The attack and defense of the two sides in Suzhou naturally revolved around the long walls and stone barricades outside the city. The Xuan army in the south fought fiercely, and the Huai army in the north was not idle. The four general soldiers under Li Hongzhang, except for Liu Mingchuan who was placed behind as a countermeasure, and at the same time made a precaution in the direction of Wuxi, Changzhou, the rest of Cheng Xueqi, Zhang Yuchun, and Guo Songlin marched together in three directions, each leading the headquarters to bravely attack for days. Among them, Cheng Xueqi in the middle of the lane fought the most fiercely.

Like the Xuanjun Wu Jianying's character building group, Cheng Xueqi's "open" character battalion is also the foundation of the Taiping Army. He was a native of Tongcheng, Anhui Province, under the Taiping Army general Ye Yunlai. When Zeng Guoquan besieged Anqing, Cheng Xueqi stuck outside the north gate and made it difficult for the Hunan army to advance. Zeng Guoquan was at a loss, so he used a strategy of the strategist Sun Yunjin to send someone to arrest Cheng Xueqi's adoptive mother, take her own son's life as a hostage, and force her to disguise herself as a beggar and steal into Cheng Xueqi's camp to say surrender.

Cheng Xueqi has always been very filial to this adoptive mother, and this time, he is in a dilemma. sent away the adoptive mother, and when he was hesitating, Ye Yunlai found out about this matter, and sent eight personal soldiers to summon Cheng Xueqi into the city with an arrow. Cheng Xueqi was shocked, knowing that entering the city was death, so he gathered more than 100 hardcore henchmen, broke through the camp gate overnight, and went straight to the Hunan army camp located three miles outside the north gate.

In the dark night, the situation is unclear, how dare the Hunan army guarding the camp gate open the door? Cheng Xueqi saw that the chasing soldiers were approaching, and in a hurry, he put the knife on the ground, shook the camp gate with both hands, and shouted: "I am Cheng Xueqi, I have come to surrender the nine marshals, because there are chasing soldiers behind me, and I have to carry the blade." If you can trust me, let me in. If you can't believe it. Just ask Jiu Shuai to kill me with one shot. lest they fall into the hands of thieves! ”

This shout alarmed the chief officer in the battalion, Zeng Guoquan's younger brother Zeng Guobao. He ran out barefoot and ordered the camp to be opened to contain more than 100 people from Cheng Xueqi, which allowed them to escape death.

The harvest was received, but forcing Cheng Xueqi to surrender was originally just an expedient measure, so Zeng Guoquan filled a battalion of people for Cheng Xueqi. But doubts remain. The Hunan army encircled Anqing, which was two moats inside and outside, surrounded the city inside, and refused reinforcements outside, among which the outer moat was the deepest and widest. Zeng Guoquan put his troops between the two trenches, but he put Cheng Xueqi's troops outside.

In this way, with the reinforcements of the Taiping Army to attack, he is always the first to bear the brunt, and the two meals that the Hunan Army provides him with every day are counted as heads. Use extra-long bamboo poles to cross the trench high. sent to his camp, and if there was not enough to eat, there was no more.

Cheng Xueqi had no choice, so he had to rely on hard fighting to survive, and he developed the extremely stoic and ferocious combat style of the "Kai" word battalion, but the pain of not being trusted in his heart was cathartic, and he secretly cried in his tent every night. When the Kaizi battalion was allocated to Li Hongzhang's Huai army, he finally came out, and he was grateful, and this time he fought Suzhou with extra effort to fight for Li Futai.

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Huai Jun wants to fight for Li Hongzhang, and Xuan Jun also has to fight for his own handsome. Ding Shijie called several chief officials together to come up with a way to break the city.

"Now it's time to lay out the chariots and horses, and it's up to you to see who breaks the city first. Cheng Xueqi is crazy in the north, and we have to hurry up, otherwise if we lose face for the big handsome, we will have no face to live. ”

If you want to break the city, you must first break the long walls and stone barriers outside the city, and the moat outside the wall is the biggest obstacle.

"Ding Junmen, that battalion officer under me, Zhan Donglu, has an idea," Ixan said, "Look at it, can you?" ”

Zhan Donglu's idea was that the Xuan army also built a wall, and used the night time to rush to build several sections of the covering wall near the river bank, put the artillery position close to the river bank, directly suppress the fire on the opposite side, and then build a pontoon bridge to cross the river and grab the base.

"Oh? Will he take a pontoon? ”

"Yes, but in the middle of the moat, there must be support......"

What to use to support, I thought of it at once, so that afternoon, the front-line artillery of the Xuan army suddenly opened full firepower, and it was released for two hours in a row, hitting the wall of the Taiping army on the opposite side full of holes. As soon as night fell, the whole army moved stones and picked up earth, and built several simple parapets about ten zhang long on the south side of the moat, and seven or eight artillery barricades were piled up on each wall, pushing up the eight-pound field artillery.

