The army of the working class is not only good at construction, but also extremely disciplined. The Great Zhou Republic was already in the midst of the first industrial revolution, an era of big factories and big industries, and what was needed was workers who could abide by labor discipline. Discipline is the foundation of an army.

In addition to good discipline, the working class of the Great Zhou Republic now has a relatively high literacy rate.

With the advent of the era of mass production, skilled workers with a certain degree of cultural knowledge became the most needed labor force for industrial capitalists. As a result, the country's education policy has been gradually adjusted, and a nine-year compulsory education system for all has been implemented since 20 years ago.

Of course, before that, education was quite universal. The literacy rate of the Republic of Da Zhou exceeded 50 percent as early as 100 years ago, and before the implementation of nine-year compulsory education, 80 percent of Da Zhou adults were literate.

The 20-year nine-year compulsory education has further improved the education level of the people of the Great Zhou, and compulsory education is not only for industrialization, but also for the country's military.

Military physical education, military training, and the habit of obeying discipline and obeying commands have all been integrated into the nine-year compulsory education.

Therefore, on September 18, 226 Republican 226, more than 50,000 soldiers of the Great Zhou Republican Army who appeared around Jiangdian Town showed extremely high discipline and obedience.

In addition, the physical fitness of these Republican soldiers is also the best ever-although the Great Zhou Republic is experiencing a crisis of surplus, the working people can still eat meat, eggs and milk.

In addition, there are free student lunches in public schools, which is enough to ensure that students have enough nutrition as they grow up.

Therefore, the soldiers of the Great Zhou Republican Army were generally tall and sturdy, and they were full of physical strength. They all look like good soldiers!

But after all, they had never been on the real battlefield, and now they were endlessly harassed by the rocket artillery of the Western Song Dynasty, and the atmosphere in the camp inevitably became tense and depressing.

Tonight, everyone in the Zhou army camp had insomnia!

……

When the officers and soldiers of the Great Zhou Republican Army lost sleep, most of their opponents were already snoring.

The reason why it is mostly is because there is also an infantry division of the Eastern Song Dynasty in the coalition army. The officers and soldiers of the Eastern Song Dynasty are also the same as the officers and soldiers of the Zhou State, they are all good recruits, and the big war is imminent, of course, they will be uneasy.

However, the officers and soldiers of the nine infantry divisions and one cavalry division of the Western Song Dynasty, which appeared on the battlefield with them, appeared very stable on the eve of the war.

Except for the officers and soldiers on duty, the others, including Marshal Zhao Liang, were already snoring like thunder now.

Most of these people were veterans of the battlefield, and they were either from military families or gunmen - perhaps it would be more appropriate to call them the samurai class!

The Western Song Dynasty, which had been in a state of war for a long time and implemented the military household system and target hunting, had formed a samurai landlord class that had served in the army for generations after more than 200 years of evolution and evolution.

Now the backbone of the Western Song Dynasty army is basically from this class!

Most of the peasants of the Western Song Dynasty were not qualified to rise in the army. Therefore, being a soldier in today's Western Song Dynasty is not only an obligation of some people, but also an honor and a symbol of status. In this case, it is naturally easy to raise elite soldiers.

However, the number of samurai landlords was relatively small, so the Western Song Dynasty could only take the route of elite soldiers, and could not engage in crowd tactics like the Great Zhou and Eastern Song Dynasty.

On the battlefield of Jiangjiazhen, the numerical advantage was on the side of the two Song coalition forces.

Therefore, the decisive battle on September 19 will not only be a victory for the two Song Dynasty coalition forces, but also a big victory!

……

The whistling and explosion of rockets sounded intermittently for half the night, and the Great Zhou Republican Army endured half the night, but did not send a single soldier to drive away the rocket soldiers of the Western Song Dynasty.

In fact, General Zhao Liang did not ambush the troops at all in the night, he had already calculated that the generals of the Zhou army would not dare to fight at night - the Western Song Dynasty was famous for being good at night fighting!

Half an hour before dawn, the armies of both sides began to raise fires and make food. The camps of the two armies are once again brightly lit!

At the same time, the advance teams of both sides began to set off, heading towards the positions they needed to occupy.

The advance team was usually served by light infantry with rifled guns. It's autumn and the wheat fields around Jiangdian Town are ripe. The ears of wheat that were growing well were large and large, which provided a good cover for the activities of the light infantry.

Soon after, a drum suddenly sounded in the Western Song military camp, followed by one after another, and the quiet army seemed to wake up from its slumber in an instant, and the whistle and password sounded together.

The moment of the decisive battle is just around the corner!

Before the decisive battle, the Western Song army usually had a full meal. Meat will also be available if conditions permit.

