365 Lin Haoda's choice
From the 200,000 allied troops led by the Kingdom of Sardinia, to the annihilation of the 30,000 elite army landed by the British, and then to the Italian Peninsula coalition led by the Kingdom of Sardinia to help 'scare away' the Kingdom of Sardinia.
This was long enough time for the Kingdom of Sardinia to build a decent line of defense, and the 18th-century line of defense was not the intricate trench lines of the First World War, and the front-loading smoothbore guns and flintlock muskets with a slow rate of fire did not require digging too deep holes.
Even the simplest fortifications require only a half-man-high earthen wall on the high ground and a few artillery positions to inflict heavy casualties on the attacking enemy.
In places with complex terrain, build a few simple fortresses with defense nodes as support points to connect the entire defense line.
This kind of fortification seemed good in the era of waiting to be shot, but if it was really in World War I, it only took one round of fire to cover it and all of them would be blown up into ruins......
After all, the musket artillery of this era is not very powerful, and the mainstream cannonball is just a big iron pellet, but the musket artillery greatly improves the long-range lethality of the army, although the result of the battle still depends on the bayonet hand-to-hand combat to end, but it can cause a large number of casualties to the enemy in long-distance shooting, which makes the city wall dispensable.
Anyway, the city wall can't prevent the continuous fire of artillery, so it is better to build more solid anti-artillery earthen walls.
Perhaps a permanent cluster of star-shaped fortresses would cost a lot of manpower and material resources, but the Sardinian kingdom did not have such a luxurious defense system, and the defense system they built was more focused on defense in depth and stepped lethality.
Choose the kind of terrain with a large slope, and use the height difference from bottom to top to build a simple defensive chest base, so that when the attacking enemy army rushes up for hand-to-hand combat, several gun lines can be formed on the high ground behind, causing terrible casualties to the enemy soldiers who attack the first chest base!
As long as there are enough people to build this kind of defensive chest, it doesn't cost much money to build it, and naturally, the Kingdom of Sardinia has built a large number of such defensive fronts from the border line back, even if more than a dozen have been breached.
Interspersed with these fronts are various cities, the houses and barricades in the cities themselves are very good defensive terrain, although the combat effectiveness of the armies of the countries of the Italian Peninsula is average, but the victory lies in the number of people, as long as this large front is sprinkled with regular troops, it will definitely make Lin Haoda pay a heavy price!
The Kingdom of Sardinia did not expect to rely on this layer of front to stop Lin Haoda's footsteps, and the Kingdom of Sardinia only needed to let Lin Haoda's troops fall into the mud pit of this offensive and defensive war, and then sit back and wait for the backyard of the French Republic to catch fire......
It is precisely for this reason that Lin Haoda is unwilling to consume a large number of elites to attack this layered defensive front.
Although the army gathered by the anti-French alliance claimed to be in the millions, it was mixed with a large number of mercenaries and musket militias with their own weapons, and even various paramilitary organizations, and the real elite was less than half.
However, although the combat effectiveness of those temporarily formed militia is not good, but this is a ready-made reserve soldier, the perennial war in Europe has already formed a complete set of army supplement inertia, each formed regular army after the battle, will use veterans to bring new recruits into a large number of reserve soldiers, even if this will make the original combat effectiveness of the army drop significantly, but as long as a few tough battles, these reserve recruits will transform into real veterans, and the extra cost is nothing more than the lives of the recruits.
In fact, it was in this way of constant replenishment that the European powers of the 18th century transformed the tradition of valuing elites in previous wars into national power and population.
Only with enough productivity can there be enough supplies and munitions to supply the army, and enough population can pull out a large number of young and strong people to train into militia, and then turn into reservists to pull in the battle-damaged troops, and after a few rounds of death on the battlefield, they will naturally all become veterans......
In the era of war, limited by the influence of weapons and tactics, it is difficult to completely annihilate the enemy troops, unless they attack again in a desperate attempt to win, just like the 30,000 elite British troops who landed!
Most of the ordinary battlefields are routs, and it is not difficult to defeat the enemy, but it is difficult to annihilate them all, and as for the cavalry pursuit, as long as it is a regular army system, it is completely possible to save the flight of most of the army with the sacrifice of the troops of the palace.
Of course, this will inevitably greatly reduce morale, if it is the commander in charge, it will often let such troops be pulled to the rear to rest and replenish reserves, if the battle situation is urgent, they can only be forced to simply regroup and pull into the battlefield, and then continue to be defeated or follow the friendly army to victory!
This is basically the law of attrition back and forth in European wars, a war may not kill too many people, but large and small battles occur very frequently.
There is only one way to avoid this attrition, and it is enough to build a series of victories in one go, wash all the enemy's elites in blood, and defeat the enemy to recover his breath.
Napoleon did this back then, but even if he did so, he could not completely occupy and destroy the real power, and Prussia and Austria, which lost to Napoleon in history, only signed a surrender treaty, and were not incorporated into France proper.
A large number of reservists and paramilitaries, in the danger of the destruction of the country, would be enough to make the authorities resist frantically, it would be a terrible war of attrition, and it would still be a war of attrition with little benefit, which Napoleon was naturally unwilling to do.
Historically, Napoleon defeated only the elite of the regular armies of Austria and Prussia, rather than eliminating all their reserves and militias and other paramilitary organizations, and when Napoleon went on an expedition to Russia, Prussia and Austria were forced to provide more than 100,000 troops......
This is the reason why there are many wars in Europe, but few of the real powers have perished, and the gradual improvement of the reserve system and militia-like paramilitary organizations is enough for the government to pull out a large number of musket-armed men in a short period of time.
Everyone is equal in front of the muskets, and it is not difficult to defeat such musket militias, but it is even more difficult to completely eliminate them.
In the war on the European continent, it is not difficult to defeat a great power, but it is almost impossible to occupy a large power, and Napoleon, who pushed the continent at that time, treated Prussia and Austria in an allied way, rather than turning it into a vassal state in the true sense of the word.
It can be seen from this that in the face of the anti-French alliance united by the entire European continent, how much pressure Lin Haoda has!
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