On the military map, the posture of the whole army commanded by General Zhao Liang, the king of Jingchu in the Great Song Dynasty, has been marked by a small banner.

This military map has been done in great detail and is the product of mastering precise surveying and mapping techniques. At the time of the Xuanhe Rebellion more than 200 years ago, it was unimaginable that even the Republican Army, which had done the best job of staff officers, would not have such an accurate map. Even if Wu Haogu is allowed to do it himself, he can't draw it.

But now, this one-to-50,000 high-precision military map is just the standard configuration of the command headquarters of the army combat units at and above the brigade level in the Western Song Dynasty.

More than 200 years of the Age of Discovery and the competition between the nations have greatly promoted various technologies. Military technology, in particular, can be described as "advancing by leaps and bounds."

In the army of the three heroes of Huaxia, cold weapons have long been hard to find, and probably only the sabers of the cavalry, the cavalry spears and the bayonets of the infantry remain. The arquebus, which once dominated the battlefield, has also been completely replaced by flintlock smoothbore guns, and further rifled guns have become quite popular, becoming a killing weapon for skirmishers and light infantrymen.

Artillery technology has also made great progress, and in the Great Zhou and Eastern Song armies, bronze cannons have long been withdrawn. Instead, iron cannons made of gray or white iron were sturdy and lightweight, and they were standardized and standardized in the production process, so they were extremely reliable.

In addition, according to the needs of different battlefields, howitzers, long guns (cannons), short guns (Karen guns), mortars were designed, and a kind of rocket artillery that was not an artillery but had the name of an artillery was also designed.

As for the gunpowder used in artillery, the progress was even greater.

In the Great Zhou Dynasty and the Eastern Song Dynasty, under the guidance of naturalists, the formula of gunpowder was not only more reasonable, but also the purification technology of nitrate and sulfur, which make up gunpowder, was also more sophisticated. At the same time, the emergence of mechanized crushing, mixing, pressing, drying, grinding and other processes also made the gunpowder produced in the Great Zhou and Eastern Song Dynasty of good quality, which could make the artillery exert its greatest power.

The progress of artillery shells is also significant, first, the production of solid bullets is more sophisticated, the solid bullets polished by the machine have a smooth surface, and the clearance between the barrel is smaller, so the range and accuracy have also been greatly improved.

Second, the technology of shotguns and flowering bombs has gradually matured. The effective range of the 6-pound shotgun has been increased to 250 steps! Flowering shells fired from howitzers and mortars now have wooden butts and fuses, and the shells are more sophisticated. And there are also grenades that combine grenades (flowering bombs) and shotguns into one, and the lethality is so great that it hurts the heavens and reason!

Not only the muskets used by the infantry, but also the cannons used by the artillery have improved, and even the horses under the crotch of the cavalry have developed rapidly over the past 200 years.

Breeding and breeding technology under the guidance of biology are of great significance to the breeding and breeding of war horses. Now the military horse farms of the Great Zhou Dynasty and the Eastern Song Dynasty can train different types of military horses according to the needs of the battlefield, and they can be "finalized and mass-produced" - that is, each bred military horse has very similar genetic characteristics!

War horses are no longer one out of a hundred, one out of ten, but have a "pass rate" of more than 90 percent.

The army, which has high-quality war horses and horses, and has eliminated armor, has also greatly improved its mobility. Such an improvement made the more than 20 Song coalition troops commanded by Zhao Liang, the king of Jingchu, able to fight unimaginable sports warfare in the early years!

Speaking of this Zhao Liangjiang's prince, it is not easy to be the prince. He is the cousin of Zhao Mian, the son of the Western Song Dynasty, and he is over sixty years old. It has been 30 years since he inherited the throne of Jingchu, but he has not enjoyed a day of debauchery and unscrupulous royal life.

Since he was 10 years old, he was sent to the Wudang Mountain Junior Military Academy by his ruthless father to receive a harsh military education, and since then he has begun a half-century-long military career.

Of course, he joined the army at the age of 10 and is not the only one who has been working for a lifetime. Most of the men from the military aristocracy of the Western Song Dynasty came over like this.

At the age of 10, he entered the Junior Military Academy, at the age of 18, he entered the Huashan Lecture Hall, and at the age of 22, he officially entered the army. Then start from the platoon commander, climb up step by step, and dedicate the best time of your life to the battlefield and the army. Among them, those who have good backgrounds and good luck will enter the Privy Council Military Academy for further study before the age of 30. After that, he will become a member of the "Huashan faction staff".

After becoming a "staff officer of the Huashan faction", he was qualified to slowly squeeze into the upper echelons of the army and become a general or even a marshal.