Chen Youliang, a soldier from the Hanyang Army on Jinghu North Road, and his fifth brother, Chen Youren, were enjoying the "last breakfast" with a few comrades. The staple food is white flour steamed buns, and each person also gets a slice of cured meat.

The cured meat was snatched from the farmers of the Zhou Kingdom, and the white noodles used to make steamed buns were also snatched from the Zhou people......

Now the combined forces of the two Song Dynasty have penetrated more than 350 miles into the territory of the Zhou State, and seven or eight days have passed since the invasion began.

At that time, the military rations carried had long been exhausted, and the supplies were all collected in the war zone.

The meaning of solicitation is not necessarily to grab, the key depends on who will collect. If the officers and soldiers of the Eastern Song Dynasty went out, they would definitely give money.

However, the officers and soldiers of the Western Song Dynasty were not so kind-hearted. It's polite to grab some food and drink, and you're not polite to grab money. If you are a little more ferocious, you will also kill people and set fires!

And the meat that was snatched back by the officers and soldiers of the Western Song Dynasty was extremely large! The abundance of food in the countryside in the Great Zhou Dynasty greatly exceeded the expectations of the officers and soldiers of the Western Song Dynasty, and even the most ordinary rich peasants (there seemed to be no middle peasants and poor peasants in the Great Zhou Dynasty) had a large amount of cured meat, livestock, and poultry stored in their homes.

Meat seems to be part of their daily diet!

However, Chen Youliang and Chen Youren couldn't let go of eating meat, mainly because their stomachs couldn't stand it...... The children of ordinary military families like them rarely eat meat once a year.

Poor enough?

Of course poor!

Now it is not the early years of the founding of the Western Song Dynasty, and it is impossible for ordinary military households in the Jingchu area to have a hundred acres of granges. If you can have twenty or thirty acres of land, you can be considered rich.

The main reason for this is of course that the Hundred Years War of the Mongol and Song Dynasties consumed the financial resources of the Western Song Dynasty military households and gun doctors - the expedition of thousands of miles without any gains was enough to bankrupt a landlord's family!

In addition, the emergence of a large number of wealthy military households is also a reason for the loss of land by ordinary military households.

Because the expenses of the Western Expedition could not be compensated, many ordinary military households had to mortgage their land to wealthy military households, and they themselves became tenants of wealthy military households.

The court of the Western Song Dynasty could issue a decree declaring the land transactions between military households and ordinary landlords and merchants invalid, but there was no way to deal with wealthy military households in the same way. So I had to admit that the transaction was valid, and watched as the land became more and more concentrated.

However, because the military household is superior, there is also the possibility of rising, and due to the arrival of the smoothbore gun era, the service cost has decreased, so by the founding of the Western Song Dynasty for more than 200 years, the Western Song Dynasty still has soldiers available. Of course, the Western Song Dynasty implemented target shooting more than 200 years ago, which also ensures that there are still soldiers available today.

Although there are still soldiers available, the people who serve as soldiers are getting poorer and more dangerous from generation to generation!

A group of poor people who dream of getting ahead, but never have a chance, everyone has a gun, this thing...... That's not right!

A group of poor soldiers and poor gun doctors silently finished eating the steamed buns and salted meat, and soon after, the captains of the teams blew the whistle for assembly. The soldiers got up one after another, lined up in squads, and when the formation was over, the captains of each team began to check the soldiers' equipment and dry rations.

The armament was simple, a flintlock pistol, a sleeve bayonet, a bullet pouch, a powder jug, a buckshot box, a gourd for water, and so on.

Flintlock pistols and socket bayonets were usually provided by the soldiers, but the caliber of flintlock pistols was uniformly regulated to allow for uniform dispensing of lead bullets.

Both buckshot and gunpowder were provided by the imperial court. Soldiers would make their own paper shells to make them easier to load. Homemade cartridges are inserted into the cartridge belt, and at least 24 rounds must be prepared according to regulations.

In addition to these ordinary equipment, some soldiers carry several hand cannons, that is, hand grenades.

They are called "hand artillery", and they are actually grenadiers in another time and space, the backbone of the line infantry.

An infantry battalion of the Western Song Army usually consisted of two musketeers, a gunner, and a hand artillery team.

The two brothers, Chen Youliang and Chen Youren, were both selected as hand artillery because they were born and raised.

……

Major Zhu Xinglong, who was born in Zhongli County, Haozhou, Eastern Song Dynasty, was inspecting the artillery reserve positions at this time. He was the battalion commander of the artillery battalion of the Third Division of the Eastern Song Army, and the artillery battalion he led would be responsible for the observation and aiming of all artillery.

There were as many as 9 Western Song artillery battalions participating in today's battle, but none of them could be compared with the Eastern Song Dynasty artillery battalion commanded by Zhu Xinglong.

