Typographical error in the previous text: Wuzhen Hachao should be Wuzhen Chaoha

The sound of shouting and killing in front shook the sky, Zhou Shixiang stood on the Daqing horse and watched coldly as the two sides of the same Han people fought each other, taking each other's lives, they even belonged to the same camp not long ago, but now they are fighting to the death here, and no one is willing to take a step back.

This is the shame of the Han nation, and those who have died since ancient times are all Han people!

Wu Zhenchao's Han army and those guarding the Zhengbai Banner soldiers had a stronger will to resist than the Han army under the Pingnan and Jingnan domains, and until now, the first brigade and the C brigade have suffered more than 1,000 casualties, the cavalry brigade has also suffered hundreds of casualties, and the casualties of those reorganized soldiers who were driven to charge the formation are also about 1,000. This is still a record achieved when the opponent was caught off guard, and if the Qing army is prepared, I am afraid that the loss in this battle will be even greater.

Wuzhenchao Hamanchu means "heavy soldiers", and the officers and soldiers are all old Han soldiers, all of whom were Liaodong Han people who were attached to Houjin during the Chongzhen period, which was earlier than the Han soldiers under the command of King Sanshun who came later. Some of these people are grandfathers and grandchildren for the Qing Dynasty, and they have long disregarded themselves as Han people, although Wu Zhenchao is subordinate to the Han army, but they can regard themselves as higher than the Han army flag, which is not only reflected in the identity, but also from the combat effectiveness. At least, in Zhou Shixiang's view, the tenacity of the Wuchao Super Hahan Army is by no means weaker than those Manchurian soldiers led by Ha Ha Mu.

The Taiping Army, which besieged Wuzhen Chaoha and guarded the Han army, was three brigades in the first town, one battalion of the cavalry brigade, and the Tierenwei directly under the commander's mansion plus 4,000 troops, with a total strength of 13,000 people, while the opponent Wuzhen Chaoha artillery and the four Niu Lu Han troops guarding it were only 4,000 people. The difference in the strength of the two sides is more than three times, even so. The Taiping army still did not win at a small cost, and the Suna army, which was the first to raid, paid half of the losses of men and horses to disperse the Wuzhen Chaoha artillery, so that most of the Qing army's artillery rolled aside and became waste before it had time to be lifted off the gun truck. Subsequently, the first town drove the reorganized troops to overwhelm the panicked Qing army with an absolute superiority in troops. The remaining Qing army was compressed on both sides of the official road less than two miles long.

In the chaos, many mules and horses directly dragged the gun carts down the official road, and as a result, the wheels of thousands of pounds of artillery were pressed into the mud immediately, and they couldn't pull it up.

Although this battle has been won steadily, there are many problems that have leaked out, and the first town has made continuous mistakes in command. It should have been able to take advantage of the cavalry raid to defeat the Qing army in one fell swoop, but due to the lack of coordination of the three brigades, it was unable to arrive at the battlefield in time, allowing the Qing army to breathe. Organizing a formidable line of defense caused the First Town to pay unnecessary casualties.

Zheng Chengkui, a partial general of the naval division who watched the battle, was very satisfied with the battle situation and was very excited, and it took him four days to transport the Taiping army by boat from Jiesheng in Huizhou to Jinghai in Chaozhou, more than 200 miles away. Two more ships ran aground on the way. One ship directly hit the reef and sank, and the more than 400 Taiping troops on board fed the fish and shrimp in the sea without even seeing the shadow of the enemy. After coming ashore from Jinghai, the Taiping army was staggered and had to rest in Jinghaisu for a day. Zheng Chengkui originally thought that he would miss the Qing army's artillery camp, but he didn't want the opponent to be still in Chaozhou.

