The city pass that has just been restored and rebuilt stands majestically, and the folded word Daxu shakes violently in the loess in the sky, adding a little bit of prestige to the slightly low earthy yellow wall.

Shen Chen and other officers had some opinions on not hanging Li *'s own general flag but folding his family's flag, and Li * laughed at this. In his opinion, confusing the party members in many ways, so that the Dingyan army does not know the reality of Guanzhong, and even less does not know the military situation of the troops sent by the broken family, this is far more important than his personal reputation and face. The more the enemy does not know the truth of Luzi Pass, the more cautious and cautious he will be militarily, and the more slow and conservative he will be in deployment. Most of the recruits in his own troops are recruits who have been in the army for less than three months, and the training time is relatively short, and the psychological training time is too short, so for the soldiers of the front battalion who have to face the huge military pressure of the Dingyan Army from now on, every additional day of training time increases the possibility of saving their lives on the battlefield, so no matter what method is adopted, Li * does not care, the main idea is to delay as long as the Tuoba cavalry can delay before they reach the pass.

Gao Shaoyuan's road has not yet been repaired, and both sides of the road are already full of various stones collected and transported by the people from various places, but because the tools are not yet in place, the road repair project cannot be officially started.

Chen Zhe's caravan had already left the customs, and before leaving the customs, Li * ordered the painters invited from the city of Yanzhou to paint portraits of everyone who left the customs, and marked the names on the portraits. When Chen Zhe returned, these people had to check the numbers one by one, Luziguan was a military unit after all, and Li * didn't want to let this one-third of an acre of land guarded by himself become a corridor between Xizuo and the spies.

The first batch of 70 horses purchased from the Shayuan Supervisor in Guanzhong has arrived at Luziguan, and the core C team of the former battalion and the commanders of each team have to conduct equestrian training for about an hour every day. This kind of training is still the most basic, and it does not involve any difficult immediate movements. Lee* didn't plan to train all of these people into cavalry eventually - that would be almost impossible, the first thing in the training of cavalry was the age limit, and the development of body organs of people who were too old had been basically set, and it was okay to barely use horses as a means of transportation, but it was more difficult to finally realize the dream of riding and archery like a young man. The advantage of the nomadic peoples such as the Xiongnu, Turkic, Khitan, and Dangxiang is that the riding and archery skills start from the baby, and everyone begins to get used to living on horseback at a very young age, so their riding and archery skills are absolutely not the same as the Han cavalry who are halfway out of the house when they become adults.

Some people say that these ethnic minorities are born cavalry, in fact, this is not accurate, although there is no lack of genetic factors, but if these ethnic minority dolls can only crawl on the ground from the birth of this life, and they can't even touch the reins of the horse, even if they are geniuses, they can't become excellent cavalrymen.

Therefore, the current twenty soldiers of the scout team are basically between sixteen and eighteen years old, and although the age of the scout is a little late, Lee* thinks it is just right for a child who has not yet reached adulthood to practice horseback riding, which Lee* thinks is a very inhumane thing.

Because the purpose of garrisoning Luzi Pass was to fight with the party members, Li * once told Xifeng Minda that he did not need to come with him, and that he could stay in Fenglin Mountain to train his troops. In this regard, the fine seal Minda just "hummed" lightly, but did not say anything. As a result, on the day of the team's departure, the brigade had not yet been assembled, and the 20 soldiers of the scout team led by the party harrier were already lining up outside the gate with backpacks and bags waiting to set off. Along the way, he walked on his own, but let the young cavalrymen take turns to ride the only five horses in the team at that time to scout within ten miles in front of the queue, and used the rest time of the brigade to explain the basic knowledge of being a scout to these novice cavalry novices.

As a scout, it's not as simple as being able to ride a horse and shoot arrows. A scout must be proficient in reconnaissance skills, weather and geography, written books, banners, golden drums, and so on; after mastering this knowledge, he must go through a long period of reconnaissance training and actual combat tests, and it is absolutely impossible for a scout with no combat experience to effectively accomplish his task.

At present, the most difficult thing for these pre-camp scouts, who are still a little immature, is not how to control the speed of the horse and how to control the horse with both hands on the horse, but how to seal the foreign language taught by Minda and the literacy lesson taught by Li *.

In order to achieve the relative secrecy of intelligence information, Li* did not invite someone to teach the common script of the era of the officers, but began to popularize the simplified characters of his own era among the officer corps. Li*'s current level of traditional Chinese characters is only at the level of reading, and let him write to ensure that it is a mess, and this foundation is still laid when he studied the inscriptions and stone carvings of the ancients. Compared with traditional characters, simplified characters have relatively few strokes and are more acceptable, and it is not easy for these specious characters to be completely correct even in the hands of the most learned scholars.

In addition, Lee* resolutely introduced the concept of Arabic numerals into the military culture class, and stipulated that all future military documents should use Arabic numerals. In this way, even if the intelligence documents are intercepted by the enemy, the ethnic minorities or military personnel of this era will not be able to figure out what the meaning of these ghostly symbols represents.