The quality of the artillery is not good, the quality of the ammunition is also not good, the level of the artillery is also a lot worse, and even the horse pulling the cannon is not very strong.

As a semi-feudal agricultural country, it was not easy for the Western Song Dynasty to maintain a group of excellent cavalry and infantry. If you want to maintain an artillery that can be compared with the artillery of the Eastern Song Dynasty, it is simply a dream!

The Eastern Song Dynasty was a country after the Industrial Revolution, and their artillery was a product of industrialization, and there was a generation gap between the artillery of the Western Song Dynasty.

And after seeing the rough things that the Western Song Dynasty artillery had, Zhu Xinglong's brows never expanded.

Although the artillery battalions of the Western Song Dynasty were the same as those of the Eastern Song Dynasty, they all had a 6-kilogram long artillery team, a 6-kilogram howitzer team, a 4-kilogram mountain artillery team, an engineer team, and a rocket artillery platoon.

But their 6-pound long guns, 6-pound howitzers, and 4-pound mountain guns are all cast in bronze, which are very bulky and look like antiques. In the Eastern Song Dynasty, you can only see it in museums. Zhu Xinglong's generation, as well as his father Zhu Shizhen, these two generations of artillerymen have never seen bronze cannons in the army......

And the shells and propellants used by the artillery of the Western Song Dynasty were even worse.

Solid shells have a rough surface and are generally cast on the small side - so that they can easily be stuffed into the breech.

The flowering bullets look even inferior, and it is said that nine out of ten rounds will not bloom if they are fired...... Why are you here if you can't bloom?

As for the shotguns, they were not contained in a barrel-shaped metal cartridge case, but a bunch of small buckshot bullets wrapped in sackcloth. This old-fashioned shotgun has a very short range, a hundred steps is almost enough, and it is impossible to have a range of more than 200 steps. And a hundred paces away from enemy rifled guns! What is the use of such a shotgun? The gunners are all killed!

As for shrapnel...... The artillery officers of the Western Song Dynasty could only say: What is this?

What made Zhu Xinglong even more unbearable was the gunpowder of the Western Song Dynasty, black smoke billowing from the fight, and if there was no wind on the battlefield, the gunner's vision would be covered after a while. The purity of this gunpowder was not enough to produce enough thrust, and the bronze bore was not smooth enough, and the clearance between it and the shell was too large, and it leaked when fighting. Therefore, the firing range of various artillery pieces in the Western Song Dynasty is much worse than that of similar artillery in the Eastern Song Dynasty and the Great Zhou Dynasty.

This situation gave Zhu Xinglong a headache!

However, General Zhao Liang had a solution, which was to concentrate on the use of artillery. 180 artillery guns of 10 artillery battalions were concentrated in the direction of the main breakthrough to support the onslaught of infantry and cavalry with heavy shelling.

At the same time, the task of artillery observation was also handed over to Zhu Xinglong's Third Artillery Battalion of the Eastern Song Army.

……

At this time, the sky is slightly bright.

The sound of trumpets and drums came and went.

Gray and blue torrents poured out from the camps of the two Song Dynasty coalition armies, and thousands of soldiers, led by officers, formed a dense marching formation and drove directly from various camps to the battlefield. The "gun doctors" who had already arrived ahead of schedule planted military flags in the wheat fields and in the wilderness, indicating the direction in which the battalions and units were advancing.

At the same time, there were other "gun doctors" who touched the front of the Zhou army near Jiangjia Town under the cover of wheat fields and grass, and used their rifled guns to fire non-stop, harassing the Zhou Republican army who was also in formation.

The Western Song rangers had also reached the edge of the battlefield and were engaged in contact battles with the Republican rangers. Most of the latter came from the Bashang grassland or the Horqin grassland, and they were all extremely good cavalrymen, and they also had Tianjin horses that had been carefully bred from generation to generation. And each cavalryman was equipped with two rifled guns that could be fired on horseback - although the loading of rifled guns was very inconvenient, the advantages of range and accuracy could still make these Zhou Rangers very deadly.

At the time when the gunshots rang out one after another, General Zhao Liang was already dressed and walked out of his Chinese army tent. This famous general of the Western Song Dynasty, with gray hair, resolute complexion, and murderous aura in his eyes, will go to the battlefield for the 61st time today.

And his opponent is Wu Yuanzhen, who is on the battlefield for the first time.

If he could defeat the 50,000 troops in Wuyuan Town outside Jiangjia Town, he would be able to defeat the other 50,000 Zhou troops in the direction of Yuncheng in a day or two.

Subsequently, he was able to lead his troops to rush to Kaifeng Mansion, the former capital of the Great Song Dynasty, where there was a secret weapon that could force the Great Zhou Republic to sue for peace!

The moment to decide the fate of the three heroes of China is coming soon!

.。 m.