenous people of Africa?

The outcome of the battle was very miserable, because the French army was not ready for another sneak attack. Damn French stupid donkey Francis, the decision to seize the advantageous terrain was correct, but who knows where the goddamn ghost troops are lying in ambush? The French army who rushed to the high ground had just taken out their shovels to dig trenches to deploy defenses, and the mandrill-like enemy was killed in the grass as tall as a man. The dense grass and trees, obscuring everyone's view, and the bullets flying everywhere made no place safe on this damn high ground.

The French, who had been beaten everywhere and could not find the enemy, fled from the high ground in great confusion, and then they were in a desperate situation. The ghost troops who occupied the high ground condescendingly fired at them with artillery and machine guns, and 20,000 Qing troops also killed them like a flood. Francis, fleeing in disarray, lost a thousand soldiers from the enemy's pursuit.

The ghost troops in Vietnam are very different from the ghost troops we encountered back then, and their soldiers are not as good as the ghost troops of the past, otherwise they would not be busy snatching the loot from the corpses and letting the stupid Francis find a way out. And their mobility ability is far inferior to the ghost troops of the past. The ghost troops of those days could maneuver at high speed on a front of 200 kilometers and appear anywhere overnight, but the ghost troops in Vietnam could not do this, and their marching speed was not much different from that of the French army. Of course, Vietnam's ghost troops also have some advantages, such as their concealment is very good, the ghost troops in those days could only rely on high-speed maneuvers to evade us, and these guys can hide in front of us.

October 7, 1884

We were defeated all the way to Xuanguang, and the grappling, ghostly torment that I imagined didn't happen, but we had to face a bigger battle. Cen Yuying, the commander of the Qing army on the western front of the Beiqi battlefield and the governor of Yunnan and Guizhou, commanded the Dian army and the Black Flag army to launch a decisive battle-level general attack on the Xuanguang front line in accordance with the strategic policy of defense on the southeast coast and the land counteroffensive in Beiqi determined by the Qing court after the official declaration of war against France.

There were two Qing troops, one was more than 3,700 people in ten battalions of Liu Yongfu's Black Flag Army, and more than 2,500 people in five battalions of the Dian Army. The Qing army successively occupied the outer areas of Xuanguang and completed the strategic posture of encircling Xuanguang. On the other hand, more than 7,000 troops of the Dian army went south to Xiahe, Qingbo and other places, approached Duanxiong, Lintao, threatened Xinghua and Shanxi, and firmly contained the French army in Hanoi.

Charles, the commander-in-chief of the French army in the Xuan Guang area, was far more reliable than Francis, and his tactics were to use trenches to connect the river bank with the castle. At the same time, a pagoda in front of the castle was used, and a post was set up on the tower with the tower as the forward position, and the deep trench was also used to communicate the communication between the post and the castle. In peacetime, when the outpost found out about the situation, it immediately notified the defenders in the city by telephone. The French could then use artillery to support and suppress the enemy's attack. The artillery of the French army far surpassed the Qing army in terms of range and firepower, and the Qing army had no power to fight back in artillery battles.

I had to sigh because I saw a very familiar weapon in the hands of the Qing army - the twelve-pounder Armstrong cannon. It was the same weapon I fought with me twenty-five years ago, and it was the latest artillery of the time. But twenty-five years have passed, and it is unthinkable that there are still people in the Qing army using such weapons. Twenty-five years ago, like them, I thought that the phone call might be some scammer's witchcraft, but they still think so today.

November 13, 1884

The equipment of the Dian army is a little poor, and the equipment of the Black Flag Army is even worse than theirs. They had no artillery to attack and no technology to deal with the forts, and the only thing they could do was to send their soldiers to charge down the city and place them*. However, their explosive skills were not up to par, and they were unable to blow up the city at all, but instead sacrificed a large number of heroic soldiers in the rain of bullets and bullets of the French army. Then Cen Yuying, the commander-in-chief of the Qing army, began to adopt the strategy of "besieging the city and sending reinforcements".

At the beginning of the month, the French army tried to transport reinforcements to Xuanguang by boat along the Qing River several times, but they were intercepted by the Black Flag Army in the Zuoyu area, and suffered heavy losses and failed to break through the Qing army's defensive line. The French army, which had been repeatedly defeated, finally sent a large-scale reinforcement, with five large warships, one merchant ship, and more than 10 towing wooden boats, carrying more than 2,000 reinforcements, and sailed upstream. After arriving in Zuoyu, after twelve hours of fierce fighting with the Black Flag Army and the Dian Army, he was again forced to retreat to Duanxiong.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, there was finally good news that the French army rushed to Zuoyu for the seventh time, landed with a force, attacked the Huang Shouzhong division of the Yunnan army by land, and finally defeated it. After the defeat of Huang Shouzhong's army, Liu Yongfu was afraid that the rear road would be copied, and he also withdrew from Zuoyu, and the reinforcements were finally able to rush to Xuanguang and join the defenders in the city.

November 24, 1884

After the French army of Xuanguang was strengthened, it increased the difficulty of the Qing army's offensive. However, the reinforcements of the Qing army also arrived, and the total strength of the Qing army's besieging troops reached more than 16,000 people, and the commander-in-chief of the Qing army, Cen Yuying, was also stationed in the pavilion department yesterday and went to the front line to command. This morning, more than 6,000 Qing troops launched a strong attack from the south of the city, conquered and burned the French army in one fell swoop, approached the city, and took advantage of the situation to seize the fort in the south of the city.

The French basically messed up this time, the Manchurians had not yet entered the war, they were defeated by the Qing army, and if the Manchurians entered the war, France should get out of Southeast Asia.