Due to the lack of intelligence talents, Lee* temporarily took up the post of intelligence management in the former battalion, and he established a very simple cipher writing system in the army, which was read in a jumping word arrangement according to the sexagenary branch, and each piece of information was determined by two Arabic numerals to determine the number of words jumped by the sexagenary branch, and then compiled according to the rules. This kind of code will become invalid once the officers are captured, but Li * believes that with the current level of education of the party members and the bad habit of not liking to keep prisoners, the failure of this system will not be an immediate matter; In the future, he will develop a more rigorous cipher system, and if possible, Lee* even wants to train a group of English talents in the future......

Whether or not his idea is realistic, this is not something to worry about at the moment, and it is already a miracle that he can get the current trainees to increase the literacy rate to more than 200, and Lee* estimates that this process will take at least a year, during which all of his military intelligence will have to rely on the established pattern of word of mouth.

It took more than ten days to repair Luzi Pass, and Li * knew that his time was very tight, and it was impossible for the party members to watch him build the city pass into a copper wall, so half of the destroyed city pass was almost built up with a pile of roughly neat stones, and finally sealed with soil and water, on the surface, it was temporarily passable, but this kind of wall could never withstand the blow of heavy weapons such as battering rams, and even a slightly higher tonnage could pose a serious threat to it.

Li * guessed that the Dangxiang people were nomadic and accustomed to cavalry field battles, and basically did not fight any siege battles, and these heavy weapons, if they existed, probably never used. However, just in case, he still took some precautions when repairing the city pass.

The wall of the earth and stone structure is dug out of holes of different sizes, some of these holes are straight and some are inclined from the inside to the outside from top to bottom, divided into two kinds of flared holes and straight holes, the inside of the straight hole is usually sealed with stones, its thickness and width are basically the same inside and outside, it is used to throw stone fireballs outward to deter and destroy the attack of the enemy troops approaching the city pass, and the horn hole is narrow inside and wide outside, mainly suitable for officers to observe the movement of enemy troops outside the city.

Although Li* also kept the battlements of the city wall, he was not prepared to let his soldiers look down from these battlements to attack the enemy, for the first-class party leaders in cavalry and archery, the defenders with their heads or bodies sticking out of the battlements were good targets, and Li* had limited troops, and he did not want his guards to be consumed in such a long-range attack.

For Shen Chen, who was accustomed to traditional city defense warfare, many of Li*'s defensive arrangements were quite strange.

For example, Li * dug a 12-vertical ravine in the ground of the wall, about half a man's length deep and wide enough to stand three soldiers side by side, and the edges of these ravines were all dug into the shape of a slope. When a soldier standing in the ravine stood up, his chest was exactly level with the position of the battlement.

After digging these ravines, Li*'s targeted assassination training allowed Shen Chen to gradually see some ways.

A team of soldiers is deployed in the gully behind each battlement, in which the commander serves as the commander, and the remaining soldiers are divided into two groups, A and B, when the commander gives the "hidden" password, all the soldiers sit in the ravine with their knees crossed, when the captain gives the "ready" password, the soldiers of Group A immediately jump up and rush up the slope, and the soldiers of Group B get up and follow the longitudinal ravine to the corresponding battlement, and the soldiers of both groups hold their guns in both hands to make a posture of waiting to be stabbed. It wasn't until the commander shouted the command "Group A, kill-" or "Group B, kill-" that he stabbed the wooden gun in his hand diagonally.

The wooden guns in the hands of the same group of soldiers stabbed in different directions, one soldier stabbed in the front, while the other soldier stabbed in the lower left corner, and the direction of the stab was slanted.

These commands are quite simple, but they are not easy to practice, and they are a great test of the commander's mentality and judgment, as well as the soldier's reflexes and discernment.

In just five days of training, the soldiers of the four teams were basically able to react quickly after hearing the order, and it took no more than a breath from the time the commander gave the order to the time the soldier entered the combat position.

But after entering the actual combat stage with straw men, the problem comes.

First of all, there is the problem of passwords, because the passwords of each army are basically the same, and the gathering distance is too close, so the final assassination orders are often confused with each other, often the commander of a certain army shouts an order and almost the whole team of soldiers stab the wooden gun in their hands together, and the chance of the straw man appearing at the head of the city is random, so there is always most of the soldiers stabbing in the air in an assassination.

In fact, this was not the fault of the commanders, but the mistake of the person who designed the password, but for some reason, Li* didn't say anything about it, just carried out this training over and over again.

The commanders began to figure out their own workarounds, asking the soldiers to ignore the final assassination order and instead focus on the castle until the straw men appeared before stabbing their spears.

In this way, a new problem arises, and some nervous soldiers often stab their wooden spears in a hurry before the straw man shows his head, and the result is, of course, all of them stabbed into the air. In addition, due to the lack of command of the password, the two soldiers could not coordinate their movements, and often one soldier had already stabbed out, while the other soldier was still standing.

