Originally, seeing Colin in high spirits and chattering all the way to the battlefield, Zhou Lang thought that he was mourning Colin, and lost interest in arguing with the other party along the way, just pandering to the other party's boasting.

And Zhou Lang really didn't want to go in his heart, after all, he thought that he was setting up a game to let Colin jump, no treachery and no business, the moral sense of businessmen generally does not reach the level of cleanliness, and there are all kinds of dirty means in the shopping mall, but when it comes to the step of pit people to death, it still touches the bottom line, so Zhou Lang still has some self-blame, several times he wants to give up, persuade Colin, don't take these miscellaneous troops to the hard bar Qing army, although the Qing army is also rotten, but after all, it is an army, and it also has a geographical advantage to defend, It seems that there is a numerical advantage of four or five hundred, but in fact, there are only a few dozen mercenaries who can fight, and some of them have to be divided to command these soldiers, who are mainly composed of ruffians in the city, which is impossible to win no matter how you look at it.

However, Zhou Lang still defeated the morality in his heart, because he knew that what he was going to do this time was not the ordinary commercial projects in the past, not the bell ringing and listing again and again, but a transformation of the national situation, doing business to buy and sell the world, this is the pinnacle of Chinese businessmen, only Lu Buwei has done it alone in history, and now Zhou Lang is also walking this road, immortal, that is impossible, I am afraid that even his closest people will be in danger in the future, so sacrifice Colin as an arrogant British colonist, It's not so hard to accept.

They are going to attack the Qing army on Banping Mountain in the north, starting from the Guishan position, only five miles away from the other party, but these five miles of road is not easy to walk, because they are all winding mountain roads, but because Zuoying has been the county seat of Fengshan County for more than two hundred years, so the road condition is not bad, it is considered to be a regular official road, so in addition to the twists and turns and slopes that make people more laborious, there is no other difficulty, and even the artillery carriage can travel.

The position of the Qing army is on a hill next to the official road, and the mountain is squeezed down, and the official road turns a bay here, so the Qing army position established on the hill can control the entry and exit of the entire official road, not to mention, according to Colin's intelligence, the Qing army also arranged five cannons on the position.

Solving these five cannons is the premise of the attack, so when everyone advanced to a distance of two miles from the Qing army's position, they stopped advancing, and the artillery equipped by the Qing army could shoot at a distance of 1,500 meters at most, but the effective firing range was only three or four hundred meters, and there was no accuracy at all beyond this distance. Therefore, it is very safe to be two miles away, but two miles is the effective range of Western infantry artillery, because these guns are generally larger, and they were previously ship's naval guns.

The British army was generally armed with four types of guns, long-barreled cannons, howitzers, mortars, and naval guns. The naval gun is characterized by its high power and long range, and the difference from the cannon is that there is a round hole in the tail that can be threaded with a rope to fix the gun to the deck.

Under normal circumstances, the army will not use naval guns, but it is not impossible to use, long before the attack on the left battalion, Colin asked carpenters and blacksmiths to help build a gun carriage, although there may be some gaps in craftsmanship and European manufacturing, can not fully exert the firepower of the cannon, but in terms of comprehensive performance, it is still better than the shoddy Qing army artillery.

In particular, these naval guns, all of which are 18-pounder guns, can easily penetrate an entire company column at a distance of 800 meters, and have an effective range of more than 1,000 meters. So now the artillery of the Qing army can't reach them, but they can hang the artillery of the Qing army.

So Colin ordered the soldiers to start building artillery positions, that is, digging some pits in the ground, placing the gun carriage in it, and using the pile of earth to block the recoil of the gun carriage.

The people who operate the cannon are all mercenaries, and Zhou Lang already knows that these people were sent by the East India Company as key officers, so many artillery and infantry can do it. In addition, there are hundreds of Chinese soldiers at their disposal, and the military skills of these soldiers are not reliable at present, but the hard labor is first-class. They were very competent to help dig the gun pits and push the gun carts.

So the artillery carriage quickly entered the offensive position, loaded with ammunition, and after the three shells were fired in a single shot, one of the mercenaries, a captain who was a professional artillery officer, began to shout various parameters, and the other mercenaries who commanded the operation of the cannon ordered to start adjusting.

More than an hour had passed since this process, and only then did the official shelling finally begin.

The Qing army was not idle, and their cannons also sounded, which startled Zhou Lang at first, because the mercenaries here were slowly preparing for various artillery bombardments, but the artillery of the Qing army was bombarding non-stop, which seemed to be much more powerful than the firepower here. But soon Zhou Lang was not nervous, because he found that the shells of the Qing army did not know where to fly at all.