And General Zhao Liang, who has been in the army for 50 years and has participated in at least 60 battles, is the first-class general in the Western Song Army. Now it is ranked in the Marshal's Mansion and has the highest military rank in the Western Song Dynasty.

And as the king of Jingchu County, he also won the trust of Zhao Mian, an official of the Great Song Dynasty, and served as the chief general of the Western Song Field Army for a long time. This time, he was ordered to command the two Song Dynasty coalition forces to launch a surprise attack in the direction of Kaifeng Mansion!

In order to maximize the suddenness of the battle, General Zhao Liang did not even wait for the 400,000 troops to complete the assembly, but commanded 210,000 allied troops to cross the Song (Western Song) Zhou border between Dengzhou and Nanyang, and pounced on Nanyang Daleng Fort.

The Henan Army of the Zhou State was taken by surprise, and a division placed on the Nanyang front line was routed, losing thousands of men, and the remnants retreated into the Nanyang Daleng Fort to defend it. After Zhao Liang left a brigade to guard the Nanyang Da Ridge Fort, he led his troops to attack the Fangcheng Mountain behind the Nanyang Ridge Fort. After a few rounds of fierce attacks, they broke through the Zhou army's Fangcheng Mountain defense line and surrounded the Fangcheng Daleng Fort between Fangcheng Mountain and Bear's Ear Mountain.

After leaving a division to besiege Fangcheng Daleng Fort, General Zhao Liang commanded the remaining 180,000 troops to climb over the low Fangcheng Mountain and go straight to Yexian, a key place north of Fangcheng Mountain.

And when General Zhao Liang's army surrounded Ye County, a large number of Zhou army clusters appeared in the direction of Xiangcheng to the north of Ye County and the direction of Yuncheng to the east.

A conference battle seems to be about to start between Yexian, Xiangcheng and Yuncheng!

"The Lone King has decided!" General Zhao Liang withdrew his gaze from the military map, and then gently swept over the two Song Dynasty coalition generals in the tent.

He paused, "One of the two Zhou armies must be destroyed before they complete their division!"

To do this, we must divide our forces into two ways! With the main force, they rushed in the direction of Xiangcheng and fought a battle between the towns of Jiangdian and Rufen south of Xiangcheng.

At the same time, he forced Yuncheng with all the way to Yuncheng, making a big fanfare, so that the enemy mistakenly thought that it was the main force, and adopted a conservative deployment. ”

General Zhao Liang spoke very slowly, but there was an undoubted majesty in his words. The Eastern Song generals present all nodded again and again without raising any objections.

If the current Western Song Dynasty still has any military advantages over the Eastern Song Dynasty and the Great Zhou Dynasty, it is undoubtedly a veteran general.

After the last Central Plains War, the armies of the Eastern Song Dynasty and the Great Zhou Dynasty did not fight any battles. And because of the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the military aristocracy of the two countries has been very economically declining and has become subordinate to the capitalists.

Moreover, the two countries have long since abandoned the military service system linked to the land, so there is no long-serving professional soldier class, which has a certain impact on the combat effectiveness of the cavalry of the two countries.

In addition, the two countries do not have a class of gun doctors, so the light infantry of the two countries is far inferior to the Western Song Dynasty.

Therefore, General Zhao Liang judged that in the early days of the outbreak of the war, the Western Song army with elite soldiers and generals had a certain advantage. And this period was also a critical period for the Western Song Dynasty and the Eastern Song Dynasty to join forces to defeat the Great Zhou.

If the commanders of the Western Song Dynasty could not seize the favorable opportunity and boldly use their troops, they would wait until the Great Zhou to complete mobilization and training. A well-armed and well-trained army of millions could undoubtedly make Great Zhou undefeated.

And as long as the Great Zhou is undefeated on land, their navy has a high probability of defeating the Eastern Song Navy - after all, the Great Zhou Navy has 50% more capital ships than the Eastern Song Navy!

Moreover, the shipbuilding capacity, the number of merchant ships, and the number of sailors of the Great Zhou Dynasty far surpassed that of the Eastern Song Dynasty, and basically had a double advantage - the Great Zhou Republic had more and richer overseas colonies, and its mainland also included islands such as the three provinces of Japan and large peninsulas such as Goryeo Province. Having greater maritime capabilities is a matter of course.

"If you have no objections," said Zhao Liangjiang, "then Ben Shuai will begin to assign tasks!" ”

"King Jun, we have no objection, please give an order!" The speaker was a lieutenant general of the Eastern Song Dynasty, in his early forties this year.

He never went to the real battlefield. For him, General Zhao Liang is a figure that exists in military textbooks. What other objections could he raise?