In the boring and repetitive training again and again, the commanders finally gradually sorted out a clue, and finally after summarizing, all the commanders and commanders unified the standards and regulations, and required the soldiers to stab their spears at the moment when the waist of the straw man exposed the head of the city. At the same time, it is stipulated that the soldier in charge of the frontal attack is the base soldier, that is, the group leader, and the soldier who attacks on the flank uses his movement as a signal to stab the wooden gun in his hand, so that although the flank attack is slower than the frontal attack, it is not enough to affect the assassination effect.

The command level of the commanders is also gradually improving, and some of the feints made by the "Blue Army" troops holding straw men outside the city under the command of Li * have also been recognized by these rapidly growing captains.

Shen Chen later went to ask Li* why the last assassination order could not be abolished and retained.

Li*'s answer to this was only one sentence: "It was not shouted to one's own people, it was shouted to the enemy......"

It is not easy for soldiers to form different habits for different passwords, for example, there are always a few soldiers who reflexively make assassination actions when they hear the password of "Group A, kill-" and "Group B, kill-", so their commander will increase the code for these soldiers, and after almost extremely painful training, the officers and men of the whole battalion finally turn a deaf ear to this confusing password.

The biggest difference between the modern army and the ancient army is that the ancient army only requires soldiers to obey unconditionally, while the modern army requires soldiers to have their own observation and judgment ability.

This is not to say that the modern army can disobey orders, the modern army pays attention to quality training, each soldier is only strong and cannot kill the enemy, only at the right time to attack the appropriate place can successfully destroy the enemy, and this "appropriate" on the one hand requires officers to sum up the experience and lessons of the battle, on the other hand, it needs the soldiers' observation and judgment on the battlefield, both of which are indispensable.

Lee* did not want to raise an army that could only do mechanical maneuvers like marionettes, such an army might be very powerful in array warfare, but it would not be advantageous in most combat environments, and soldiers who could not observe, think, or judge would be at a loss if they were separated from their commanders, and such soldiers might be able to win battles, but they would collapse in the face of defeat.

On more than one occasion, Lee* has emphasized the importance of white-knuckle combat in training, and it is not just about courage. Anything can happen on the battlefield in the future, and the death or wounding of junior officers at the Shiwu level is very frequent in this era, and if everything depends on the command of the commander, then the death of a corps commander will cause five soldiers to lose their combat effectiveness, and Li * does not want this to happen in his own troops.

The current training is only the most preliminary, and the ultimate goal of Li * is to train these soldiers to be strong soldiers who can quickly enter the state and attack the enemy soldiers in formation without relying on the orders of the junior officers in battle.

In addition to deploying frontal defensive tactics, Li* was extremely uneasy about the cliffs on both flanks of Chengguan, and the mountain cavalry on both sides would definitely not be able to climb up, but as long as they dismounted and marched on foot, the archers of the Dangxiang people would climb up and condescendingly pose a long-range threat to the defenders on Chengguan. Therefore, Lee* stepped up the process of repairing the military fortress on the hill on the west side, and the soldiers cut down the trees on the slopes on both sides of the pass, which were natural barriers to cover the flank troops.

Shen Chen thought that the threat of the flanks was not big, the enemy's archers were not monkeys, and there were some low hills that could be climbed up within more than ten miles in front of the city pass, and the troops of the last ambush of the fine seal minda team were deployed on these hills, but the slopes on both sides of the city pass were high and steep, and it was almost impossible to deploy a large force on them, and it was relatively difficult to climb up and shoot bows and arrows downward. Because the slope on both sides is almost at a right angle, it is not easy to see the people on the castle below through the branches of the trees on the mountain, and if you are not careful, you will fall down. It is not for nothing that the defenders of Yanzhou have set up a pass here, the towering Tumen Mountain is like two gates, and the Luzi Pass is the latch.

However, Li * was still not at ease, in his opinion, this so-called dangerous land on the Loess Plateau was not even a bag of earth compared to the mountains in Sichuan, and the degree of danger in some places was not even as good as that of the Taihang Mountains, and it was really unreassuring to not subordinate some troops on the two wings.

Shen Chen was more worried that there were some unknown paths in the surrounding mountains, and if the party cavalry bypassed Lu Zi from these trails, it would be very troublesome to cut off the back road and supply lines. However, after many days of investigation, Shen Chen found that these paths were not nothing, but they were all dangerous and narrow mountain roads that must not allow horses to pass, and there were some rivers and streams crisscrossing them.

Even if the party members dismounted and made a detour, bypassing the Luzi Pass from these trails and appearing in Yanzhou, it would be impossible to do so without 20 days to a month. The more men and horses, the longer it takes, if a 100-person army needs a month, a 1,000-strong team will take at least two months, and this time is long enough for the party cavalry to go around in a circle in Yanzhou.

The most important thing is that these nomads do not have the habit of crossing mountains and mountains.

The work of fortifying the city and training to defend the city was proceeding in a step-by-step manner, and the cavalry scout squad was also training intensively, and was now able to perform some very simple tasks, which continued until Chen Zhe's caravan returned from the territory of the difficult army.

——————————————————————————————————————————

There's something going on today, the update is late, or cheeky canvassing, and the second watch in the evening