At first, Zheng Chengkui was surprised that the Qing army was moving so slowly, but after seeing the big guys on the gun trucks, he was not surprised. There is no other reason, which of the cannons of the Qing army weighs no two or three thousand catties, and such a big guy can't pull it just by mules and horses. Each car has to be pushed by another twenty or thirty people in the front and back, left and right. This official road is not paved with bluestone, and the foundation is hard enough. Some places are just paved with some gravel on top of the soil, and it is not in the way of walking people and horses normally, but it is strange that the big guy weighing thousands of pounds walks on it without getting trapped, and it is hell to go fast!

Zheng Chengkui estimated that it was only about 70 miles from Puning County to Xitang River, but the Qing army's artillery team walked for four days on this road, and it was only about 10 miles a day. It is hard to imagine how the Qing army transported these cannons all the way from Beijing, thousands of miles away, to Guangdong, and it is estimated that most of them will be taken by water, and if they are simply taken by land, it will take at least two months to reach Guangdong.

When receiving Zhou Shixiang's request to transport troops to land in the rear of the Qing army with the naval division warship, Zheng Chengkui was very puzzled by this request, and now he finally understood that the original naval division could also be used in this way - the naval division's warships could not only attack the opponent's warships from the water, but also transport troops on a large scale, and use the sea to transport the Ming army's army to any place along the coast, so that the Qing army was caught off guard and made them defenseless. If this tactic could be used flexibly, it would mean that there was no place in the Manchu coastal area that was no longer their rear, and even the city of Beijing was under threat from the Ming army.

If the fleet was large enough, wouldn't I be able to transport the Taiping army to Nanjing, to Beijing?

Zheng Chengkui was very enthusiastic, but he didn't know that there would be a prince in Xiamen, hundreds of miles away, who had the same calculation as him, and had already started to implement it.

"Xingpingbo, the cannon of the Tartars after this battle?"

"General Zheng, don't worry, these cannons are yours, as long as you can transport them onto the ship."

Knowing that Zhou Shixiang valued faithfulness, Zheng Chengkui couldn't help but ask more, and after getting the other party's reassurance, he immediately put twelve distractions, after all, this battle was fought by the Taiping Army, and there were so many captured cannons, in case Zhou Shixiang regretted the opposite, he was embarrassed to insist on it, and the lawsuit went to the old general, and the old general's liking for Zhou Shixiang was definitely not as good as his Zheng Chengkui's good fruit to eat.

It's just that how to transport these cannons to the naval warship and bring them back to Zhaoqing is a tricky matter, Zheng Chengkui has a little headache, and those hundreds of pounds of cannons are just that, hang them with ropes, get more people to pull them together, how can they be pulled on the boat. But the big guy weighing thousands of pounds is much more difficult to pull by a rope alone.

Zhou Shixiang saw that Zheng Chengkui seemed to be thinking about how to transport the cannon onto the ship, so he asked Xu Yingyuan behind him to give Zheng Chengkui the drawing of the pulley installed on the ship that he had drawn a few days ago.

Zhou Shixiang didn't take these guns of the Qing army in his eyes, these cannons were too heavy, and most of them were solid bullets, and they could be used for simple siege, but the words of field warfare were simply cumbersome, not only inconvenient to move, but also inconvenient to use.

The artillery battalions of the Taiping Army are now equipped with small cannons weighing several hundred pounds, such as the Tiger Squat Cannon and the Big Pole Gun, which are light artillery, and the heavy artillery such as the Hongyi Cannon is not equipped at all, but is placed on the head of Guangzhou City to scare people. If you really want to assemble the Hongyi cannon to the artillery battalion, you don't know how much mules, horses and manpower you need to serve these big guys, and it will be useless to fight in addition to being scary. Zheng Chengkui's eyes were hot on these big guys, and he just took off his hand to reward him for transporting troops. With these hundreds of artillery, the strength of Chen Qice and Zhu Tong in Zhaoqing can also be higher, at least the defensive ability of Zhaoqing City is by no means below that of Guangzhou.

Attacking the city, Zhou Shixiang already had the best choice, that is, the blasting method that he had done once under Xinhui City.