This time, the distance is much closer, and the accuracy is much better.

At dawn, the Taiping army was in an uproar when they saw this, and the two sides exchanged guns and artillery at each other. The Taiping army also had foreign artillery, but the number of jishu and flowering shells that operated the cannon could not be compared with the Xuan army, and in the afternoon, not only the long wall was broken a few gaps, but also in the seven or eight large and small stone fortresses on the front, the cannons were gradually dumbfounded, and less than half of the remaining ones could still be fired.

On the Xuan army's side, the loss was that the simple cover wall was not solid enough after all, so the damage was also great, but the tactical intent was achieved anyway. Zhan Donglu, who was starry at the sword, divided his battalion into two halves and placed them about fifty paces away from the cover wall, half of them were holding door panels, oil and hemp, maces, large wooden branches and other materials for building pontoon bridges, and the other half were squatting on the ground with guns, which were the death squads ready to charge.

By four o'clock in the afternoon, the artillery fire on both sides was gradually thinning. Zhan Donglu looked at the foreign watch and ordered to prepare. It didn't take long for me to hear a sudden noise coming from the river to the west, and then I saw three steamers emitting black smoke and heading towards this side at full speed.

On the position of the Taiping Army, there was another uproar, although I don't know what the gunboats of the three Xuan Army are going to do, but it must not be a good thing to come here like this! So they came out from behind the long wall and opened fire.

Driving on such a narrow and unsheltered moat is truly a fateful move. There were hardly any soldiers in sight on the boat, and the two guns did not return fire, but blindly rushed towards the center. On the side of the Xuan army, the artillery fire suddenly became fierce, wanting to make a cover for these three ships.

Only two rushed to the predetermined position, and the three helmsmen on the other boat were killed by random gunfire one after another, and the motorboat also crashed headlong into the river bank.

But two are enough! Zhan Donglu shouted, more than 500 soldiers of the Xuan Army bypassed the covering wall, shouted, sacrificed their lives to rush to the river bank, put the big wooden branch in their hands on the motorboat first, and the people who came out of the motorboat tied it with oil and hemp, and then nailed the wooden branch to the ground on this side, spread the door panel one by one, and then concocted the same method, with the motorboat as the support, and put the wooden branch on the opposite bank.

It's a pontoon! The Taiping army finally understood the intention of the Xuan army, but the cannon in the stone barrier could not hit here, so they could only ignore the suppression of the artillery fire on the opposite side and desperately shoot at the pontoon bridge in the middle from behind the long wall, hoping to block the construction of the pontoon bridge.

For Xuan Jun, this is a change of life. The river next to the two motorboats was already stained red with blood, hundreds of corpses were floating in the river, and a layer of people had fallen on the boats.

But the pontoon bridge was built after all! The 300 men in charge of the charge shouted wildly across the two pontoon bridges, penetrated through the gap that had already been blasted open into the long wall, and used bayonets to deal with the panicked Taiping army behind the wall, and soon occupied a place of twenty or thirty zhang to the left and right. When the rear team of the Kezi regiment crossed the river in a steady stream, the Taiping army could not even hold the stone base, and the two bases and four small bases on the front were all broken by the Xuan army, and the soldiers who were surrounded and killed in the base were always thousands.

At this time, a huge gap was opened in the defense line of Zuihou around Suzhou City, and the Xuan army that crossed the river one after another was the entire Kezi Regiment and the three battalions of the Foreign Gun Regiment, and the field artillery was also transported across the river one by one. The next day, it withstood the two counter-charges of the Taiping army, and it was considered to have completely secured the "beachhead".

When he was in high spirits, Guan Dashuai suddenly came with two orders, one was to order Ding Shijie to restrain all the troops and slow down the offensive, just make a show in the next few days, let the troops rest first, and the other was to order Zheng Guokui to return to the Mudu camp immediately.

Ding Shijie was a little confused, but the military order was like a mountain, how dare he disobey it? Zheng Guokui rushed back to Mudu in the afternoon of the same day, and went to Xuan Shuai's big tent to sign up.

"Zheng Guokui, last time in Qingpu, you dealt with Gao Yongkuan and them. He zuihou was able to open the city and surrender, and you have a lot of credit. ”

"The national leader doesn't dare to be, this is all the cultivation and promotion of the handsome." Zheng Guokui, who has been promoted to the deputy officer of the Jianzi Regiment, said respectfully.

"Well, Suzhou has hit this point, and he knows it in his heart, but he can't keep it after all." Guan Zhuofan's voice was very calm, and he said eloquently, "Now that the Huai army in the north of the city is fighting desperately, our Xuan army has raised his hand in the past few days, so that he can take a breath and ponder carefully." He is a smart man, and you may be able to see this verse, so you might as well contact him again to see if he has any 'ideas'. ”

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(On Chinese New Year's Eve, I wish you all book friends a Happy New Year!) Don't say the words of the New Year's greetings, the lion takes the serious code word as a New Year's gift~)

*(To be continued......)