While three million Chinese soldiers were munching on mutton from Ili in the warmth of the Kazakh barracks, and while the leaders of the professional cooking squad were still making beef buns at leisure, their opponents, the Anglo-Russian army, shivered in the leaky and broken tents.

The British did not lack food and drink, even if the Chinese fleet blocked the Black Sea straits, but through Russian territory, the railway from Petersburg directly to the lower reaches of the Volga was guaranteed.

The main reason is that they are not adapted to the continental climate, where the dry, cold climate is very different from the humid climate of Britain, and the British soldiers feel that no matter how much clothes they wear and how many quilts they make, they are still cold. In contrast, the Russian army was in a better situation, not because they were better supplied, but because they were more adapted to the climate, or more tolerant of bitter cold.

After a long cold winter, when everything recovers in the spring, the snow melts, and the grass grows and the warbler flies, the Anglo-Russian forces plan to continue their offensive and must capture the Kazakh hills before the end of the summer. But given the strength of the Chinese, the two countries negotiated to add more troops.

Despite fighting on Russian soil, and despite the fact that the Russians now seem to have a greater need to fight for themselves, the two sides are still in dispute over the division of forces. Russia has said it is willing to build more troops and expand the size of the Russian army to 2 million men. This expansion is not an increase in the number of troops in the simple sense, and the number of soldiers that need to be requisitioned to ensure the maintenance of battlefield strength is much more than 2 million. Russia has asked Britain to increase its army to 1 million, so that the coalition will have 3 million troops, which can be balanced with China's forces.

Britain preferred to provide military aid to allow Russia to arm more people, not that the British valued the lives of their own people, in fact those nobles would not sympathize with the lives of the Irish and Scottish people, or even the lives of the lower classes of England, they did not care too much. The main problem is the cost, the cost of raising a soldier in Britain is more than ten times that of cheap Tsarist Russia, they only need to provide the Tsar with tens of millions of pounds is enough for the Tsar to arm millions of troops, but to arm the same number of British troops, it must be more than ten times the capital investment.

The Russians also understand this reason, and the main reason why they put forward the demand for Britain to bear more troops is to win more military spending, and the British have already provided Russia with 20 million pounds of military spending last year, which is twice the Russian fiscal revenue, and bears almost all the expenses of the Russian army of 1 million. Finally, after Britain agreed to raise this year's military aid to £30 million, Russia decided to unilaterally increase its troops by 1 million. Expanding the Russian army to 2.5 million men, plus the British army of 500,000, Russia would have 3 million available troops.

With the support of the British checks, the new Russian army was constantly armed, constantly moving towards the Kazakh steppe and the Ob River valley.

On the grassland, the snow melted first, resulting in mud, which continued to block the range of the battle between the two sides, affecting the scale of the battle, and finally assembled in the late spring, the conquest of the sun made the grassland solid, and the cavalry could support a wide range of charges and roundabouts, and large-scale battles appeared again in the Central Asian steppes.

The Anglo-Russian coalition began to launch a large-scale offensive, and both countries were holding back their strength to achieve a decisive victory this year, and they did not want the war to drag on until next year, and every year of delay would be hundreds of millions of pounds of investment for the British.

The Anglo-Russian offensive began in April and lasted until June, and then it was unsustainable. It was not that their forces were damaged and could not continue the offensive, but that there was a sudden outbreak of malaria in the Anglo-Russian forces.

It is normal for soldiers to contract malaria due to long-term life in the wild, and it can even be said that malaria occurs among millions of people. Malaria is contagious, and it quickly turns into an epidemic that spreads throughout the army. For 3 million people, these conditions are largely inevitable in the wild without good sanitation.

Malaria can kill people in this era, and the only effective treatment for malaria is quinine, which is a special medicine extracted from the bark of the cinchona tree, so it is called cinchona cream in China.

But the problem is that the only country that is producing quinine on a large scale is China, and African companies have opened large-scale cinchona plantations in West Africa. The reason why it is an African company, rather than a European company with more commercial capabilities, or a more ambitious American company, is mainly because the African company, under the leadership of Xie Qinggao, had a team with adventure and exploration as the main goal, for them, the greatest danger in the expedition is not the attack of the enemy, but the disease brought by the soil and water, the most common and harmful of which is malaria.

There are medicines for malaria, and as we all know, in South America, the Indians were the first to use these medicines, and they treated malaria by taking cinchona bark with quinine. The Europeans brought this method to the civilized world, and according to the European prescription, the treatment of malaria required about 5 kilograms of bark, and after recovery, it was necessary to take 500 grams of it a day for a week to prevent recurrence. The bark retails for around £1 500 in the UK, so only the wealthy can afford it.