But when the mercenary's artillery began to bombard, soon the Qing army was dumb, and the Qing army's artillery position did not appear in the thrilling picture of continuous explosion in the film and television drama, although the mercenaries used flowering shells, but after all, there were only ten cannons, and it was impossible to have dense firepower coverage, but each shell basically had a spectrum, even if it did not explode on the Qing army's position, it also fell near the position.

The shelling lasted half an hour, knocking out a third of the shells that hundreds of people had worked so hard to bring before the shelling stopped.

At this time, Zhou Lang thought that Colin would order the soldiers to charge and directly take the position of the Qing army, but he didn't expect him to let the soldiers move forward.

In the process, he was not attacked by the Qing army, until he advanced to the opponent's position for about a mile, Colin ordered to stop the advance, and then continued the previous round of performances, or the artillery pressed forward, methodically built a temporary position, and then began the shelling.

The artillery of the Qing army never sounded, and people couldn't help but wonder if the opponent's artillery was destroyed in the round of artillery battle just now.

But at this time, Zhou Lang still thought that the Qing army's position at a height of about 80 meters was not easy to fight, and there was a wall built outside the position, even if the mercenaries attacked with a bullet just now, they could not destroy these stone walls, obviously not shoddy, then the Qing army that stuck to it would always occupy a favorable position, and their fortifications were not destroyed, the soldiers inside must have been protected, and the artillery could not kill them in large numbers. Moreover, according to Zhou Lang's inquiry to Colin just now, he learned that artillery bombardment is not the most important means of killing, in fact, the rifle has the greatest killing effect, and the rifle kills the most is not the design of the bullet, and the surprising thing is that Colin is very sure that the enemy who dies under the bayonet will always die more than under the bullet.

What Zhou Lang didn't know was that until the rifled rifles were massively equipped, the accuracy of smoothbore guns was very limited, so the tactic of lining up to shoot, the two sides lined up in two linear arrays, and then shot at each other at close range after a few rounds, and then launched an impact, in fact, in the end, the battle was resolved by white-knuckle combat, and shooting could not destroy the other party, unless there was a big difference in the strength of the two sides. The first war, in which bullets were more lethal than bayonets, took place during the American Civil War, when both sides were already armed with rifled rifles, but the tactics of the old shotgun era were still used, resulting in many battles, with bullets destroying more than half of the enemy before both sides could charge.

This time the shelling continued for more than an hour, and about a third of the shells were also emptied, but at this time Colin still did not let the soldiers charge directly, but continued to order to move forward.

This time it advanced to a distance of two or three hundred meters from the Qing position, continued to build fortifications, and then launched an artillery bombardment.

Zhou Lang began to wonder if Colin really planned to rely on artillery to defeat the opponent, the difference was that this time the shelling began to use a large number of solid shells, and the Qing army's walled wall began to collapse in many places under the bombardment of solid shells at a closer range, but it was still not destroyed as a whole, and it still maintained an effective defense, Zhou Lang felt that the use of infantry feints from the bottom up would definitely suffer major damage.

Sure enough, Colin began to form a team, due to the large number of mercenaries being concentrated, the cannons could not fire at full strength, and in the end only four cannons continued to work, each cannon was operated by four mercenaries. The Chinese mercenaries were also assembled, and under the leadership of the mercenary officer who commanded them, they began to form a formation with a simple military command.

The three hundred Chinese soldiers were divided into three squares, one in the middle and one on each flank, about fifty meters apart from each other.

Zhou Lang and the more than 60 Nanyang companies he led were not required to participate in the assembly, but Zhou Lang still ordered these people to form a phalanx, also three rows of horizontal formations, behind the large army, with bayonets. But Zhou Lang didn't plan to fight at any time, but planned to create chaos at any time, his purpose was to wait for Colin's attack to be at a scorching juncture, shout a voice, and then everyone ran together, he believed that the soldiers composed of three hundred ruffians in the city could not have any military discipline, and they would definitely be chaotic immediately, and they would run together, and Colin would definitely be defeated at that time. Aren't there countless such cases in history textbooks, and all the battles in the rivers were all caused by the chaos created by the traitors, and finally led to a great rout.

But Zhou Lang watched from a distance, but found that Colin had not ordered an attack, but after the officers had sorted out the formation of the Chinese soldiers, all the mercenaries began to assemble, except for the sixteen artillerymen, the other more than forty mercenaries lined up in a separate phalanx, just in front of everyone.

