When the sky was completely bright, a loose encirclement was unfolded, and the officers and men of the 20,000 volunteer divisions began to tentatively launch a cautious attack on the enemy camp, and began to tentatively narrow the encirclement, passing over those simple wooden fence barracks. There were of course many people alive in the camp, and the resistance was quite active at first, but it was completely intimidated by the overwhelming rain of arrows and even the opening of firearms.

About two-thirds of the 70,000-strong Russian camp was either killed or wounded in the night blasting attack, and although the rest of the men were not much less in terms of strength, the whole team did not encounter any more casualties worth mentioning in the advancing attack. Only a few brave enemies either detonated gunpowder or pretended to be dead and began to shoot, causing dozens of casualties to the entire team.

As the commander of the army, Xiao Xuan of course also personally participated in this raid on the Russian army camp. Although the climate at this time was not bad, Xiao Xuan still spent a lot of effort to clean up the battlefield with tens of thousands of corpses, and collected as much gunpowder and ammunition as possible from these enemies, and also tried to collect the lead bullets that were shot out of the blasting attack.

Generally speaking, although the battle with the main force of the Russian army, which is not small, consumed a lot of ammunition from the initial shelling and firearm fire to the final blasting attack that consumed a lot of ammunition, in general, the capture was still able to make up for the shortfall in consumption, and it was obviously much better than the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party in modern history. After all, most of the European armies of this era obviously cannot be called modern armies.

The follow-up troops, which carried a lot of artillery and baggage, quickly followed, and after capturing a lot of horses, the animal strength of the whole team also increased to a greater or lesser extent, and they also had a lot of decent vehicles.

"In this battle, have the casualties of our army been counted?"

"Including the previous head-to-head confrontation with the enemy army, less than two hundred casualties and less than fifty killed."

Hearing this, Xiao Xuan already had a plan after being silent for a moment: "You have also seen the quality of firearms and gunpowder and even the level of gunnery of the Taixi army. Do you think that with such sophisticated firearms, they will not be able to make the car shields and armor of the Jianzhou people? Nowadays, it seems that our army is still fighting against the enemy, but the enemy does not know us. Our army must give the enemy the greatest blow and damage before the enemy is really familiar with us, so as to avoid its own danger to the greatest extent. Therefore, the march after that is not to maintain physical strength and horsepower in a long-term operation, everything must be done as soon as possible! We are going to deal at least the hardest blow to the Poles and even the Russians, and even the Ottomans and Swedes, who might intervene before the middle of winter... ”

In this way, as soon as the war on the South Russian Plain ended, the entire battle group of more than 100,000 men began to get rid of the previous state of regular marching with as much horsepower as possible, and in the eastern European region, where the terrain was much flatter than most places in the East, it first embarked on a long march at a forced march speed of 100 miles a day, and in less than half a month, it drove thousands of miles into the hinterland of Russia, where the population began to become more and more populated. The march then proceeded to a state of concealment or semi-concealment while maintaining the same pace, marching as hard as possible at night, and concentrating large numbers of horses in a few towns and villages in the early hours of the morning or dawn, and keeping the men as concentrated and concealed as possible.

On the surface, this may seem like a bit of a cover-up, but at least the Russians will not be able to understand the size of the coming army by means of simple reconnaissance and transmission, but can only speculate and analyze the size of the invaders through some surveys of the area after the march.

Of course, for civilized Eastern Europe, the warning of the enemy situation was transmitted to the Moscow area through relay messages in less than 10 days or so at the fastest speed. Having established that there was a high probability of the destruction of the Southern Route and that the enemy was heading straight for Moscow as fast as possible, the whole Russian upper echelons began to stir up rumors, and withdrew their troops from Smolensk as quickly as possible, and suddenly sought an armistice with the Poles at no small cost and with no small concessions. Soon, the Poles also learned that the armies of the East had begun to march into Europe, as they had done in the time of Genghis Khan.

Like the Russians, who often dealt with the Tatars and even the Ottomans, the Poles did not have the same mystic fear of the so-called Eastern armies as the Westerners further afield. Even the fear of mysticism that existed in Ottoman Turkey. In the eyes of the Polish aristocracy, the Orientals, who were at most like the Ottomans, often lacked a serious attitude towards equipment making and even training. At most, I think it's the sheer size that people might have to pay attention to.

Of course, the Poles at this time also wanted to know how strong the strong enemy was and what the combat characteristics were, so after occupying Smolensk, they did not continue to march to Moscow, but the main group of about 20,000 or 30,000 people still maintained a state of combat readiness at any time, ready to decide who the balance of victory and defeat would ultimately belong to when the Russians and those eastern armies launched a decisive battle.

There was also a lot of debate in the Polish-Lithuanian Federation about whether to unite the Easterners against the Russians or to unite the Russians against the powerful foreign enemies, but because the envoys sent to contact the Easterners had been gone for a long time and there was no news, one had to suspect that those envoys might have suffered an accident. In the face of such an "unruly barbarian", more and more Polish nobles tended to unite with the Russians first and drive the enemies from the East out of the circle.

The late autumn in Eastern Europe seemed to come a lot earlier, but after a month or so of marching, before the winter of Chongzhen's fifth year, the army led by Xiao Xuan finally approached about two or three hundred miles away from Moscow.

At this time, it seemed that the covert march was becoming more and more difficult, and in order to seek maximum suddenness, the troops also began to march as fast as possible during the day. However, when I actually came to fight in Eastern Europe, many conveniences and benefits also made the investigators in the team feel a lot more relaxed. At least most of the time, the scouts in charge of the reconnaissance don't have to go over the mountains and take risks. Just by choosing a slightly taller tree, you can observe the movement within thirty miles, and with the help of a scout hot air balloon that is rare in previous wars, the whole team also has a great advantage in terms of initiative.

(End of chapter)