And he really couldn't think of a better way...... Although the coalition forces now do not know the reality of the Zhou army in the direction of Xiangcheng and Yuncheng, they are actually fighting an uncertain battle that they do not know who they are.

However, the overall situation is indeed as Zhao Liangjiang said, but it is only favorable in the short term.

If you're overly cautious, you'll miss the opportunity, and when your opponent is ready, you'll be in big trouble.

General Zhao Liang's deployment is actually completely correct! His swift action completely hit the enemy in the soft underbelly...... It was not that the Zhou State blindly launched the war without adequate preparations.

It was that Zhou's army had not fought for decades, and the officers could not enter the state for a while. And they are not used to such a fast-paced attack and defense - although the era of the invincibility of the fortress has long ended, the top brass of the Zhou State Army also knows it.

But it's one thing to know, it's another to work out tactics that are completely new and adapted to the realities of the battlefield.

The Zhou army still likes to rely on the fortress for deployment, and they are not likely to concentrate large corps to fight mobile warfare, but to fight in divisions or corps.

In the concept of the officers of the Great Zhou, a field army consisting of three infantry divisions plus an artillery regiment, a cavalry regiment, an engineer regiment and a baggage regiment was enough to take charge on its own. Even if you encounter several times the enemy, it is enough to rely on the favorable terrain for defense.

Therefore, on September 16 and 17, 226 of the Great Zhou Republic, the two Zhou armies that appeared south of Xiangcheng and west of Yuncheng were the two armies belonging to the Henan Corps of the Republican Army. The numbers are the 18th Army of the Republican Army and the 19th Army of the Republican Army. Both armies are the "standing forces" of the Republican Army, and they are the backbone and elite of strategic duty tasks. Even in peacetime, it is a large establishment of more than 50,000 people. The equipment is even more sophisticated, with as many as 25 artillery batteries and 150 artillery pieces of various types in an army. In order to tow so many artillery pieces and the ammunition and repair vehicles that accompany them, there are thousands of horses that can be used by artillery in one army. In addition, there are countless baggage vehicles, horses, and war horses.

When an army is mobilized, it is really called a mighty one!

On September 18, 226 in the Republic of China, such a huge army was blocked by an even larger number of enemies in the area of Jiangdian Town, south of Xiangcheng.

The commander of the 18th Army of the Republican Army was Lieutenant General Wu Yuanzhen of the "Volunteer Faction", and his commander was Colonel Han Shantong.

On the night of September 18, the two of them were only shocked by the Ming camp of the two Song Dynasty coalition armies that appeared on the southern plain like a sea of stars on the ground.

That night, both sides went down to the camp, and the two armies were separated by about 10 miles, and lanterns and bonfires were dotted with the wilderness.

Between the two "sea of stars", one large and one small, it is pitch black, and occasionally a rocket crosses the starry sky, exploding a ball of fire in the wilderness or between the camps of the Great Zhou, leaving a bright afterimage and then returning to calm.

This is the Western Song Army using rocket artillery to carry out harassing attacks!

Wu Yuanzhen and Han Shantong worked out the next day's combat deployment with Ji Yi in the Chinese army camp, and then ordered someone to blow the overnight trumpet, and then got up to patrol the camp.

When they came out of the big tent of the Chinese army, they happened to see the flames of rockets passing through the sky, and both of them frowned slightly. This kind of rocket, which is subordinate to artillery, has a range of only three or four miles, and it is very convenient to launch, although it is not accurate, but the effect of harassment is excellent.

Without sending a large group of men and horses to search, it was simply impossible to expel the enemy rocketeers who were operating under the cover of night. Dispatching a large group of men and horses means that there may be a night battle.

And the night battle is obviously disadvantageous for the Zhou army, which has fewer people and is not as elite as the opponent.

Therefore, Wu Yuanzhen and Han Shantong would rather let the troops endure the harassment of enemy rockets than risk attacking.

As for returning fire with their own rockets, it is not in their plan. Because that would also lead to a night fight!

Tonight, the number of cavalry and spearmen of the Western Song Dynasty scattered in the wilderness and wheat fields must not be much less!

After retracting their gaze from the air, the two began their routine night camp patrol.

The current Zhou army still has not gotten rid of the influence of the "Fort Era" and attaches great importance to camping. Even if it is just a temporary camp, it will be layered and very elegant. There is no shortage of walls, ditches, fortifications, lookouts, and fortifications. This kind of camping work is much stronger than the elite of the Western Song Dynasty, and it is comparable to the Eastern Song Dynasty army.

The reason for this is not only that Zhou Jun's thinking is a bit old, but also because the main source of Zhou Jun's troops has changed from peasants to the working class, and there are many construction workers among them, and the level of construction is of course high.