Chapter 226: Pre-War Preparations

In fact, Boyan had several thoughts, and the elite military forces who came from the southeast road were all given to Dong Wenbing, and there are only more than 50,000 people who are currently following him, and many of them are hard laborers carrying food and baggage, and to be honest, the combat strength is not sufficient. （）

The main force really responsible for attacking Guangzhou was Ashu who went south from Xiangyang, and Ali Hague, who was responsible for supporting him, he led the army to come just to block one direction, if the Song army in Guangzhou was defeated and retreated, it was better to withdraw to the southeast, and clean up Zhang Shijie in Xinhui along the way.

Ashu, who led the army south, was not going fast either, and he had been clinging to the idea of turning everything he passed into pastures, but his men were having a hard time finding ordinary people in the neighborhood. The nickname of the Murder Demon King was given to Ah Shu from Henan Province, and the murderous name was sparsely populated within a hundred miles, and the originally prosperous land was barren.

The excessive mountains and hills along the way also made the cavalry soldiers very unaccustomed, that is, there was no Song Dynasty army to resist harassment, and their marching speed was not fast, when they crossed the mountains to reach the vicinity of the Qing Dynasty, Ah Shu finally withdrew the order to kill the population within ten miles.

Qingyuan County is also an empty city, after most of the buildings were burned down last time, there are no Song people in the city, only some unattended cats and dogs are reluctant to leave home, and then wander nearby into wild cats and wild dogs.

Ah Shu set up the big tent of the Chinese army in Qingyuan, and then began to scavenge the surrounding wood, preparing to build a ladder chariot for the siege, while waiting for the large number of troops to follow behind him. If he is within ten miles of the city of Guangzhou, he will find that the trees thicker than his arm have been cut down, and there is no suitable wood to use.

Lu Shikui and Li Heng have already fought Guangzhou twice, especially Li Heng's siege of the city a year ago, and the timber and rocks within dozens of miles were all looted by him, but they were still defeated outside the city of Guangzhou.

These experiences have been reported to Ah Shu in detail, especially the powerful artillery at the head of Guangzhou City, which can hit targets three miles away, which is the key point summarized after Li Heng's siege failed.

But Ah Shu never believed in those reasons, and he also looked down on Li Heng, the so-called marshal of the Han army, in his eyes, there was no city that the Mongols could not capture, and the reason for the failure was that those generals who surrendered their troops refused to give their lives to contribute.

However, the Mongols destroyed Liao three times to conquer the west, and twice invaded the Song Dynasty in the south, and they were one of the armies that broke through the most cities in the world's military history, and they were also the armies that killed the most people. According to the records of later generations, the Han people of the Song Dynasty alone died in the war of 60 million, and the Jin and Liao countries were even more miserable, and the entire royal family was wiped out by the roots.

Ah Shu patiently built siege equipment to prepare for the siege, and Guangzhou City has also begun to make a rain shelter for the city, which is about to enter the rainy season, and it is necessary to avoid affecting the use of cannons because of rain.

Scout patrols on both sides often broke out into skirmishes, and they would fight at any time in the area between Qingyuan and Guangzhou, but the scale was very small, and both sides sent squads of ten or twenty people, and both sides had their own victories and defeats.

Boyan's department also rushed to Wudieling and Dong Wenbing, who was waiting here, and Dong Wenbing, who was arrogant, knelt outside Boyan's Chinese army tent with his bare back.

"Dong Wenbing, the general of the defeated army, please surrender to the Prime Minister."

Dong Wenbing knelt for an hour before Boyan came out of the big tent, sleepy-eyed as if he was getting up, and when he saw Dong Wenbing, who was already trembling, he hurriedly stepped forward and supported him with both hands.

"Get up, the Song army has always been cunning, how can you be ambitious to enter after a defeat, the Great Khan still expects General Dong to attack the city and plunder the land for him, hurry up!"

Dong Wenbing wept gratefully, hugged Boyan's calf and cried loudly, thanking the prime minister for his grace not to kill, hoping to lead the troops to kill the enemy again and make meritorious contributions.

First of all, the Song army in Guangzhou City was full of fighting spirit at this time, and several generals began to ask for their lives, wanting to go out of the city to meet the attacking Yuan army. The cavalry's equipment is now very sufficient, although Zhao Tianyou ignored Jiang Hanchen, but it did not prevent him from getting more than 10,000 war horses from Quanzhou, and he didn't know how much their Jiang family paid to Pu Shougeng in order to satisfy Pu Shougeng's greed.

Combined with the horses captured in the two victories, there were now 30,000 cavalry in the city, and the places and barracks were already very crowded, and many houses had to be demolished to meet the growing demand.

When Zhang Zhensun defended Guangzhou for the first time, the residents had no confidence and fled with their families, fearing that once they fell, their families would lose their lives. On the other hand, the people in Guangzhou today, no one is discussing the problem of escaping, they are all worried about the cavalry troops, if the horses of the Yuan soldiers are captured, which fast position in the city should be converted into a place for raising horses.

The channel of the Pearl River has been kept unobstructed, but the tension of coal has not changed, and there is even a tendency to become more and more serious, not only because of the imminent war, but also because the Yuan soldiers completely strangled the transportation path from the source, even if it is difficult to guarantee the supply at a high price.

Another more important ingredient, the sulfur trafficked from Toei, had a problem, and a trading house that had been bartering with the Japanese had an accident during sea transportation, and three ships sank at sea.

For a while, the supply of sulfur in the port was tight, and the Japanese people who had goods took the opportunity to raise the price and extort money, and the price of a shipload of sulfur more than tripled.

As an important raw material for gunpowder, high-quality sulfur is the most important factor to enhance the power of gunpowder, and before better sulfur is obtained on Hong Kong Island, Japanese sulfur transferred from Quanzhou is the only choice to ensure the power of gunpowder.

The successive resource constraints made Zhao Tianyou very helpless, this has not yet evolved into the era of energy war, and he has tasted the pain of resource constraints in advance. Otherwise, all the struggles in the world must revolve around the ownership of resources in the end, and the excuse of clever names is just a fig leaf on the head.

"How well do we have gunpowder reserves, and will they be able to sustain this war?"

Zhao Tianyou returned to Hong Kong Island, summoned Zhou Yuan, Liu Jinli, as well as Lao Feng Tou and some outstanding talents who emerged in the later period, and held a conference where people were represented in each process. From the beginning of coking, the report step by step, the shortage of materials, the existing inventory and semi-finished products, especially the focus is on the supply of explosive gunpowder and whether the production capacity of flowering bombs can be guaranteed.

After a whole day of intense accounting and implementation, all the resource data were brought together, and Zhao Tianyou's eyes lit up when he saw it.

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