Xie Qinggao was an explorer who didn't care much about the cost, but his company had finances that cared, Xie Qinggao insisted on bringing enough medicines, and finally the company's management decided to plant cinchona trees themselves to save costs. In the past, cinchona trees grew in the wild in South America, and the Indians cut down the trees and stripped them of their bark.

The African company bought the seeds from the Indians, introduced them in the nearby tropical regions of West Africa, and after scientific selection, found the most effective cinchona tree species, and planted millions of acres of plantations.

Although the price of quinine bark has been greatly reduced with the large-scale cultivation of African companies, it is still a high-priced drug, which is not affordable for ordinary people, and has been purchased by explorers and armies from all over the world, but this kind of war of millions of people cannot provide this medicine to everyone, and after the outbreak of the war, the Anglo-Russian coalition has cut off the supply of quinine.

This leaves them uncontrollable with the spread of malaria, which does not necessarily kill everyone, but has at least a mortality rate of more than 30 percent, which is higher than the rate of war deaths; Moreover, after contracting malaria, the combat effectiveness will be lost, and symptoms such as fever and weakness will make people feel hopeless, let alone attack, and it will be difficult to keep the army from mutiny.

The key is panic, this kind of helpless disease is very common in ancient Chinese and Western literature, and Westerners directly call it the devil; During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the famous seven sons of Jian'an, in the plague of malaria outbreak, five people died in the same year, the living conditions and health conditions of this great literati could not resist malaria, not to mention the army that fought the battlefield for a year, lived in poor conditions, and was in poor health.

The Chinese army has always been mainly defensive, combining attack and defense, constantly attacking from the weak point of the Anglo-Russian coalition army, and the fighting state of the two armies has always continued, so the enemy's gradually stopped offensive was soon noticed by the Chinese army, and the reason was found out, and the enemy was infected with miasma through the prisoners.

Malaria is known as miasma in traditional Chinese medicine and is thought to be caused by inhalation of poisonous gases. In the West, it is also thought to be caused by inhalation of toxic gases in swampy areas, as it often occurs in humid swampy areas.

The enemy's disadvantage was quickly reported to the highest echelons, and the cabinet had a different opinion, and the civilian-dominated officials suggested that the large-scale offensive could be stopped at this time, and the enemy could collapse on its own under the blow of the plague, which they said was self-defeating.

The civilian justification was that large-scale contact with the enemy could infect their own military forces with the plague. In fact, it is still out of the benevolent thinking of civil officials, who are naturally repulsive to death.

However, the army did not think so, and it was very dangerous to ridicule this idea of self-defeat, and they insisted that they should continue to attack, and that a combination of offense and defense was the correct tactic, and any idea of rigid defense could lead to defeat.

The officer's reason was to put more pressure on the enemy when they were about to collapse, to break their tight spine, and to defeat the enemy once and for all.

Zhou Lang supported the opinion of the army.

A large-scale counteroffensive began.

On the defense line of the Kazakh hills, which is hundreds of kilometers long, the Chinese army began to attack more frequently, through thousands of passes of various sizes and sizes, they launched attacks on the enemy's positions outside the hills, and the British and Russian coalition forces were trapped in malaria, and their combat effectiveness was getting weaker and weaker, and the key was that the will to fight was greatly reduced.

News of victories continued to reach the country, and although there were no decisive victories, the largest number of enemy annihilation and capture rarely exceeded 10,000.

However, the successive small-scale defeats made the Anglo-Russian coalition decide to retreat, and they planned to retreat to the area of the Turkai Plateau first, relying on the plateau terrain and the defense of the Turkige and Ishim rivers, so that they would be closer to Russian territory, transportation could be improved, and sick soldiers could retreat to the rear for treatment. After the army has regained its combat effectiveness, the chances of a decisive victory against China this year seem very slim. According to the experience of Westerners, this malaria tends to dissipate on its own after the weather cools down in autumn.

Unfortunately, their opponents refused to give them the opportunity to calmly retreat, and began to launch an offensive on all fronts, which gave the Anglo-Russian coalition a headache, in the case of a strong attack by the enemy, a forced withdrawal would definitely cause collapse, if not retreated, malaria became more and more serious to weaken the combat effectiveness of the coalition army, morale was generally low, and it was also very risky to use such an army against the Chinese.

In this unfavorable situation, Britain and Russia decided to resort to other methods, the only feasible one was the political one, and they conveyed to China the demand for peace talks through neutral countries.

China said that it could negotiate, but demanded that all the Anglo-Russian forces in Kazakhstan surrender, which was tantamount to refusing to negotiate, because handing over more than 2 million troops to China was tantamount to handing over the fate of Russia to China.

The battle can only continue in this case.