Bao Jing and Zuo Yuan led the Wuzhen Chaoha soldiers and the guards of the Han army and the adapted soldiers who were driven up by the Taiping army to kill on both sides of the official road, and people fell in the Xitang River, and the corpses floated on the surface of the river one by one.

The first town gathered its position under Ge Yi's command and slowly pressed forward. Suna led the remaining more than 400 cavalry to leave the battlefield for a short rest, in the raid just now, Suna's subordinates suffered heavy casualties, two Manchurian flags, a Han army hundred households were killed. Suna's face also bloomed, but it was the cannon called Wuzhen Chaoha who cut off a piece of meat on his chin, if he hadn't subconsciously raised his head up at that time, I was afraid that the whole face would have been blown up by the cannon, and now I think about it, I am very afraid. However, Suna didn't care about his injury, but led someone to drag out more than a dozen soldiers who were afraid of battle when he was charging, and cut off his head in front of everyone, which made Suna's subordinates very afraid of him, but Suna enjoyed the eyes of his subordinates looking at him, which was the army he was used to.

Shen Yongxing commanded the gunners of Wuzhen Chaoha to fire the artillery there without a sound, and with the retreat of Bao Jing and Zuo Yuan, the artillery of the Qing army was already in the battle to harvest the lives of the enemy and me. Shen Yongxing's eyes were red, and he already ignored his own family members who were still fighting with the Taiping Army.

The reorganized troops relied on the large number of people, and there was the supervision of the Taiping army behind them, coupled with the obvious signs of defeat of the Qing army, they marched forward bravely like chicken blood, and forced the Qing army to the artillery array. Seeing this, Shen Yongxing ordered his own soldiers to carry himself and led the remaining hundreds of gunners to rush towards the Taiping army in a final fight. The hope of reinforcements had been dashed, and the battle had been fought for almost an hour, and if the Qing army had come to meet them, it would have come long ago. Now there is no shadow of reinforcements, either the Qing army of Jieshiwei and Lu Feng did not know that Wuzhen Chaoha was surrounded, or the Taiping army divided its troops to block the Qing army that came to help. There were only a few hundred battalions of Wu Liuqi stationed in Puning City, and they couldn't be counted on at all.

Shen Yongxing was unwilling to fail and refused to surrender, so he could only fight to the death. The battle of the trapped beasts made the Huaxian soldiers who rushed in front unable to stop them from retreating. As soon as the Huaxian soldiers retreated, the Conghua soldiers also retreated, but Zhao Ziqiang's Nanhai soldiers did not retreat, but instead resisted desperately to block the counterattack of the Qing army.

Zhou Shixiang, who was watching the battle from afar, put down the clairvoyant mirror, and felt very uncomfortable in his heart, these South China Sea soldiers were the culprits of the Chaoyang Bloody Case, but the loyalty and combat effectiveness shown at this moment were stronger than those of the Huaxian soldiers, Conghua soldiers, and Xin'an soldiers, I really don't know whether it should be happy or angry, could it be that the large-scale slaughter of the city really helped to improve the combat effectiveness of the army, otherwise how to explain the current performance of these South China Sea soldiers.

Li Chengdong was not like this back then, when he was the Ming army, he couldn't even beat the peasant army, but after becoming the Qing army, he became the vanguard of the Qing court's pacification of Jiangnan, it can be said that Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong provinces were all fought by Li Chengdong's soldiers alone, and Li Chengdong made great achievements against the Manchu Qing Dynasty, but after Li Chengdong returned to the Ming Dynasty anyway, his subordinates seemed to have changed overnight, from a dragon to a worm, and they would be defeated in every battle. Such an abnormal thing, except that the slaughter of the city can help the blood, improve the combat effectiveness, and motivate the soldiers to work hard, Zhou Shixiang can no longer think of any other reason that can be explained. (To be continued.) )