Soon Colin's official attack began, and it was only these forty or so people who launched the attack, and the other three hundred people stood still all the time, and Colin was supported by only four cannons, and after they rushed forward two hundred meters, all of them stopped.

Zhou Lang quietly looked at the forty or so people, first lined up in a queue, slowly moved forward, and when they were about a hundred meters away from the opponent's position, the Qing army began to fight back, mainly with bows and arrows, and Colin's soldiers fought back with three-stage shooting, these mercenaries are indeed elite, they can walk forward in unison, while constantly loading and shooting, and can also maintain the basic formation is not disordered, it is not unreasonable for them to hold a high commission, and the military skills have reached their level, just like the craftsman has achieved the level of a master.

Only more than forty mercenaries, using smoothbore guns with very low accuracy, actually suppressed the Qing archers who relied on the stone position to shoot arrows, and when they advanced to about forty or fifty meters, no one had come forward to shoot arrows, and at this time the casualties on both sides turned out to be zero, and it was impossible to see how many kills the mercenaries brought to the Qing army, anyway, the more than forty mercenaries were all not injured, and even Colin, who was holding a saber and had been striding forward, was intact.

At this time, suddenly Colin turned around and shouted to the mercenaries behind him, and then he took the lead in the charge, more than forty mercenaries followed at the same time, and the shouts of dozens of people were a little shocking, not their volume, but the courage that burst out.

At this moment, Zhou Lang suddenly sighed with some emotion, there are many countries and nations that have fallen at the feet of Western colonizers, and a few hundred Spaniards were able to destroy the Inca Empire and the Aztec Empire in the Americas, and it is probably unfair to explain all this with weapon superiority, and those opponents who fell at their feet may also lose to them in courage.

At this time, Zhou Lang already felt bad in his heart, but he still had luck in his heart, he recalled the description of the opium war in the textbook, and the picture of a military general like Guan Tianpei fighting bravely with a big sword appeared in front of him, just a white-knuckle battle, Colin's troops were at a disadvantage, and it was a feint, if the Qing army had a brave general who stood up and led everyone to fight to the death, it should be able to achieve victory.

But Zhou Lang's illusions were soon shattered, and there was hardly any sound of fierce battle breaking out on the position, and soon Colin was seen standing on a high place, waving the St. George flag.

Occupy this place so easily, Zhou Lang didn't have to go up to understand what was happening, there was no fight, and the Qing army fled!

I don't know why, Colin won this battle and destroyed the conspiracy in Zhou Lang's heart, but Zhou Lang did not hate him, but was full of resentment towards the Qing army.

Before, he was very sure that with his own cooperation as a traitor, the Qing army only needed a little resistance to destroy the army led by Colin. But I never expected that the other party would flee without a fight, let alone kill Colin, not even a single soldier.

I don't know where I saw it, in the record of the Opium War, there is a very exaggerated data, saying that the number of British soldiers killed in battle is in the single digits, Zhou Lang didn't believe it before, but now he believes it a little.

At the same time, Zhou Lang couldn't help blushing, he thought that with some textbooks and military stories similar to those recorded in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he would be able to give an officer like Kelin. But he was so naïve, at least in the war, Colin was a regular officer with much more specialization than he was.

Zhou Lang could see the weaknesses of these Chinese soldiers, how could Colin not see them, so Colin didn't plan to put these soldiers who had only been trained for ten days into battle from the beginning, as for letting them put them in formation, the purpose was not to prepare for the attack, I am afraid it was to scare the enemy.

At this time, Zhou Lang had some understanding, probably because the Qing army saw that there were more enemies standing outside the position than themselves, so they gave them a reason to choose to retreat without a fight, of course, Zhou Lang at this time was still too high to see the Qing army's discipline, even if there were no such reasons, they could find and even make up reasonable reasons.

Zhou Lang's military experience is still very shallow, and he can't see the problem from a professional military perspective, but at this time, it does not prevent him from discovering a hidden danger, that is, he saw three hundred Chinese soldiers standing in a neat queue, and everyone was shocked in their eyes at this time.

I am afraid that this battle, which was seen by three hundred people at the same time, will make a deep impression on these soldiers, and the majesty of the Qing army in their hearts will be swept away, and the mercenaries will engrave their authority in their hearts.

If next time, these people might actually be able to help Colin fight!

"Is this an experience that the British have figured out in India?"

Zhou Lang couldn't help but guess.